Why the Hornets are still terrible 20 years after expansion

Is that just the Hornets, or is it how expansion team-building works in the NBA?

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Portrait of a Boy; Pietro Perugino; 1495

The other day, I pointed out that the Charlotte Hornets née Bobcats had only won three playoff games in their 20 years of existence. This is a nightmare for the franchise, for its fanbase and for the NBA writ large. Fielding as many competitive teams as possible as at the core of the league’s intentions, and Charlotte has been mostly down since expansion birthed them in 2004.

Expansion is again on the horizon, with two teams expected to be added to the league before the end of the decade. (I’d predict a 2026-27 inaugural season for both.) We’ve talked about the candidate cities, we’ve talked about realignment since the favorites are both Western cities, we’ve talked (a little) about talent dilution. But we haven’t talked about the process of building a new roster from scratch as an expansion team, and why the Bobcats got so badly screwed in 2004.

So let’s talk about it … after we talk about the Raptors and Grizzlies, who were expansion teams in 1995 and suffered similar problems in their earliest years.

The Raptors missed the playoffs in each of their first four seasons, and won just a single playoff series in their first 20 years. Eventually they built a persistently high-level team, kissed with a championship in 2019. The Grizzlies missed the playoffs in each of their first eight seasons and needed 15 seasons to win their first playoff series. They got decently good at that point, but made the conference finals just once and have a total of five playoff series wins in 29 seasons of existence.

If just Charlotte had significant trouble building a competitive team over its first two decades, you could chalk that up to both the vagaries of building a team via expansion and team mismanagement. But the Raptors struggled for most of two decades after creation, and the Grizzlies were mostly bad for the first 15 years. There is something about how the NBA does expansion that kneecaps its new franchises for a long time. Or all three teams just happen to have been grossly mismanaged.

The expansion drafts are illustrative. In 1995, teams could protect up to eight players under contract from being poached by the Raptors and Grizzlies. The Canadian clubs alternated picking from the rest. The Raptors landed B.J. Armstrong (who forced a trade before camp), Ed Pickney, John Salley and Acie Earl. The Grizzlies walked away with Greg Anthony, Antonio Harvey, Byron Scott, Gerald Wilkins, Benoit Benjamin and Blue Edwards. As you can see, there just wasn’t much talent available.

In 2004, with just one team picking players from other teams, the format was a little different: Charlotte saw the list of unprotected players and took its pick. It ended up taking a lot of players who immediately became free agents due to the rules of the draft, and brought in seven younger, cheaper players to its roster. Gerald Wallace, buried on a high-level Kings squad, was the biggest prize. Primoz Brezec and Jason Kapono were interesting, too.

But Wallace might be the best expansion draft player ever in terms of individual performance for the team he landed on. (I’m not counting the ABA dispersal draft here; you had living legends in that thing.) The other contenders, to give some flavor: Dell Curry and Muggsy Bogues in Charlotte’s first expansion draft; Scott Skiles to the Magic; Tom Van Arsdale to the Suns; Jerry Sloan to the Bulls. The vast majority of expansion players over the history of the NBA are short-timers who move on or out of the league.