It’s NBA Expansion Week at The Ringer! With a break in the schedule, we’re examining one of the biggest questions about the future of the league: Should the NBA expand beyond 30 teams? We’ll examine all the possibilities and complications, plus take some strolls down memory lane and examine some expansion teams of the past. We’ll bring it home at the end of the week with a hypothetical mock draft and a deep dive on potential future team owners.
I felt a pang of familiarity in the reports. Déjà vu, maybe? The Lakers had rescinded their deadline trade with the Hornets for rim-running center Mark Williams because of a failed physical exam. There were immediately theories of foul play—had Charlotte known more than it had let on? Were the Hornets preying on the Lakers front office’s desperation to make a good first impression with Luka Doncic, acquiring valuable assets in exchange for a player who has missed roughly two-thirds of all possible games in his three seasons? The Hornets have disputed the Lakers’ medical assessment—a bold, borderline delusional move for a Charlotte franchise that, since its reincarnation as the Bobcats 20 years ago, has found just about every conceivable way to be on the wrong side of NBA history. Imagine that team standing up to challenge the Lakers, an iconic franchise that outlines the history of the league writ large, that famously gets what it wants. It’s a next-level exercise in futility. It’s kind of cute that they’d even try.
From another perspective, perhaps the trade was just a matter of balancing the scales of history. See, the failed Williams trade has a sort of spiritual antecedent in the franchise. In the summer of 2009, the Charlotte Bobcats traded Emeka Okafor (the expansion team’s original draft selection) for Tyson Chandler. Okafor, the 2004-05 Rookie of the Year, was a double-double machine, but had plateaued in his time with the Bobcats; Michael Jordan and then-coach Larry Brown used to tease Okafor for being more devoted to yoga and Pilates than basketball. So they traded him to the New Orleans Hornets—I know, right?—for Chandler, who, five months earlier, had failed a physical, nullifying a deadline trade that would have sent him to Oklahoma City. True to OKC’s concerns, Chandler would go on to have a lackluster season for the Bobcats, limited by numerous injuries.
There have been conflicting accounts about who initiated the Williams trade talks between the Lakers and Charlotte Hornets, but given the way my brain works, it seems clear to me that the ghost of Chandler’s lost season in Charlotte is what compelled the Hornets to pull the trigger. The opportunity to make Williams’s troubling injury history someone else’s problem would finally absolve the Bobcats from taking on someone else’s problem more than 15 years ago. That’s how I interpreted the situation—trade histories are meant to be read like Bloody Mary chain-email curses, right?
Less than a year after acquiring Chandler, Charlotte traded him to Dallas for cap relief. Then? Chandler won a championship with the Mavericks in 2011; he’d win Defensive Player of the Year with the Knicks the year after that. Of course he did. Patently unlucky is the most succinct way to describe the past 20 years of Charlotte basketball.
This week, The Ringer is exploring the ins and outs of NBA league expansion: its viability, its pitfalls, its history and legacy. And, unfortunately, you can’t really tell that story without the Bobcats, the league’s last expansion attempt—the least successful of the modern era and arguably ever. Blame it on a coherent but misguided team-building philosophy, on misplaced hopes laid upon the wrong prospects, on a general malaise forged in the fires from which the Bobcats emerged … and never really left. The Bobcats were created to fill a void left in the city, but over the course of a decade, the team only managed to make it deeper, more existential. They’re the Hornets again. They have been for the past 10 years. Yet, has anything really changed? These days there is hope, there is talent, there is a vision. But the franchise knows how easily that all can get snuffed out. The Bobcats—and all they’ve come to represent—persist as a phantom limb that the franchise hasn’t been able to move beyond. It is both the least and most interesting era in franchise history, yet there is a cruel irony in how the most forgettable team the NBA has ever produced continues to haunt the league today.
