The Charlotte Hornets are once again miserable crud. At 4–13, they are down there sloshing in the fermented trash juice of the Eastern Conference. The Hornets are perhaps a somewhat more buoyant grade of filth than the league's absolute worst teams—the Washington Wizards are presently on pace for five wins this regular season—but only in the way that putrid foamy scum floats along the surface of a pool of toxic sludge. The teams below Charlotte in the East are not, in any meaningful sense, trying to be good: the Pacers are riding out a season that effectively ended seven minutes into the final game of the last one; the Nets are in asset-collection mode; God only knows what the Wizards are up to. The Hornets, poor deluded devils, imagine themselves fine-tuning the core of a playoff contender. It's heartbreaking, is what it is.
Nothing is really hitting. LaMelo Ball, God and figurehead of the Doot Doot movement, remains as eccentric a lead ball-handler as ever, imagining into reality sudden torrents of open shots for his many dependent teammates but then also throwing away possessions willy-nilly on a really striking number of one-footed three-pointers. That's no way to live: The Hornets rank just 18th in the NBA in points per possession, nowhere near good enough to make up for the crummy team defense that has been a feature of their ongoing Alpha brain-rot era.
LaMelo turbo-boosts Charlotte's offense—their pace jumps with him on the floor and their offensive efficiency spikes by more than 12 points per 100 possessions—but a real challenge of handing the keys to a player whose preferred and only style is Joker-coded is building a system that can sustain through that player's breaks, his off-nights, and his absences. Ball, for all his genuine playmaking brilliance, is erratic and unreliable: He has lots of off-nights (he's shot worse than 40 percent from the floor in five of the 10 games he's played so far this campaign, and is hitting just 28 percent of his three-pointers) and is often injured (he's played more than 51 games in just one of his five NBA seasons, and is already hobbled this season). It thus falls to head coach Charles Lee and Ball's more dependable teammates to build and sustain two distinct identities: A structured, rules-based one that they can deploy without LaMelo, and then the one that accommodates whatever bonkers inspiration their highest-paid player took from bingeing Roblox the night before.
There's an idea of LaMelo, one with stable ankles, where his improvisational latitude is just a swirly-eyed update to the court generalship of, say, Steve Nash, fitted closely enough to a modern game stretched to accommodate a certain number of early-clock step-back 30-footers. The LaMelo Ball story isn't one of a thriving basketball ecosystem, not yet, and the narrative does not appear to be headed thataway. Charlotte has not yet experienced any joy beyond little hyperpalatable bursts from the project of loading their operation onto the back of an unpredictable goofball. A player given Stephen Curry's leeway who is even a little bit worse than Stephen Curry is fundamentally anti-system, an agent of true chaos; to this day, Damian Lillard probably comes the closest to redeeming Sometimes He Just Goes Fuckin' Crazy as a team-building concept, with Jordan Poole as a hideous strobing not-even-worst-case-scenario. The modern game has worked out a lot of optimization, but it is still learning what to do with a guy who can make good on a surprising amount of crazy, balletic, long-distance high-wire shit, but at a somewhat lower rate than literally the greatest shooter ever to touch a finger to a basketball.
With the fourth pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, and coming off a lost 19-win season where LaMelo played just 47 games, the Hornets selected wing shooter Kon Knueppel, from Duke. Knueppel is, in some respects, a profoundly un-LaMelo-ish player. He's an off-ball shooter, a straight-ahead driver, and a swing-passer; he is not going to throw exhausting mixtape dribble moves at a defender or heave a running 30-footer with 18 seconds on the shot clock. He is also not going to dance into unlikely possession-salvaging hero buckets, or sometimes gain extra-dimensional sight and become genuinely unguardable, or dime a succession of spatula-handed teammates into life-changing paydays. LaMelo, for all of my digging at his authentic Skibidity, is a special basketball talent, with a kind of intuitive genius for playmaking that probably cannot be taught. The appeal of Knueppel, meanwhile, is precisely that he is a familiar high-floor player type: A sturdily built wing who knows where to stand, who makes one sound basketball decision after another, and who can shoot the leather off the ball.
Charlotte fans—exhausted, starved, racked with despair—can be forgiven for pondering, with a desperate flicker of hope, whether Knueppel might make LaMelo expendable in the broader Hornets project. Knueppel is a damn fine player: In the first 17 games of his professional career, Knueppel is averaging 19 points on freaky 65 percent true shooting, he's contributing on the glass, and he's even chipping in some playmaking. He has that trait, on offense, of seeming to be pulled magnetically into the defense's soft spots, he has the quick-release and versatile shot-form to cause floor-warping panic in an opposing defense, and Charlotte's offense benefits from his quick and unselfish decision-making. When your team's primary ball-handler sometimes drives you insane with heat-checks and turnovers and enough dip on their chip to sink an aircraft carrier, it can feel so encouraging to just have a guy out there who will swing the ball, who will pump and go against a close-out, who after dishing the ball will zoom to the nearest opening and be ready to shoot.
