Charlotte Hornets president of basketball operations/general manager Mitch Kupchak was recently asked if trading Terry Rozier means that the team is now in rebuild mode.
(via Charlotte Hornets):
“It’s definitely not a rebuild. We’ve got a foundation of players in place. Of course I’m not going to mention all the players, but I’ll mention our two highest picks, it just makes sense, LaMelo Ball & Brandon Miller. But there are other players that we’ve pegged as players that would be very difficult to trade. Like I said, I don’t want to mention all the names. And then, we’ve got some veteran players still under contract. We drafted them four years ago, but they’re not even 25 yet. So, we do have I think a good group. For various reasons, most of all the injury scenario this year, we weren’t able to really see what kind of team we had or reach whatever potential we thought we had. And we had hoped that we would contend for one of those lower-level playoff spots, that was our hope. Never got a chance to put together a run, and that’s not to say that we still don’t intend on trying to win games, because we do.
“So, I wouldn’t call it a rebuild. A rebuild is, in my opinion, something where you start from scratch and you convert everything you have into draft capital and you create gobs of cap room and you start taking in contracts to get picks and it could drag out years. That’s not the case, I think it’s more of a case of recognizing where we are this year. Going forward, just looking at our timeline, we had to be realistic to the kind of year that Terry was having, and it’s hard to make a deal like this when a guy has played as hard as he has on the court. Rarely does he miss a game. The kid every time he goes in for a layup, he gets thrown to the ground and he does a side flip or whatever and he gets up and runs back down the court. It’s hard to say goodbye to a player like that, but these are hard decisions you make in professional sports.”
