NBA Draft primer: where things stand with the 2024 class
Another deflating Charlotte Hornets season has came and went. Though to be fair, it concluded on a much more positive note than years past thanks to the sea change in the front office since Jeff Peterson took over. Rather than hoping that key players would just stay healthy (falsely, in hindsight), this summer Hornets fans can look forward to a new front office strategy, a new head coach, and in all likelihood, a new cast of players on the roster.
Part of that “new cast of players” will inevitably be a high pick in 2024 (unless the pick is traded, but that’s for another time), because lost seasons do breed at least one positive result; a high lottery pick in the NBA Draft. The Hornets got lucky and jumped up from fourth to second in the 2023 lottery and drafted Brandon Miller, who firmly established himself as a building block after the pick was universally panned by the entire NBA sphere. Currently, Charlotte is tied with Portland for the third-best lottery odds in 2024 after each team finished the season at 21-61.
A coin-flip will break the tie and determine which team gets a 14% chance at No. 1 with the third-best odds, and which team’s odds at the top pick plummet all the way down to 12.5%. Really, the important thing about having the third-best odds is that the farthest a team can fall is to the seventh pick. That floor drops to the eighth pick with the fourth-best odds, and so on.
If the Hornets can get lucky for the third time in five drafts and not only claim the third spot in the lottery odds, but jump into the top-two, they might have a chance at selecting one of the higher-regarded players in a draft class perceived as the weakest in a number of years.
There are a host of prospects that have a claim to the “consensus” top-three; Alexandre Sarr, Nikola Topić, Zaccharie Risacher, Matas Buzelis and Ron Holland II all come from outside the traditional NCAA route, but Rob Dillingham, teammates Donovan Clingan and Stephon Castle, Cody Williams, and Isaiah Collier all made their way to the top of the class by way of college hoops. The issue is that if these prospects were in another class, few, if any of them would be drafted as highly as they will be in June.
That’s not to say they lack upside; Sarr, Topić, and Williams in particular strike me as prospects with lots of room to improve upon the skillset they already possess. Thankfully for Charlotte, they’ll be in range to land a player with a high ceiling barring some catastrophic lottery luck. Apart from landing seventh or eighth, the Hornets will have a shot to land a consensus top prospect. Even in a weak class, draft position matters — acquiring players to build with is especially important for teams like Charlotte, which already has two players to build around in LaMelo Ball and Miller.
In the first summer of the Peterson regime, we’re about to find out which player archetypes the front office value most when building around a dynamic playmaker that’s struggled with ankle injuries and a potent three-level scorer. For example, let’s say the Hornets draft fifth; picking Dillingham in that spot signals a vast difference in draft philosophy versus picking Reed Sheppard. It’s fair to surmise that the past front office believed in the athletic implications behind a player’s upside — Miles Bridges, Kai Jones, James Bouknight, JT Thor, Nick Richards, even Scottie Lewis.
Drafting a player like Dillingham, Williams, Stephon Castle, or another prospect with flashes of high-level athleticism and talent but less polish in their overall game rather than an early-career contributor with a limited ceiling might indicate the newly-formed Peterson front office values those same traits. How philosophy, eye test, analytics, age, and the balance between floor and upside are weighed within a scouting department is going to be telling this year. It’ll be interesting to see how that all shakes out with an entirely new collection of decision-makers in Charlotte.
