2024 was a year of change for the Hornets, who traded away veterans like Terry Rozier, P.J. Washington, and Gordon Hayward, hired a new head of basketball operations (Jeff Peterson), and brought aboard respected assistant Charles Lee to replace head coach Steve Clifford.
In the wake of those changes, there was plenty of chatter ahead of the 2024/25 season about how good the vibes in Charlotte were, leading to some speculation that the Hornets could be a dark-horse playoff (or at least play-in) contender in an Eastern Conference that didn't look all that competitive outside of its top few teams.
That may have been an overly optimistic outlook, but it's hard to say for sure, since we never really got a look at a fully healthy version of the Hornets in '24/25. Injuries decimated Charlotte's rotation over the course of the season, with starters like LaMelo Ball, Brandon Miller, Miles Bridges, and Mark Williams each missing weeks or months at a time and Grant Williams suffering a season-ending ACL tear in November.
After a passable 6-9 start, the Hornets went into a tailspin, losing 18 of their next 19 games to slip to 7-27. As discouraging as that stretch was, it made the team's approach to the rest of the season fairly straightforward -- Charlotte was once again in seller mode, sending out Nick Richards, Cody Martin, Vasilije Micic, and Mark Williams in three separate trades in January and February.
The Williams deal was ultimately voided by the Lakers due to concerns about his physical, but the fact that the Hornets were prepared to trade a 23-year-old big man for far-off draft assets (a 2030 pick swap and a 2031 first-rounder) was eye-opening. Maybe the Hornets have their own concerns about Williams; maybe they really like rookie forward Dalton Knecht, who would've ended up in Charlotte if that deal hadn't fallen through; maybe they just thought the offer was too good in terms of overall value to pass up.
Generally speaking though, the move suggested that Peterson is in no hurry to transition out of a rebuild and into win-now mode. It'll be interesting to see if that thinking carries over to the offseason or whether the Hornets begin acting with a little more urgency to end a nine-year playoff drought, the NBA's longest active streak.
