Still Tanking After All These Years: Charlotte Hornets | Avoid LaMelo?

Still Tanking After All These Years: Charlotte Hornets | Avoid LaMelo?

H. So, it could be a rough one today, folks. So, I figured it was a perfect time to talk about the Charlotte Hornets if I’m not feeling great. And we’re going to talk about the Hornets. Well, what could possibly go right on today’s show? Uh, welcome to Old Man Squad Fantasy Basketball. Please, I would tell you to like and subscribe, but I don’t think you’re going to like or you’re going to want to subscribe at the end of this one for so many different reasons, but we’re going to do it anyway cuz I’m going to try to get through as many of these teams as we can before leagues open and then I don’t know if I’m going to keep doing the team previews at that point. You guys might just want draft content instead. In any event, Charlotte stinks. Sorry, Hornets. Love their radio guy though. That’s my boy Sam Farber. Team’s terrible. Radio guy is great. Uh, we’ve got one, two, three, four, fiveish. Fiveish players to talk about, which is effectively what? What? Let’s see here. Three, four, six. Yeah, I mean, it’s more like four and then a uh sort of like a hydra at the center spot. Yeah, we’re doing Greek mythology on today’s show. So, uh, let’s dive in. I say that with just the all the worst feelings in my tummy. Charlotte is, um, coming off a season where they went 19 and 63. They were terrible. Really, really terrible. Again, they’re in a they’re in a a a rebuild that’s in like year 14 or something wild. Uh, LaMelo Ball played 47 games this past year. Brandon Miller played 27 games this past year. Mark Williams, who’s not there anymore, played 44 and was by all accounts one of the bright spots. And then Pillar of Health Miles Bridges played uh 64 games. So, not only were they bad, but they were also injured. And so you got a healthy healthy dose. Oh, mind you, Grant Williams, who was supposed to be like the veteran presence on that team, played in only 16 games. So you got a healthy dose of guys like Nick Smith Jr. and rookie Tan Salon. Uh Musa Diabate played 71 games this past year. And then some of them he did like a little bit of a Dennis Rodmant sticktick. Well, maybe not the shtick so much as the the numbers, the style of fantasy lines he was putting up. Uh, which then brings us to our title sponsor here on Old Man Squad Fantasy Basketball. Those are the good folks over at FanDuel Sportsbook. They’ve got the Hornets with a season win total number of 27 and a half, which feels, you know, by all accounts like a pretty big step forward. But at the same time, like how long can the Hornets be this awful? I guess the other question then is like what does the payroll look like? LaMelo Ball is signed through 2029. Miles Bridges has two years left on his deal. Uh Brandon Miller is on his rookie deal, so a couple more seasons there. uh if you were worried about like whether or not the timelines sync up, Colin Ston, who they collected this off season, is uh on an expiring deal. So, there’s that also. So, like the Hornets by all account, other than I guess Miles Bridges of the Youngish guys on the team, most of them are still signed for two or three more seasons after this one. So, they don’t have to start winning yet. You know, LaMelo would like to, but he’s going to have to stay healthy if that’s going to happen. I think Colin Ston is going to be kind of a nice presence for this team. And then we’re going to see what Brandon Miller does if he can get his health back together. They got a bunch of rookies again uh out of this draft. Canelo Kulk Bunner, those are the two I think that pop up in my brains. And they’re not like the issue here is that the Hornets even if they try to win, they’re not a good team. They have four what I would call like kind of competent starters and then there’s that weird center thing going on. But like these are not these are not good like truly good players. At least not yet. I like LaMelo a lot. But then like what do we what do we really think of Miles Bridges? He’s he’s good like three times a year and then he’s serviceable the rest of the time. It’s really hard for me to take an over on a on a team that I think is this bad where it does feel like one injury again. They’re one injury away from sliding right back into the tank. So, uh, FanDuel’s got that number 27 and a half. That’s going to probably split the the take pretty evenly. As of this moment, I lean slightly to the under because I think they’re going to be terrible again. But then, who knows? Like, maybe they’re finally healthy for the first time in forever. Let’s talk fantasy stuff now. Let’s get into LaMelo Ball. He was of course the um well technically Mark Williams was the highest ranked Hornet on the perame