The Ringer’s NBA Expansion Week
The Bobcats as we knew them wouldn’t have needed to enter the league in 2004 had the seeds of tension not been sown earlier. The city of Charlotte was always suspicious of then-owner George Shinn, who had loosely threatened to move the team as a negotiation tactic back in 1990, only one season removed from the original Hornets’ inaugural season. His standing in the city cratered at the end of the decade in a televised civil suit in which a woman said he sexually assaulted her; the jury found in favor of Shinn, but not before he admitted to multiple extramarital relationships. Shinn felt the contempt of the city and withdrew from the public. When the city of Charlotte rejected a new arena proposal, Shinn moved the team to New Orleans in 2002, in part to attempt a clean break from his transgressions. “People [in Charlotte] love basketball,” Shinn told the Charlotte Observer in 2008. “Had I wised up early and gotten out in the community like now, we'd probably still be there.”
The Bobcats were Charlotte’s consolation from the league. But, as we’ve seen in Dallas, there is a psychic toll in watching something that’s civically beloved be ripped away from the people. The Bobcats were a team, sure, but they weren’t their team. The name was either a way of thematically latching on to the coattails of the Carolina Panthers or a nod to the team’s majority owner, Robert L. Johnson—it’s hard to tell which explanation is more acceptable. For 10 years, they existed—then they were renamed the Hornets. That’s about the extent of it.
It’s been two full decades since the Bobcats played their inaugural season—the NBA hasn’t introduced an expansion team since. It’s no real mystery as to why. The most compelling argument for expansion is the notion that there is more than enough global talent to support it, and that has never been truer than it is today. The most compelling argument against it? Over the past 20 years, Charlotte has had a grand total of two All-NBA players (Kemba Walker, 2018-19 third team; Al Jefferson, 2013-14 third team), which ought to be impossible. Even the worst, most snakebitten franchises you can think of have fallen into at least five All-NBA appearances from their players in that span. Charlotte has consistently fielded some of the least talented teams of this generation—and that’s without any kind of purposefully engineered collapse like the one that made the Sixers notorious during the Sam Hinkie era. Roster construction, especially in a small market, heavily relies on luck, but is it truly possible to be as unlucky as Charlotte was? From Bernie Bickerstaff to Rod Higgins to Rich Cho, the face of the Bobcats front office changed over the years, yet the same dark cloud lingered above them. Michael Jordan signed on as a part-owner in 2006 and became majority owner in 2010; even the presence of the GOAT couldn’t eradicate the gloom (and if anything, just further cemented MJ as a truly appalling judge of talent). Charlotte’s monumental draft-day missed connections are practically woven into the team’s identity. For the sake of posterity, let’s run through the three foundational heartbreaks:
2005: Losing out on home-state legend Chris Paul
… to the team that used to be theirs—because of a coin toss that broke the tie between the Bobcats’ and Hornets’ identical 18-64 records in 2005. (There was an offer in play to trade up; the Bobcats didn’t take it.) The Hornets drafted the Point God at no. 4. The Bobcats drafted Raymond Felton at no. 5.
2006: Drafting Adam Morrison
The Bobcats took Morrison with the no. 3 pick, one spot behind LaMarcus Aldridge, the best player taken in the lottery. Charlotte’s brass was divided: Morrison had his partisans, but so did Brandon Roy and Rudy Gay. Newly minted part-owner Michael Jordan played a role in the final call, holding meetings with head coach/GM Bernie Bickerstaff and team scouts in the days leading up to the decision. “We’ve had the addition of two competitors—Michael Jordan and Adam Morrison—and that’s our profile,” Bickerstaff told the media after the draft, in what would be the last time Morrison would ever be lumped in with Jordan. After an underwhelming and inefficient rookie season, Morrison tore his ACL in a preseason game just before his sophomore year. The injury drained what little athleticism he had; he was traded to the Lakers the following season.
