There will be an All-Star celebration shortly in Charlotte, which was the grand plan to begin with, because the city was awarded the 2017 game partly as homage to owner Michael Jordan and to recognize the appetite for basketball in Carolina.
Yet this hoopla will be vastly watered down and confined to a few moments on Saturday to honor guard Kemba Walker, the Hornets’ lone All-Star rep, who’ll receive a framed All-Star jersey before the Clippers game. That’s all. There will be no sold out hotels, celebrity parties, dunk contests or halftime concerts next week. The NBA All-Star Game and the All-Star Weekend, long since re-routed to New Orleans, isn’t coming, not now and maybe not in the near future.
It’s a rather sobering time in Charlotte, all because of the state’s controversial HB2, the “bathroom bill” that the NBA and others deem discriminatory to the LGBT community and forced the event to move. And in a non-related development, but discouraging as well to local fans, the Hornets are currently caught in a fog and slowly fading in the Eastern Conference after an encouraging start.
“We’re playing in spurts a lot, making mistakes,” said Walker, only the team’s second All-Star since the franchise’s rebirth in Charlotte. “We’ve got to give ourselves a chance to win games.”
In a perfect teal-and-purple world, the next few weeks would turn the city into a basketball mecca as it hosts a collection of NBA greats both past and present and give Charlotte a chance to take a bow. Walker would receive a bigger applause during the All-Star pregame intros than LeBron James and the Jordan Brand would be slapped on every sidewalk, downtown building and bare foot.
But months after the NBA pulled the game out of Charlotte, the law remains, even with North Carolina governor Roy Cooper pushing for its repeal. Unless that happens, NBA commissioner Adam Silver has made it clear the game won’t return to Charlotte, and anyway, next year’s site is already awarded to Los Angeles. It’s not just the NBA that’s punishing Charlotte; the NCAA and other sports organizations are detouring events elsewhere and costing the city and state millions in potential revenue.
The innocent victim is the Hornets, a team that condemned HB2 (led by Jordan) but will suffer from it. All-Star weekend would’ve been the perfect showcase to shine a flashlight on how far they’ve come and how Jordan has improved as an owner. The image of the Hornets as a basketball wasteland populated with blown Draft picks and constantly-changing coaching staffs no longer exists. Hard lessons were learned from those hardscrabble days early in Jordan’s rule and this team now represents well.
Just look: Steve Clifford, groomed by Jeff Van Gundy, brings a firm yet calm hand from the coaching bench and generates respect from the fraternity and his locker room. With the possible exception of the brief stay (of course) by Larry Brown, this is the best coaching the Hornets have had. Jordan burned through the likes of Sam Vincent, Bernie Bickerstaff and the unforgettable Mike Dunlap before finding stability. Clifford has the Hornets playing defense first. It’s an upbeat locker room where the players seem to like to play for him and with each other.
Walker is a draft pick gone good, quite a contrast to a franchise that reeled in Emeka Okafor, Sean May and Adam Morrison. Not that the Hornets are totally free of the occasional oops (Noah Vonleh). But ever since Jordan yanks his long-time pal Rod Higgins in favor of the brainy Rich Cho, the personnel decisions upgraded. And at least Cho flipped Vonleh for Nicolas Batum, already the best wing scorer in Hornets history under Jordan, thus turning a minus into a plus.
Imagine if the Hornets were lucky under Jordan’s watch. They would’ve won the draft lottery and had Dwight Howard instead of No. 2 pick Okafor and Anthony Davis instead of No. 2 pick Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. Yet, they’ve survived it all to give Charlotte a respectable team. And there’s also the Spectrum Center, the team’s home, a vastly underrated arena that visually impressive, provides a fun fan experience and boasts the most artistic court design in the league.
So the buzz about the Hornets is finally real. And then, poof, the All-Star carnival up and left before it arrived.
And now the trick for the Hornets is to dust themselves off after a recent stumble and get back into the mix in the East. They’ve won one game since Jan. 21, and following the break they’ve got six straight on the road. It’s a tenuous time for a team currently on the playoff bubble and can’t afford a lengthy slip, or else. Just days ago, Cho traded for Miles Plumlee, a big man who brings skills (but also a massive contract), to help Frank Kaminski and to serve as insurance for the oft-injured Cody Zeller (Hornets are 1-11 when he’s hurt) in the post.
“Our fourth-quarter defense as been our biggest problem,” said Clifford, noting that 10 times the Hornets took leads into fourth quarters and lost them all.
Yes, the Hornets would be best served by closing out games better and giving Walker some relief during crunch time by developing other options. Also, they’re still wondering if a future star will emerge from their batch of young players: Zeller, Kaminski, Kidd-Gilchrist, Jeremy Lamb. Based on what we’ve seen, it’s very likely that all of the above will top out as decent players, nothing more.
The Hornets are capable of moving up in the East and safely into the mix, but just as well, they can falter and get bypassed by those teams below them in the standings, including the Pistons, the Bucks (who just welcomed back Khris Middleton) and maybe even the streaking Miami Heat.
“We have a few things we’ve got to clean up,” said Clifford. “Our team was built to shoot the three-ball and we’re not. We’re 19th in percentage. Last year we were fourth in attempts, fourth in makes and eighth in percentage. If we don’t shoot the three better, it’s going to be hard for us to be consistent. We’ve got to make threes.”
It could be worse. It could be five years ago when the Hornets won only seven times in a 66-game season and then followed up by going 21-61. Those were the dreadful days, when the Hornets had precious few assets, when Jordan’s reputation as an executive took plenty of hits, and when the NBA was largely a pit-stop between football seasons in Charlotte.
Then Cho arrived, Clifford was hired, Walker was drafted and the Hornets haven’t looked back since. They still need what 20 or so other NBA teams could use: A second All-Star on the roster. Taking it a step further, the Hornets will really turn the corner once they find a player who’ll make Cam Newton the second-biggest pro athlete in town.
There are two challenges, then: To get that special player, and to convince state lawmakers to repeal a bill that’s keeping the NBA from bringing its showpiece event to town.
A horde of fans and media and players were supposed to convene in Charlotte next week for a well-deserved celebration of basketball. Instead, the buzz is moving to New Orleans, just like the Original Hornets over a decade ago, thus providing a cruel twist of irony and the knife to the gut.
Veteran NBA writer Shaun Powell has worked for newspapers and other publications for more than 25 years. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.
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