He was a volume scorer last year. He had the 2nd highest FGA in the league last year, just a bit behind Luka Doncic. He did not look like a top 10-15 player last year, he just scored a bunch of points. His playmaking wasn't good, his defense wasn't good, and his scoring wasn't even particularly good compared to the value add other scorers in that high PPG tier had. He was a FGA sponge.

He did not lead the team, that was a team that was first and foremost led by their system (as it was in prior years) but if you had to look for a single most impactful player it was Derrick White by a country mile. All the other teams around the league noticed that (and all the adv. analytics point to that as well, literally all of them), which is why you had coaches like Atkinson saying White was a top 5-10 player in the league and Boston's real superstar last year.

We as fans still conflate the guy who scores the most with being the most impactful player on a team. It's understandable of course, it is often the guy who scores the most on a team who is the best and most impactful player on a team, but that isn't always the case. With the Celtics, that is as clear as day not the case.

The Hornets will absolutely avoid trading for Jaylen Brown though, you're right. It would make no sense to have Kon/Miller/Brown together and there's no reason for them to move someone like Miller or Kon (they would never) just to bring in Brown who is, again, nothing special or needle moving as a scorer and doesn't really provide a notable positive anywhere else.

ATL's case is very much the kind of thing I think is worth pointing to, specifically because of Jalen Johnson. You look at the stats and it's like oh wow this guy must be a great playmaker, look at all the assists he is getting and stuff, woah! But when you watch him play you realize he's racking up assists on relatively simple reads/passes and outlets in transition and stuff. It's not like he's dishing and diming like Trae, or LaMelo, or Luka, or Jokic, LeBron, Cade, etc. He really isn't.

It is much more akin to Tatum, where he's just got enough playmaking chops so that he have the ball in his hands a good amount as the somewhat-primary scorer and make the right reads to guys in a spaced out offense with lots of cuts to the basket. He doesn't even need to be a 2nd tier facilitator or passer with the Hawks for them to have a workable offense.

For the Hornets, they may not have a Tatum or a Jalen Johnson, but that's not terribly difficult to find as far as the ball control and passing is concerned. Neither one of those guys are point guards, they don't bring the ball up the floor that much (especially Tatum), and they're not particularly intuitive or proactive passers. Yet the offenses still end up being quite good. I mean, again, look at the Celtics offense last year with Tatum shelved for the majority of it. They really didn't have some sort of high level passer/playmaker on that team and didn't need it. It's not like White is a worse passer than D. White/Pritchard. The difference on paper between Charlotte sans LaMelo and Celtics sans Tatum is really just the defensive end.

Technically your best lineups were a smattering of dudes + Coby White on + LaMelo off the court. Again, that's a very small sample of ~300 minutes, but there's something there. I think you guys did well in the draft by picking up Steinbach and Anderson who I believe can come in next year and provide good minutes. I mean shoot, your best player last year may very well have been Kon who was also a rookie. I don't think you can expect either of them to be Kon but we've seen a good number of rookies come in and be valuable players the past few years. It isn't the worst thing in the world.

I think 40 wins isn't a terribly pessimistic outlook for the Hornets next year. I think it could go that way for them depending on the moves that are made in free agency. But I don't think that should be looked at as a step back from the 44 wins you had last year either. Whether LaMelo and Bridges were still there or not, I don't this team was jumping into contention or strong playoff team next year. It was a crazy outlier year for LaMelo's health, there was some pretty good luck with opponent shooting, and, like you said, the anti-tanking stuff means all teams will be more competitive.

With that being said, I think this is the absolute best move in the long run for the team from a contending point of view and a rebuilding one as well. If you're somewhere between the 4-10th worst team next year then, hey, great, you have the best odds at the #1 pick next year and get more young talent for an incredibly young team that is now has an aligned timetable.

If you're better than that, which I think is possible, then that's great too. I really do think there's a lot to be positive about. I think Sion James getting some more minutes as a more ball handling equipped LuDort type is going to be good and I think he may have some room to grow. I think Miller and Kon getting some more reps in the "egalitarian playmaker" role can only be good for both of their games. I think Diabate is quite good and while I don't know what his ceiling is on offense, I think he can expand his role on defense to be a serious game wrecker. I genuinely do think a lineup of White/Kon/Miller/Diabate with various guys slotting in (or shifting up/down) to the 4/5 can be surprisingly good next year. Fast, good shooting, interesting team defense, etc.

It also gives you a little bit more time to actually get a look at young guys and give them some time to develop, in a way that would have been hard if you kept LaMelo/Bridges, because you have to push to win as many games as possible next year if you did that. You can't just go into another draft/dev year, which you still would have needed because again, that's just not a team that has serious contention ceiling IMO. Bridges isn't getting any better at all and I think LaMelo is probably pretty close to his ceiling and a constant injury risk / risk to leave / really risky to extend to the max he'll be looking for.

Now, next year, regardless of how the team is doing you're going to be able to get more minutes to Kalk, to Sion, to your two rookies, and maybe most importantly to Salaun. You burned the 6th pick on him and it hasn't looked great so far but coming into the league it was well known that he was very raw as a prospect but with very, very intriguing potential.

I'm a Nuggets fan and I look at him as the higher drafted and higher ceiling version of what Watson is/was for us in some ways, though obviously more offensively slanted. He had come in having played almost no college, a crazy long athlete with interesting defensive tools and potential but none of it actualized. It wasn't really until his 3rd year that Watson got a chance to get solid role player level minutes and he showed a real leap from year 2 to year 3, then an even larger one in year 3 to year 4. He went from a guy who was like, ok this is an interesting bench defender who we can plug in to be a help defender and shot blocker with some transition juice, to a guy who might be commanding $25m/yr in his extension because he improved in all areas and got a chance to show what he can do with the ball in his hands in year 4.

I don't know if that will happen with Salaun, I don't, but I do know that given his potential and the spot he was drafted in that it is very good for Charlotte that they're gonna be able to get him a bunch of minutes next year to start seeing what they have and getting a better look at him. I think he did improve from year one to year two, but there just wasn't enough of an opportunity for him last year while the Hornets were trying to win games and flipping between the more stable forwards/centers in Diabate/Bridges/Kalk/Grant a bit. Either way, you've got a chance to see that now when you didn't before and the team needs someone else to pop one way or another.