2012: The Bobcats’ unfortunate pièce de résistance
After suffering through the indignity of the NBA’s all-time worst single-season win percentage (.107 on a 7-59 record) in the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season, Charlotte was rewarded with the no. 2 pick in the lottery. Their selection, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, was sandwiched between two future All-NBA talents in Anthony Davis and Bradley Beal. But it gets worse: Talks that could have landed them James Harden in exchange for the no. 2 pick fell through.
There was a common refrain top brass had when explaining the team’s philosophy. “The thing I see most is his desire to win; you can’t teach that,” Jordan said after the franchise drafted Morrison. The Bobcats were trying to surmise the intangible qualities that separate great from good without first recognizing what makes a prospect appealing in the first place. Franchise-changing talent isn’t subtle; it punches you in the face. They were scrutinizing the sprig of parsley without making sure the roast chicken was cooked. "When we were formulating our plans for the franchise, we wanted to try to find players who had been in winning programs," Bickerstaff once said. "These people know how to win, and know how to surmount difficult times."
But knowing how to surmount difficult times isn’t the same as having the ability to, especially after ascending to a higher tier of competition. From 2004 to 2010, the only underclassman the Bobcats drafted (and retained) was D.J. Augustin. The only freshman the team selected in that span would be packaged in a draft-day trade for 27-year-old Jason Richardson. There was, at the very least, consistency in the approach. The aim was to shoot for “sure things.” Okafor was the best player on a UConn team that had just won the 2004 national championship. Tar Heels teammates Felton and Sean May were also national champions in 2005, playing for a school just 150 miles away. Morrison was the biggest name in college basketball—the second coming of Larry Bird, they called him.
That didn’t work. So the front office began working the margins, buying low on misidentified talent. Boris Diaw, Stephen Jackson, and the aforementioned Tyson Chandler. The 2009-10 roster, with Larry Brown at the helm, was the Bobcats’ first winning team. Brown created a floor-raising model for success. Strong, physical defenders on the wings, long-armed 5s stationed around the rim, quick rotations and recovery. The team’s original expansion-draft success story, Gerald Wallace—essentially Tari Eason in 480p resolution—ready to create chaos as the low-man helper. The objective: turn basketball into a walk through hell.
By 2011, their draft strategy attempted to incorporate the best of both worlds: Bismack Biyombo, an 18-year-old Congolese big man with an absurd wingspan—who had just recorded the first triple-double at a Nike Hoop Summit (with points, rebounds, and blocks, no less)—and Kemba Walker, another national champion upperclassman who would go on to become the franchise’s best player, though it took a good long while for him to hit his stride as a star. It was those subsequent drafts that truly set the team back more than a decade. Kidd-Gilchrist in 2012, Cody Zeller in 2013, Noah Vonleh in 2014, Frank Kaminsky in 2015. All fine role players, but not a single breakthrough.
Despite all this, I legitimately loved watching Charlotte during this time. Or maybe it was because of the star-crossed nature of the entire enterprise: watching one of the more hopeless teams in basketball as a radical act of empathy. Those teams played hard. There was never an excuse not to try. Steve Clifford, a longtime defensive lieutenant for both Jeff and Stan Van Gundy, took Brown’s blueprint and turned it into an IKEA manual: bare bones, foolproof, and full of wooden dowels. On offense, the goal was simply to not turn the ball over (Charlotte had obscenely low turnover rates in Clifford’s first five seasons with the team). On defense, the team protected the paint by committee in a “no middle” approach, covering for Al Jefferson’s lack of foot speed. When it failed, it really failed. It was a miracle that they were consistently top 10 in defensive rating given the number of times they’d lose by more than 20 points.
But when it worked? Charlotte didn’t just take you to hell, they took you into a time machine to experience 1950s McCarthyism. We’re a month removed from the 10-year anniversary of a random regular-season game seared into my memory. On January 17, 2015, the then-renamed Charlotte Hornets defeated the Indiana Pacers in a game I can only describe as cruel and unusual. The Hornets won, 80-71. In overtime. The Hornets held the Pacers to just 71 points in an overtime game. The last time that happened was in 1953. The Hornets won despite shooting 30.7 percent from the field. No team has done that since. Again, this happened only 10 years ago. On the same night, the future champion Golden State Warriors beat the Houston Rockets 131-106 in regulation. The Hornets and Pacers combined for only five more points in regulation than the Warriors scored. True to form, the Hornets had only seven turnovers in a game where they forced 20.
Clifford led Charlotte to two of the franchise’s three playoff appearances since the Bobcats’ inauguration in 2004, the last time in 2016. The past nine seasons have been the roughest stretch in franchise history, which, again, seems impossible. You could sense the desperation in Charlotte when the team brought Clifford back to his former post as head coach in 2022, after three consecutive years of incremental growth under the guidance of the offensive-minded James Borrego. Clifford’s two seasons back were brutal, some of the worst basketball Charlotte has seen. The league landscape had changed. It’s no longer enough to simply mitigate risk. Perhaps that was never enough to begin with. There is a palpable difference in Charlotte’s new regime. More than ever, the team seems willing to lean into risk, exploring avenues that previous eras were too reluctant to acknowledge.
Part of that philosophical shift is inspired by employing a star that possesses chemistry-altering exposure effects. Drafting LaMelo Ball with the third pick in 2020 could go down as the best draft decision the franchise has ever made. Melo’s fearless imagination has the power to break statistical models and denature the very fabric of basketball. He has All-Star and All-NBA ability, but can we separate the art from the artist, the player from his context? His breathtaking highlights, the obscene numbers—they’ve mostly amounted to nothing. The Hornets have the fifth-worst record in the league dating back to Ball’s first season. His troubling injury history has left his hardwood revolution to buffer intermittently. (Never mind the crushing blow of losing promising sophomore wing Brandon Miller for the season to a torn ligament in his right wrist.) The Hornets will have the next four seasons to not only figure out how to keep Melo upright, but how to build around a legitimate superstar talent for the first time since Larry Johnson and Alonzo Mourning in the early ’90s. (Yes, it really has been that long.)
The Charlotte franchise officially reclaimed its Hornets name and team history in 2014-15, a symbolic move at best, but a necessary one: Shinn took the team name and the city’s dignity with him, but at least that sense of oneness between a city and its team could be reclaimed. The Bobcats never quite occupied the space a professional sports team is supposed to. In the 10 years of its existence, it played second-fiddle to a memory of what used to be, not once reaching the jubilant highs of the Hornets’ best years. And in the 10 years since, it’s lingered like a cautionary tale. Then again, some of us like a good ghost story.
In the farthest corner of my closet is my wife’s least favorite item in our home: An official practice T-shirt from the Charlotte Bobcats’ inaugural 2004-05 season. The groan of disgust every time I remind her of the shirt’s existence fills me with something approaching glee. It is objectively hideous. It’s a medium, but fits approximately a full size larger, as was the case in the mid-aughts. The team logo and all the lettering is patch embroidered on the front, rather than printed, creating awkward ridges on the undercarriage of the shirt. It’s exactly the kind of oversized tee that a partner might want to steal for bed, except for the fact that it’s profoundly uncomfortable.
It was a bargain-bin thrift-store find that emanated a hum and glow perceptible only to the most masochistic of league followers. I answered the call. I’ve worn it out in public maybe three times in all the years it’s been in my possession. It’s never once elicited the ball-knower’s nod one might get for wearing a Timberwolves-era Tom Gugliotta jersey at the Las Vegas summer league. Still, this shit means something to me. It’s a piece of the past that insists on being forgotten, but you know how the saying goes. I choose to remember. That’ll be my cross to bear. Whether it’s Seattle or Las Vegas, or both, expansion is on the horizon—and no team deserves the doom of repeating this particular slice of history.
