Times are changing for the Charlotte Hornets – At The Hive

Summer League is in the rearview mirror and rosters are largely set as we enter the offseason doldrums. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of roster reshuffling and summer league showcases. All of it has happened under a new version of the Charlotte Hornets. It’s the first full offseason with a new ownership group at the helm. Along with that, it’s the first offseason for new general manager Jeff Peterson and new head coach Charles Lee. So much new.

The players haven’t stepped foot on the floor for a single second of meaningful action under that full leadership brigade, but you can already tell that this isn’t your older brother’s Charlotte Hornets organization. Optimism abounds. Competency is seemingly running rampant throughout the organization. The team seems like they have a real vision and a plan to execute. Some of this can be chalked up to the usual optimism that comes with newness, but there is evidence that the Hornets are on the right track. There is realism within the optimism.

It started before Peterson and Lee even set foot in Charlotte. At the trade deadline last season, the Hornets dismantled a stagnant roster that hadn’t gone anywhere (yes, injuries and so on and so forth). That technically happened under the watch of former GM Mitch Kupchak, but reports are that the ownership group was calling the shots. Clearly they knew what they were doing.

They’ve since handed the reins to Jeff Peterson, and he has quickly shown that he’s going to be aggressive in acquiring assets and getting involved in trades. He acquired four second round picks just to be a salary dumping ground, which is not something we’ve seen a Hornets front office do with any sort of regularity. He acquired Josh Green for basically nothing. It was simply a matter of getting the team involved in a trade where a contending team was trying to land a star. There was more offseason activity from the Hornets in a few days than we’d seen in the previous two summers combined. And they were moves that objectively helped the team. These were not deck chairs being moved around on the Titanic.

The Hornets are clearly in the business of getting better whenever and wherever they can. We’ve had lots of conversations about the Hornets lack of activity in recent seasons. It’s hard to argue that a team should be making moves when we don’t know what moves there could be made. But the arrival of Peterson has coincided with a massive increase in activity. If nothing else, fans can feel like the team is trying to push forward. They’re not resting on their laurels. There is value in that.

The other key hire of the offseason was head coach Charles Lee. Unlike Peterson, he hasn’t had a chance to truly do his job yet. We’ll know more about him when the team comes together for training camp at the start of October and takes the floor for real a few weeks later. But there are flickers of a culture being set that showed through during summer league.

On the floor, the summer Hornets were competent for the first time in years. Part of this again comes back to Peterson, who assembled a roster with very good lead guards. It was a departure from summers past where the Hornets point guard rotation featured a mix of young players playing out of position and low upside undrafted free agents. But beyond that, the team was playing with a fire and level of intensity required for success in that environment, or any basketball environment really. Lee coached the team during the California Classic, and he quickly and quite clearly got buy-in from his squad. That translated into the Las Vegas Summer League with assistant coach Josh Longstaff leading the team.

The style of play was its own departure from the Hornets under Steve Clifford. The Hornets practically refused to shoot 3-pointers early in the season. Most of their offense consisted of headlong drives into the paint with hopeful attempts at the rim. Lee’s summer league squad fired away spot up threes, which should help the Hornets score points in bunches when they’re hot, and they have the players to make that happen. The defense was active and cohesive. It was a more well tuned defense than we saw from the regular season Hornets last year. Hopefully Lee’s message resonates with the varsity squad the same way it did with the Summer League squad.

Lee also stated that the team is reinvesting and revamping its training staff during an in-game interview during the summer league. That’ll surely make Hornets fans happy given the spate of injuries the team has had to withstand over the last couple of seasons.

The big club seems to be on board as well. The entire roster came out to Las Vegas to attend a couple of the games together (except for Olympics bound Vasilije Micic). There is a sense that they believe in what the organization is doing, and that’s required for any of this to work.

When new owners Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall did their opening press conference, they repeatedly iterated their desire to be a “premier NBA organization,” almost to a satirical level. The steps they’ve made thus far show that wasn’t just lip service. They’re truly, genuinely trying to pull the Hornets out of the NBA’s basement. They’re willing to invest in the team to make it better, and the hires they’ve brought in have done all the right things to set the organization on the right track. Now we just have to wait until October to start to see the payoff.