Will the real New Orleans Hornets please sit down? Seriously, your services aren’t needed the rest of the 2012-13 NBA season.
Here’s my suggestion: lose as many games as possible.
It would be one thing if the Hornets had a realistic chance of making the playoffs for the first time since 2011. They don’t.
As of today, New Orleans is 21-40 and tied for last place in the Western Conference standings. But at least the Bees now have the same amount of wins they had in last season’s 66-game shortened schedule due to the NBA lockout.
I’ll give coach Monty Williams and his ragtag bunch of players from last season credit: they didn’t mail it in. Although New Orleans got lucky in the NBA Draft Lottery and landed the No. 1 pick, which they turned into Anthony Davis, the Hornets gave all-out effort every game last season.
The Hornets’ effort down the stretch might have been the reason the ping pong balls turned out in their favor.
In the NBA, mediocrity is the worst place to be. If the Hornets were to finish strong and win 50 percent of their remaining games, instead of looking at a top-five pick, they could get stuck on the fringes of the lottery.
And that’s not somewhere the soon-to-be Pelicans want to be.
The 2012 NBA Draft was ridiculously top heavy. Only five rookies averaged double-digit points this season, four of those five players were taken within the first six picks of the draft.
NBA blogger Adam Zagoria of Zagsblog.com threw out a stat last week that blew my mind: 26 of the 60 picks in the 2012 draft have been sent down to the NBA Developmental League at some point this season.
The scary thing is, this year’s crop of future NBA talent might be worse than last season’s.
Any player taken outside of the top five is a gamble. In a perfect world, the Hornets would get one of those top five selections and take a guy like Georgetown forward Otto Porter Jr. or UCLA swingman Shabazz Muhammad.
New Orleans doesn’t have time to take on a project who will take two to three years to develop. I’m looking at you, Xavier Henry, Austin Rivers and Al-Farouq Aminu.
The Hornets need someone who can come in right away and put points on the board. Porter Jr. and Muhammad both fit the bill.
I feel bad for Williams because this team is still hard to evaluate. He thought he was going to get a healthy Eric Gordon for the entire season.
If the Hornets had Gordon’s scoring ability all season, meshing with newcomers Ryan Anderson, Robin Lopez and Anthony Davis, the Bees would probably be in the playoff hunt.
Alas, Gordon’s knee was sore and he missed the team’s first 29 games and the Hornets went 6-23 to open the season, flushing their postseason aspirations down the toilet.
Gordon still isn’t playing in back-to-back games, making New Orleans completely different when he’s on the floor one night and not the next.
There’s tons of reasons for optimism for the Pelicans next season. They should have a team fans have been waiting for since Tom Benson bought it last year.
Gordon has to show he’s rebounded from his injury and can play in back-to-backs, and coach Monty Williams will have to prove he can coach a team that should be in contention for a playoff spot.
A new name, new colors and hopefully a top-five draft pick should be on New Orleans’ mind. Winning the rest of the season? Not so much.
