The Saturday Stinger
Your Weekly Charlotte Hornets Notebook that’s not afraid to laugh at itself. Not here to convince you with stats, just good prose; I can’t afford Synergy.
The Sermon on The Spectrum (Center)
My big picture, Weekly State of the Hive Address:
I can’t help but think here lately this is the biggest offseason the Charlotte Hornets have ever had.
Like, “Husband is eating as much as his pregnant wife and is putting on more than a few extra pounds himself,” kind of big. Maybe a bit too personal a comparison.
I’ll leave it up to you guys to decide which of Charles Lee/Jeff Peterson is the husband, and who is the wife. Neither of them is getting big like I did, at least.
Charlotte’s offseason just gets bigger and more important the more you think about it, though:
A Brandon Miller contract extension that’s looming very soon on the horizon. A draft that’s acclaimed as one of the best since 2003, where you have two top 20 picks. Coby White still needs to secure his own new contract with Charlotte.
All the while, amidst all of this, you have to figure out how to use a savvy trade and your mid-level exception to secure the depth deemed necessary by Jeff Peterson to go and finally secure an outright playoff spot next year.
So much is on the line… and one mishap means you have to recalculate your entire approach.
Don’t know about you guys, but the reason I think about this offseason being so important as often as I do is because I’m so tired of recalculating.
I feel like, around early March in most Hornets’ seasons, we as fans have already had to recalculate. The former front office, at times, didn’t even have enough direction most times to be calculated about anything.
Much less the old front office being worried about REcalculating.
Recalculating their draft boards, maybe.
When I try to think of former Hornets years whose offseasons are comparable to this one, only a few come to mind; one season flashes in my mind more than the others.
I think of the summer in which Charlotte and GM/VP Bob Bass traded away Larry Johnson to New York, just six months after Alonzo Mourning had been traded to Miami in exchange for Glen Rice.
The 1995-1996 season was a doozy, and the Hornets were left in a state of complete transition.
Poor Bob had only been hired in May of 1994. It took all but a year and a half to start pulling off some of the crazy things he did.
To start the ‘95-‘96 season, Alonzo Mourning was traded for Glen Rice the DAY BEFORE the regular season started.
Mourning was traded on 11/3/1995. Charlotte played their first regular-season game against Philadelphia the very next day.
Rice scored 21 PTS, had 7 AST, 6 REB, and 3 STL.
Despite a new addition in Rice, Charlotte finished 41-41 in Allan Bristow’s last season as the Hornets’ head coach, and Bristow and Charlotte “mutually agreed” to part ways in April of 1996 after missing the playoffs.
So, by the time the Hornets get to July 14th, 1996, and trade Larry Johnson to the Knicks…
Both of their own star draftees, Mourning and Johnson, were now gone; they needed a new head coach, and all the while, Glen Rice was sitting in the background needing pieces around him to succeed in his new home.
So Bass did something that ONLY someone who was crazy enough to work under George Shinn could do:
Bass bet on players like PF Anthony Mason from NYK, who nobody believed in at the time besides him.
Bob was batting .1000 on trades that made absolutely no sense to the outside world in the late 90’s and early 00’s.
He did it with such an air of confidence that you wouldn’t believe it, either.
Like, the kind of confidence Elle Woods (if you haven’t seen Legally Blonde, what are you doing?) had when she told her ex, on the first day at Harvard after she was accepted into law school, “What, like it’s hard?”
I don’t know how Bob Bass did it, truly.
I would’ve thrown my hands up in the air and told George Shinn, “What the hell do you expect from me here, Boss?”
I’m sure Shinn would’ve responded with, “Well, use what ‘ya got and go do better than 41-41, which just made me change our coach yet again! You got this, Bob!”
At this point, I personally would’ve thrown a salary cap book (it was 1996 — surely they had those, right?) at Shinn’s face, but Bass rolled up his sleeves and went fishing with a potato chip as bait.
It can’t even stay on the hook. There’s nothing for Bass to use to even draw a big fish in! It’s a godforsaken potato chip! Have you seen what those things do structurally when they hit water?
They get soggy and crumble.
Somehow, this dude Bob Bass found a way to make do with the soggiest, crumbliest (I’m inventing my own verb conjugations now, I think), lousiest bait you could imagine — George Shinn being your owner — and Bass still put Charlotte in a position to win 50 games.
Both of the next two seasons.
I don’t know that I can pick another NBA team in all of history who traded away both their star players in the span of six months and got… better. Like, a lot better.
Bass would also hire head coach Dave Cowens in 1996, who would win 50+ games both of the next two seasons, and win NBA Coach of the Year in his last season with Charlotte.
Cowens did all this while earning the lowest salary of any coach in the NBA.
Bob Bass did it with the lowest payroll (not in terms of salary cap, but in terms of resources) in the entire NBA. He did it, anyway.
This offseason is just as important as 1996 to me, but in a different way. Charlotte drug themselves out of a self-created hole due to Shinn’s notorious stinginess in 1996. Bass became really accustomed to a shovel.
There’s no hole that Jeff Peterson has to dig the Hornets out of this year.
How Jeff’s responsibility differs from that of Bass in 1996 is that Jeff now has the luxury that Bass didn’t have.
The luxury of having financially and MENTALLY secure owners who aren’t stingy. Jeff’s responsibility is to build a safety net that keeps the Hornets from ever BEING in a similar position to that of Bass in 1996.
To me… that’s just as important as the hole Bass had to dig out of.
Had Bass had the opportunity and money to build himself a safety net, he would’ve. But he didn’t, so he couldn’t.
Jeff has already built himself a safety net of picks.
Now, it’s time for Peterson to show he can make big-boy moves — the scary moves — the same moves in which Bass made out of necessity all the time.
Jeff has shown me he can get the war chest of picks up. Now I want him to show me what he can do to get the talent on this roster up.
We’ve got the picks, but right now, what’s more important is that Charlotte already has talent.
It’s time we stop thinking about draft picks alone and start capitalizing on the Hornets’ current collection of cost-controlled talent while the iron’s hot.
In the NBA? You never know when that iron is going to get unplugged out from underneath you.
Most of the time, you don’t even know the iron has gotten cold again until the heat fully dissipates.
By that point…
It’s usually too late. You have to wait for it to warm up again.
You gotta finish ironing that shirt before the heat runs out on you, Jeff.
If you’re not careful, we’ll be late to church.
The rest of Owen Watterson’s weekly column will be available here at 1:00 PM. Please subscribe to SportCLT for an early preview of the Sermon on the Spectrum (Center) every single week.