Knueppel already has a couple of 30-point games, and over Charlotte's last four he is averaging 26.5 points on genuinely fucked-up 59-percent shooting, including 52-percent shooting on more than 10 three-point attempts per game. He is not an especially smooth athlete, and he is somewhat more limited athletically than the generation's true freaks, but already he is absolutely no worse than Charlotte's third-best player, and I feel very certain of how most Hornets fans would stack him up against Miles Bridges. The Hornets have lost the four games of Knueppel's recent tear, but it's encouraging enough to hope that he might soon be what Ball so far has not, which is productive enough and reliable enough to be the centerpiece of a competitive NBA team.
But even a player of Knueppel's steady and projectable type presents a range of potential career outcomes, one maybe not as wide as that of the Chaos Guard but also without the same obvious upside. Watching Knueppel on offense, I think that he might be a Klay Thompson-level shooter, with maybe a little bit less of Thompson's jump-shooting versatility but maybe a little bit more secondary ball-handling. Probably he will always be a vulnerable defender, but anyway you can confidently scrape some of the really gnarly lower-end outcomes off of your Knueppel projections just by observing his baseline repertoire of basketball skills.
On the other hand, I'm reminded that not very long ago a rookie Bennedict Mathurin seemed advanced well beyond his years as an all-offense wing, but seems lately to have settled in as a fun and useful but intermittently dependable scorer who probably should not be starting for a team that aspires to sustained excellence. Player development is super hard, even when the player presents a solid foundation. I'm reminded that Otto Porter was once a welcome and reliable good-place-stander for a disorganized Eastern Conference team in urgent need of a dip-ectomy, and topped out as a low-rung rotation guy. I'm reminded that De'Andre Hunter is on his second team, and Buddy Hield is on his fifth. I'm reminded that Kyle Korver was extremely useful for a very long time without ever ever ever being someone you could hope to build an entire team identity around. I'm reminded, for that matter, that Klay Thompson played every good season of his NBA career in the insane unprecedented gravity of one of the very best basketball players in history.
More to the point, I'm reminded that not one of those sub-Thompson, middle-outcome players is or has been or was a bust, nor anything like it. From 2000 through 2024, fewer than five players per NBA draft have ever made an All-Star game. Hitting in the draft cannot mean only that you have found a star. In 2003, the Los Angeles Clippers used the sixth pick of the deepest draft of this millennium to select Chris Kaman, from Central Michigan University. Four of the five players selected ahead of Kaman are either already in the Hall of Fame (Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Carmelo Anthony), or will be (LeBron James). Kaman, against those guys, looks like a grotesque thumbless ogre. Boy, the Clippers sure got screwed in that draft, you might think. No! Chris Kaman played 13 seasons in the NBA, started almost 600 games, won a couple of playoff series, and was an All-Star! He was an exceptional case! Most NBA draft picks, even most lottery picks, cannot match Kaman's career résumé. Kon Knueppel should be so fortunate!
LaMelo Ball has already been an All-Star, and is capable of All-NBA-type production, and is just 24 years old. He has not had a Shai Gilgeous-Alexander-ish effect on his team, but he is a bird in the hand in a scenario where you would not be wise to expect two more to turn up in a shrubbery the size of Wyoming. There is the question of why it has not worked for Ball in Charlotte, but given the history of all parties I feel much safer laying the blame on the team than the player. LaMelo makes me crazy and his entire player type fills me with dread, but the Hornets bow before no one when it comes to organizational dysfunction. Knueppel will be raised up in his profession inside the same hellish environment as all the other failed saviors.
I am engaged in this hand-wringing about the Hornets because eventually a team really can start to seem cursed, and as a generally rational person I find this awfully troubling. The Hornets have promising players—finding promising players has not been a problem in their present era—but once again they stink like you wouldn't believe. Ball was supposed to end this mess; Ball plus Bridges seemed like enough of a core to make some assumptions; Ball plus Bridges, plus Brandon Miller, plus now Knueppel, plus some veterans, shit man, maybe this even looks like a feast! Instead it is just a stew of horrid vibes and unbearable basketball, plus a shrieking Eric Collins.
The Hornets probably have a couple of months to see if they can get pointed in any kind of direction. The trade deadline is Feb. 6. If it doesn't start working, or doesn't at least stop actively crashing, and in a way that seems sustainable, even the most ethical of hoops fans will understand another teardown in Charlotte. The law of large numbers, or one of those related math laws, says that sooner or later something has to work for the Hornets. Hell, if they're still flailing around at this endless rebuild a few years from now, maybe they can start grabbing up more Knueppels.