side this past year but he’s not there anymore. So LaMelo Ball highest ranked per game guy at number 59. Uh and I know what you’re thinking Dan is a lot of that because of turnover issues and the answer is kind of 3.6 turnovers per game. Not a good number, but also not like as bad as it could have been. Thinking of uh you know like a Trey Young or whatever. He was he was in the mid to high fours. James Harden was up there as well. So yeah, LaMelo was better in 8cat than Ncat. He was number 27 in eight category leagues. But his other big issue, arguably the larger issue for LaMelo, was that he shook he took 21 shots a game and didn’t bother to make any of them. I would call that slightly problematic. He shot 40 and a half%. That was a career low. His three-point percent on 11 11 three-pointers per game was also a career low. He’s a good foul shooter, but that was actually pretty close to a career low as well. Uh, no, cuz his rookie season was was much worse. Um, steals were a career low this past season. Assists were fine, rebounds were fine. He’s a pretty good rebounding point guard. But there are all these things that need to get fixed. Most notably though, it’s games played. Like if you’re taking LaMelo Ball, and many of you will, and you’re probably going to have to take him, I would think in the second or third round again because that’s the way it’s been, you have to be very comfortable punting one thing. If you’re punting two, and this is sort of a little bit of like the James Harden, Trey Young situation, if you’re punting two things with LaMelo, he jumps up to number 14. That’s if you’re kicking turnovers and field goal percent. So that makes him a pretty useful player. if he can play 65 games or more. So, I would say, and you know, we’re going to do this a few times on today’s show, my personal opinion on LaMelo Ballal is fun though he may be to roster when he’s actually upright cuz he puts up some pretty goddy numbers like he had a 27 and 15 game uh this was at the the tail end of this past year. Um when he’s healthy, he can he can do some crazy stuff. I think he had seven three-pointers in that game as well, but I don’t trust him to make it through the year. And until he does so reliably, he did it in his second season, but that was it. The other four he has not, and he hasn’t been close. He missed seven games that one year. The other four seasons, he missed 31, uh, 21, excuse me, that was a COVID season. 46, 60, and 35. These are not small numbers. Until we start seeing smaller numbers there, I think I’m comfortable just saying screw it. I don’t want to deal with it. And I get it. We’re going to miss the season where he gets drafted in the third round and he’s a second round value. I get it. We’re going to miss that season. But if we would have just avoided him the whole way through here, we would have dodged at least two bullets by this point. So, probably not. Uh, Miles Bridges is the next name on the board. We’re going to try to get through today’s show in 20 minutes or less because um, my children were up in at 3:30 in the morning and never went back to sleep. So, I feel like I’m going to die on this podcast. You might actually see me die in real time on today’s show. Miles Bridges, uh, for all of his personality warts, has actually been one of the more reliable Hornets over the last couple of years. Yikes. That’s a tough pill to swallow if you’re the Hornets. But he’s tried to play in basketball games. And you can see through his six-year career, he miss he missed two games, seven games, six games, two games, and then 13 and 18 the last two years. Admittedly, some of that is tank related, but he’s been by all accounts relatively consistent. This year was kind of a downshooting year for Bridges, but the free throw percent was still good. He’s still rebounding. He’s not a great steals and blocks guy. I kind of feel like it should be better, but he’s not terrific there. And then he ends up in that sort of like kind of chill. He was number 68 this season. Uh last year he was number 57. Year before that, where was he? That was I think a that was the suspension year, right? Year before that he’s number 31. That was a good shooting year for him. So, you know, do I think usage goes down for Bridges? Yeah, probably. But again, that’s contingent on LaMelo Ball staying healthy, which we haven’t truly seen, and Brandon Miller staying healthy, which again, I think we’ll, you know, maybe perhaps a higher likelihood of that. Would I draft Miles Bridges with like the 85th pick? Probably, because I don’t think he’s going to be terrible. I don’t think he’s going to be that good, but I also don’t think he’s going to be terrible. He’ll be a perfectly fine, perfectly adequate non-cat fantasy player. So then you start to think, all