Charlotte Hornets could pick anywhere from 1-8 in 2023 NBA draft. Here are all the odds
To boil down the Charlotte Hornets’ chances of winning the No. 1 pick in the 2023 NBA draft lottery to simple terms, consider the imaginary coin I’m about to flip.
You get to call it: heads or tails.
Heads, you say? You’re right.
But now I’m going to flip it again, and you need to call it correctly once more.
And if you get the second one right, you have to guess a coin flip correctly a third and final time.
There is statistically a 1-in-8 chance that you can call “heads or tails” correctly three times in a row, and that is also the chance the Hornets have at obtaining the No. 1 pick in the NBA draft lottery May 16th.
By finishing the regular season Sunday with the fourth-worst record in the NBA, the Hornets have a 12.5% chance of the ping-pong balls coming up exactly the way they want them to. The worst three teams — Detroit, Houston and San Antonio — don’t have a much better shot, at 14% apiece.
The team that gets No. 1 gets the prize of presumptive top pick Victor Wembanyama, a 7-foot-3 French wunderkind who is thought to be the best draft prospect in the past 10 years. Even though he’s only 19, Wembanyama will be a star immediately (at least that’s what most everyone thinks). He can block shots, shoot threes and score inside. He is, to use LeBron James’ term, an alien.
So that is the Hornets’ quickest path to success: Win the No. 1 overall pick in the lottery, only a couple of months after the Carolina Panthers traded for the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft, and quicken the pulse of every Charlotte pro sports fan.
Can you imagine? Wembanyama and a rookie quarterback like Bryce Young or C.J. Stroud both starting their rookie season in Charlotte, within a few weeks of each other?
That would be the dream. But the reality could be much thornier. By finishing 27-55 and continuing the NBA’s longest current “no-playoffs” streak, now at seven seasons, the Hornets could pick as early as No. 1, but also as late as No. 8.
In the most likely scenario, in fact, Charlotte will draft No. 6 (there’s a 25.7% chance of that happening).
The draft could be good for Charlotte regardless of whether the Hornets get Wembanyama or not. The draft website Tankathon.com ranks Charlotte’s draft capital for 2023 as No. 1 in the NBA, owing not only to its lottery pick, but also to the late first-round pick it also holds (originally Denver’s pick) and the three second-round choices the Hornets have also accumulated.
Still, though, No. 1 overall is where everyone would like to be.
“I’ve never seen those guys play, but from what I understand, the top of the draft this year is potentially game-changing,” Hornets coach Steve Clifford said Monday in his end-of-season press conference.
If the Hornets ended up at No. 2, or No. 3 the pick might be G League Ignite point guard Scoot Henderson, or Alabama small forward Brandon Miller, each of whom might be a No. 1 overall pick if this were a weaker draft.
“Number 1 pick, number 2 pick, number 3 pick,” mused Hornets guard Terry Rozier. “I think we’d be happy…. This draft has got a lot of talented young guys, and I’m going to be excited to see who we take.”
“I feel like we all know what’s going on,” point guard LaMelo Ball said. “The first pick would definitely help a lot.”
Any of the top picks would help a Hornets roster that badly needs an influx of talent. Yes, the Hornets were injury-plagued in 2022-23, but that happens in the NBA.
You can’t say you’re just unlucky every single year in terms of injuries. That is part of the game, because the human body isn’t really equipped to go through 82 high-intensity basketball games each year. The best teams have enough depth to survive injuries. Charlotte didn’t.
But can you imagine a healthy Ball and Wembanyama co-existing on the same court and surrounded by several deadeye three-point shooters? That would be a team worth watching, and a team that would break Charlotte’s playoff drought.
Speaking of “worth watching”: Kudos to the Hornets’ marketing staff and to the team’s fans. Despite fielding a team that lost two out of every three games on average, Charlotte still had 16 home sellouts this season in 41 home games — the most sellouts in any season since the franchise reopened shop in Charlotte in 2004-05. I went to the season finale Friday against Houston. It was a thoroughly meaningless game, pitting two of the NBA’s four worst teams, and yet it was a sellout regardless.
Hornets fans are aching for their team to return to relevancy, whether Michael Jordan still owns them at the beginning of next season or not.
There are a few ways to get there, but the fastest one is this:
Make that 1-in-8 chance pay off. Win the lottery. Win Wembanyama. And then… win.
THE QUEST FOR NO. 1
The Charlotte Hornets have a 12.5% chance of winning the No. 1 NBA pick on May 16th in the 2023 NBA draft lottery. They are guaranteed to pick no worse than No. 8. Here are the odds for the Hornets to earn picks 1-8 in the lottery:
No. 1: 12.5%
No. 2: 12.2%
No. 3: 11.9%
No. 4: 11.5%
No. 5: 7.2%
No. 6: 25.7%
No. 7: 16.7%
No. 8: 2.2%
This story was originally published April 10, 2023 at 2:11 PM.
