Queen's Guard: Making sense of the Charlotte Hornets' free agency plan

Since adding four rookies via the NBA Draft, the Charlotte Hornets have acquired five players: Collin Sexton, Mason Plumlee, Tre Mann, Pat Connaughton, and Spencer Dinwiddie. Three of the them, Sexton, Mann, and Dinwiddie, are the most effective when they possess the ball, functioning as primary initiators of an offense.

Strategically speaking, it's an odd choice to trade for, sign, or re-sign players that thrive with the ball in their hands when you already employ a Ball who thrives with the ball in his hands. Of NBA players who appeared in at least 45 games last season, LaMelo Ball only trailed Milwaukee's do-it-all superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo in usage rate.

I'm here to tell you why it makes all of the sense in the world.

It starts with this truth: the Hornets have no real desire to make the playoffs in 2025-26. If they backdoor their way into the dance due to the dearth of talent in the Eastern Conference? Great. The organization will be thrilled if that's the eventual outcome, but I don't think they have postseason basketball at the front of their minds.

Jeff Peterson, the Hornets' President of Basketball Operations is clearly still in asset acquisition mode (see the Mark Williams trade, the Jusuf Nurkic trade, and the Vasilije Micic trade for examples), making the upcoming season an important evaluation tool as they continue to lay out a plan to cash in on said assets.

Charlotte's roster is stocked with young talent. Ball, (23), Moussa Diabate (23), Sion James (22), Ryan Kalkbrenner (23), Kon Knueppel (19), Tre Mann (24), Liam McNeeley (19), Brandon Miller (22), and Tidjane Salaün (19), make up the core of the Hornets' current building blocks, and none of them are older than 24-years-old.

Peterson and his staff need to collect meaningful data on each member of this core, and an important factor in that data collection is rolling out 48 minutes of high-level guard play when the team takes the floor.

The sun that the Hornets' roster orbits around is their effervescent point guard LaMelo Ball. Unfortunately though, nagging injuries have made it a near impossibility for Charlotte to know their ceiling with Ball as their centerpiece, and without his undeniable creativity on the floor, it has been difficult for Charlotte to evaluate the ancillary pieces they have surrounded him with.

When Ball has missed time in the past, the Hornets' have handed the keys of their offense to a litany of inexperienced guards on two-way deals or aging veterans on the back nine of their NBA career. After the Hornets shipped Terry Rozier out of town, impactful guard play from someone other than LaMelo has been hard to come by in Charlotte.