right, well, is this a player I really want to even root for on my team? And the answer is probably not. So if we’re talking about a guy that doesn’t have much in the way of upside, and I want to think this through, like I don’t want to be the guy cuz I I’ve I’ve been this guy before and I’m trying not to be this guy anymore. I’m not just going to come on this show and be like, Miles Bridges, he’s a turd. I don’t want him. We did that a couple years back and I got yelled at by a bunch of people, but it turned out fine because like there are plenty of other ways to win a fantasy league. Now I think the argument is cuz he was actually a value that year cuz everybody avoided him cuz he’s clearly not a good dude. Uh and then he and then he overperformed. Now, we’re at a spot where, you know, LaMelo, Brandon Miller, Colin Ston, who we’ll talk about later in today’s show, if these guys are upright, Miles Bridges is not going to get to do as much as he has in years past, and there isn’t any surprise with him anymore. The upside is could he shoot more like 47, 48, 49% again instead instead of 43? The answer is maybe. I don’t know. It’s almost impossible for me to know. his his field goal percent has bounced around a lot through his career. 46, 42, 50, 49, 46, 43. There’s been no consistency at all to his field goal percent through Miles’s first six years in the NBA. Like, you know, Sharp Money would probably say he’s not going to repeat. That’s the only thing that he hasn’t done is repeat a field goal percent. So, probably it’ll be a little bit better, but with the downtick in usage, it probably doesn’t really matter. So, when you roll that all together, if we’re talking about a guy that’s not really gonna like he doesn’t really have upside and he’s not what you’d call a beloved human being, why bother? Let’s talk about Brandon Miller, who uh had his own issues coming out of college, but uh he was number 75 this past year. um where like LaMelo Ball had big negatives. Biles Bridges didn’t have those big negatives in his fantasy game. Yeah, the the field goal percent wasn’t good, but punting it didn’t change his rank like a ton. And he’s not a guy that you’re going into the year assuming you’re going to punt uh field goal on Miles Bridges. With Brandon Miller, it kind of feels like you might need to. His two seasons in the NBA, he’s shot 44 and then down to 40%. And some of that was because his shot profile changed a little bit. He was taking about 40 some odd percent of his shots from three-point land. His rookie year this second season was more like 60% of his shots from downtown. So field goal percent dip. Number of three-pointers per game went way up. He does have some versatility to his fantasy game. Got 1.1 steals and.7 blocks this year. That was pretty good. Five boards, three and a half assists is not bad. The 2.8 8 turnovers is is painfully high for a guy who’s not passing all that much. But there is an all-aroundness to his game that I don’t think was super evident his rookie season, but a really nice free throw percent emerged as well. So, the Brandon Miller discussion is going to come down to whether or not we think he can get back up to like 44% from the field or if super low 40s is really the the the spot for him. If you’re bunting field goal percentage makes the decision a whole heck of a lot easier. He was going around 60 this past year. I felt like that was a little bit too soon. I think if he had stayed healthy all year, it would have been probably accurate. So, I think maybe I was underelling him a tad. I don’t have any idea where he’s going to go this season because again, like his numbers were fine if you were punting a couple of things and then, you know, got hurt early and missed 55 games. So, what does that do to the sort of flavor in everybody’s mouths? It’s hard to say until we get that first batch of pre-rank and ADP data, which should be coming any day now. By the way, Yahoo Leagues are very close to opening up. I don’t know when that day is. We uh we’re told probably first two weeks of August. We’re kind of at the we’re near the tail end of two weeks into August, but you know, maybe we get it later this very same week. In any event, would I draft Brandon Miller? Yeah, absolutely. He’s uh he’s an interesting young player. Um if the field goal percent comes around, now you’re talking about a guy that has sort of that shooting guard profile plus a big bump in threes and decent defensive stats. So that’s the way that he sort of pushes past the kind of Zack Lavine mold, which is pretty good to begin with, but Brandon Miller could be better than that. Mostly because of the defensive stats, but also because he hit four three-pointers a game last year. But it’s going to take some things improving. We’re going to need to see the field goal percent get better and we’re going to see the usage not tail off even if the team is mostly healthy with an added Colin Ston. So, uh, where would I look at Brandon Miller? Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of where he finished last year in that 75 range. If you’re punting, uh, you that’s I think ends up being a pretty good spot to get him. If you’re going straight nine cat across the board with no punts, so more like a roto uh, style build. um he probably doesn’t quite get to that mark. So u that’s probably your where I if I had to guess I think his ADP is going to be pretty close to where he finished in rank last year. So in the 70s um there may be some sort of faith that he gets better that pushes him a little bit sooner. If he does go sooner than that, I think I’m out. Again, you know, barring the punt stuff, that changes things quite a bit cuz again, his turnovers were weirdly high for a guy who didn’t have that many assists. That’s not cool. Uh but field goal percent was the big one. You know, if you’re punting field goal percent and you don’t care about his 40 in that mark, he jumps up to a third rounder. Turnovers and field goal pushes him up. It’s still a third rounder, but like right at the front end of it. So, that’s the Brandon Miller story. But and you guys might be noticing a a pattern so far. I’m not super into these guys because there is also stuff hanging over them. And let’s talk about Colin Ston because he’s another example of a guy that first of all his fantasy game doesn’t translate all that well. Um he needed an absurd usage marker in Utah to get to a decent fantasy mark. And it’s weird too because he’s a pretty good percentages guard and those guys generally have okay fantasy value, but Sexon’s issue is that his assist to turnover ratio is not particularly good. Uh when he’s the point guard, that number can get the assist can get high enough where it kind of overshadows the turnover issues. But he also doesn’t hit three-pointers really. He was only at 1.7 last year. He doesn’t rebound. And so what do you get? You get okay percentages, but not a whole lot else. He had a couple of seasons in Utah where he was sort of flirting with consistent fantasy value, but it has required so much usage to get him there. And I don’t know that that’s going to be available in Charlotte this coming year. Not that he was like an overwhelming usage guy. uh really since Cleveland, he hasn’t been that guy. Cleveland, he was putting up 24 points a ball game in his his last uh full season with the Cavs. Utah, he hasn’t eclipsed 19 yet. Uh but he needs that extra shot or two and now he’s going to a place where and like what what was he in the pecking order in Utah is is still kind of anybody’s guess because you had Larry Mark in there, but he didn’t do a whole lot this last year. Jordan Clarkson was kind of in and out. Utah had all these rotating bodies that were semi sort of in the usage mix. Now he goes to a place where there’s a much clearer hierarchy and he’s not the number one guy. I don’t think he’s the number two guy. I’m not even sure he’s the number three guy. I’m not even sure that he starts, but I I I would lean towards probably on that one. But they may opt to start Tan Salon and bring Colin Sexon off the bench as kind of like your primary bench gunner type. In which case, he’s like right back into what the problems that we had in Utah, which is 13 and change shots per game. Yeah, he’s going to get you good percentages on those, but he’s not going to rebound. He’ll get you fourish assists probably, but he doesn’t steal or block shots. And so, what are you really looking for here? you’re you’re talking about a guy that his upside is tied up in whether or not LaMelo Ball is playing. And so there is a certain allure there. But like if you’re thinking headto-head, is this a guy that you really want to have to start all those games when he’s not putting up value? And if you’re thinking more along the games cap side, is this a guy that you want to sit on the entire year and then deploy him in those games that LaMelo’s out? That pathway maybe makes a little bit more sense, but at the same time, I really value my roster slots. And so, I think I’d probably lean towards just not drafting Colin Sexton this year and referring to him more as a burger board guy, right? like lamela misses a game. Sexon drops into the starting lineup potentially as a point guard. Although it’s possible Spencer Denwidy takes that job anyway. So there’s there’s not even really a guarantee that Sex is going to be great when LaMelo’s out. It might be more that like maybe he needs Brandon Miller to miss a game or Salon. Both those guys I would put more in the in the kind of small forward bucket, but Brandon Miller plays