Charlotte Hornets head coach Steve Clifford has always been a straight-shooter. During a recent media session, Clifford kept it real when talking about how teams keep persisting with some players just because they were high lottery picks.
"The NBA is full of all these guys, that they play cause we drafted them 6th, 7th, 8th, right," Clifford said. "And we don't want to say 'Gee, we might've made a mistake' and then by the time they're 23, they're gone... and two more coaches got fired. That's just reality."
Clifford does make a very fair point there. If the front office and/or ownership decided to select a player with a high lottery pick, then they would pressure the coach to keep playing them. No one likes to admit they made a mistake, and if the player isn't performing as he was expected to, then the coach gets blamed.
A new voice is brought in to get the best out of the player to prove that management was right to pick him. By the time it becomes clear in a player's fourth season or so that they are just not that good, a coach of two probably would have been fired.
If you look at Clifford's career, you can maybe point to a few instances when that could have happened. He was the head coach for the Charlotte Hornets/Bobcats from 2013 to 2018, when the front office made some pretty terrible picks in the lottery.
They selected Cody Zeller with the fourth pick in 2013, Noah Vonleh with the ninth pick in 2014, and then Frank Kaminsky with the ninth pick in 2015. Neither of the three ever came close to achieving stardom.
Vonleh would be traded after his rookie season itself, but the other two remained on the roster. While Zeller was still a solid contributor for the Hornets, Kaminsky really wasn't, but he got a fair bit of playing time.
It could be that the front office wanted that, or maybe Clifford himself did, we'll never know. Whatever the case, after he got fired by the Hornets in April 2018, he was hired by the Orlando Magic just a few months later.
Clifford might have then found himself in a similar situation with Mo Bamba, whom the Magic had picked with the sixth pick of the 2018 NBA Draft. He didn't seem to fancy Bamba as a player but got criticized for not giving him game time.
Once Clifford parted ways with the Magic in 2021, Bamba became a regular starter. In 2023, though, he was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, who waived him last offseason. Bamba is now a backup on the Philadelphia 76ers, and Clifford was right all along about him not exactly being the superstar that the Magic might have thought he could be.
Steve Clifford Told His Players That The Team Just Isn't Talented
I spoke about Clifford, who was re-hired by Charlotte in 2022, being a straight shooter right at the start, and we saw a great example of that earlier this month. Clifford took a shot at his team as he stated the Hornets can't win because they are undertalented.
“One thing about NBA players, if you want 'em to listen to you, you gotta tell them the truth," said Clifford. "So I tell them, they know that there's little room for error. I also tell them the facts. Our problems aren’t their effort, their work, how much they wanna win. Our problem is that we’re under-talented... there's nothing wrong with telling them that."
The Hornets are currently 15-42 on the season and find themselves at 13th in the standings in the Eastern Conference. There appears to be a fairly good chance that Clifford will end up being fired by the team for a second time at the end of the season.
More must-reads: