How the Charlotte Hornets Are Rewriting Their Story

In the American sports world, there are a handful of teams that are expected to struggle each year as a franchise. The Cleveland Browns, the Sacramento Kings, the Columbus Blue Jackets, the (formerly) Oakland Athletics, and the Washington Wizards all come to mind immediately as those teams.

Of course, one stands out above the rest: the Charlotte Hornets.

In their 36 years as a franchise, the Hornets are the only team in the NBA that has yet to see a conference final. They have not played the playoffs since the end of the Obama Administration, and are on their third (technically fourth if you count Kenny Atkinson) head coach of the 2020s.

In contrast, growing up in Massachusetts has meant the complete opposite. The New England Patriots, Boston Red Sox, Boston Bruins, and Boston Celtics have had success expected from them, and if they come up short of a championship, it's viewed as a failure of a season.

For my entire life, I have known what a winning team looks like. A team that defies all expectations and goes on to do things that only a few diehard fans could have even imagined before the season began. I mean, it happened with the Patriots this season, and the Celtics just a few years ago.

That's what's expected of those teams, though. Constant success. On the other side, there is a team like the Hornets. One where losing is essentially expected. For the first time in decades, though, the Hornets aren’t just trying to win, they’re trying to become something entirely different.

The Hornets weren’t just losing, they were stuck. A franchise cycling through ideas, rosters, and timelines without ever committing to one. In the fashion of Daenerys Targaryen, someone needed to break the wheel.

Jeff Peterson and Charles Lee didn’t promise instant success. They promised something harder: patience.

In their first season with the team, the Hornets were unable to get consistent play out of the roster Peterson partially constructed. They lost several key pieces to season-ending injuries, trotted out around 50 different starting lineups, and saw 27 different players touch the court at some point.

From the outside, it looked like instability. From the inside, it was an evaluation. In the middle of all of this chaos, the Hornets were able to find that diamond in the rough. As a two-way player, Moussa Diabate was supposed to come in, give good spot minutes for 40 or so games, and then be on his way to his next team.

Instead, he changed the complexion of the Hornets' future. They dealt their top two centers to create room for him to receive minutes. At the start of the season, he was not supposed to matter. By the end, he was more important than two-thirds of the roster.

The temptation to speed things up creeps into every general manager's mind. Take the example of playing a season on NBA2K, you don't want to wait a few years to get that championship team, you want to make all the big moves now to get it quickly.

What makes Jeff Peterson different is that he stayed patient.

During the summer of 2025, Peterson stuck to the process he laid out. The Hornets made several moves, none of which was a deal that instantly made them playoff contenders. They acquired Collin Sexton from the Utah Jazz for Jusuf Nurkic, re-signing Tre Mann, dealing Mark Williams to the Phoenix Suns for the draft rights to Liam McNeeley, and using every draft pick that the team owned. Those draft picks were Duke's Kon Knueppel (4) and Sion James (33), and Creighton's Ryan Kalkbrenner (34).

The clearest example of their shift into a new era was not their top draft selection, or one of their stars taking a leap (though, those helped). It came from a contract dump.

One of the smaller moves the team made was a trade with the Milwaukee Bucks for veteran Pat Connaughton. Connaughton's contract was negative value at this point in his career, which led Milwaukee to end up sending the former NBA champion, along with draft capital, in a salary dump to Charlotte.

When the Hornets acquired Connaughton, he was not expected to stay. Even Peterson told him that.

"It starts with your daily habits and at the end of the day if we can look at each other and say 'Hey, we have each other's backs', we're embracing the adversity on a day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month basis and we are competing consistently we're gonna be a team that goes out there that the city of Charlotte can be proud to represent, and we'll be representing them no matter where we are across the year within the league."

This quote came from not just a veteran trying to make a roster, but it was proof of the identity that the Hornets were trying to build: one that comes from consistency, accountability, and belief, no shortcuts.

For me, that's different.

I have spent my entire life watching teams where coming short of a championship is failure. The expectation is never growth, but results.

In Charlotte, it's never been that simple.

There is no banner to measure up to like the ones in the rafters of TD Garden. There is no recent run to replicate like the Red Sox in 2018. There is no foundation to fall back on like the last 25 years of the Patriots. For years, it's been the same cycle for the Hornets: new players, new coach, same result.

This time feels different.

Are the Hornets suddenly contenders? Maybe. That is not because one move changed everything overnight. It's because for the first time, there is a vision.

It's in the patience from Jeff Peterson. It's in the opportunities given to players like Moussa. It's in a veteran like Connaughton fighting for a roster spot he was told he would not be receiving.

It's the idea that success can be built from the bottom up. For the first time in decades, the Hornets are not chasing wins.

They are building something that can last.

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