more like a shooting guard. So maybe you need Brandon Miller to be out for Colin Ston to have enough usage. like 13 and a half shots a game, which is probably a target number for him. That’s just not enough because of the fantasy shortcomings because he doesn’t get defensive stats or rebound and the assists are fine but not great and he doesn’t hit three-pointers out of that guard spot. There’s just sort of not enough there. And I was trying to think of like how I wanted to present the last talking point on today’s show. And the best thing I can say is look here’s the roster and I can’t sort by position but right now uh Mason Plumbley, Ryan Kulch Brener, and Musa Diabate are all in the running to get center minutes. And the simple fact is it’s it’s not really clear that any one of those three guys would have fantasy value even if they got full starters minutes. The clo the safest play would be Plumbley, but he’s not a good free throw shooter. He’s not particularly skilled on offense. He doesn’t even get that many defensive stats as you look at like the historical Mason Plumbley numbers, at least not lately. Early in the career, he was pretty close to like a steal and a block. Uh last time he played full starters minutes was actually with Charlotte a couple of years ago and he was at 1.2 combined. So, field goal percent, yeah, you’ll get some of that. Um, you know, you’d get some rebounding and and okay assists out of the center spot if he played starters minutes, but I don’t think there’s a guarantee that any one of those three guys gets more than 24 minutes a game. Even if they did, you still need Plumbley to get up around 30 for him to have value. Diabate would probably need to be about 27 28 to have value. And we don’t really know much about the rook coming in. So, I think it’s safe to assume he’s not going to get big minutes either. So, would I draft any of the centers for the Charlotte Hornets? I would not. And that brings us to sort of the summary of today’s show, which is again, we talked about it at the beginning. The Hornets have a regular season win total number over at FanDuel of 27 and a half, which is showing some belief that this very bad team stays more healthy this year. Does Vegas know something we don’t? Do they have are they just sort of balancing out the risk against what may or may not happen? All of that seems very feasible. Again, I think I still lean slightly to the under. And I also think that because Colin Ston got added and because like we really haven’t seen the Hornets regulars all together for more than a couple weeks at a time, no one really remembers how much less guys get on that team when LaMelo balls in there and taking 21 shots at night. That’s a big big chunk of usage that comes off the board that was going to mostly Miles Bridges this last year. So, he’s going to see a usage drop off. That dude ain’t getting 17 shots a game when the team’s fully healthy. Brandon Miller uh is going to be trying to get his. How much he gets, I’m not entirely certain. Uh but it did seem like he was in line to see the biggest usage bump. And then what does Colin Ston get to do in this whole thing? Like 10, 11, 12, 13 shots. Does he even start? So, I think LaMelo probably gets overdrafted just on the hope that he stays healthy. If he does, he’ll be fine. Miles Bridges probably gets overdrafted on getting 17 shots a game for the last two years in a row. Although, at least again, he isn’t a punt guy, so he has a slightly safer floor. Brandon Miller is probably the most interesting of the Hornets because he could still get better in a few things in a way that I don’t know about these other guys really changing their stripes all that much. So Miller’s the guy I’m probably looking at the closest. And then Colin Ston, I just I don’t think he has a good fantasy game. He might help the team a little bit, but he just sort of doesn’t make sense from the straight nine fantasy standpoint. And that’s a terrible terrible Charlotte Hornets. I’m so sorry that I didn’t have something better to tell you. I’m mostly avoiding this team. I’m worried that they end up going into a tank, even if it’s by accident at the end of the year. I’m sure they are convincing themselves that they want to win games. But can they? Will they? And with the young guys signed for two, three, four more years, there isn’t that expressed need to win right now, even if it feels like they’re sort of overdue. I’m Dan. Like and subscribe on the way out. But we managed to keep our eyes open for today’s show. Uh, let’s do somebody else tomorrow. Gross.

The Hornets look bad on paper once again, but health may still be the biggest factor for the most interesting players on the club. Will Dan draft any of them?

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