The Charlotte Hornets had their best season in quite a while in 2025-26. They used a red hot close to the season to make the play-in and came up one game short of making it into the playoffs. Now to be fair, they were thoroughly beaten down in that one game, but it was one game nonetheless. That led many to believe that the Hornets were going to run it back with largely the same group to see if they could carry the momentum of their late season surge into next season. General manager Jeff Peterson wasn’t buying it. He traded away LaMelo Ball and Miles Bridges for future first round picks and Naz Reid, Grayson Allen, and Royce O’Neale. He added Dorian Finney-Smith and Dennis Schroder is separate, smaller deals.

All of those transactions plus the addition of two more first round picks means we’ll see a dramatically different Hornets team from the one we saw last season. It doesn’t have as much star power, but the depth is greater than we’ve seen in Charlotte in recent memory. Let’s break it down.

Starters

Guard: Coby White
Wings: Brandon Miller, Kon Knueppel
Forward: Naz Reid
Big: Moussa Diabate

Second String

Guards: Dennis Schroder, Grayson Allen
Wing: Royce O’Neale
Forward: Grant Willams
Bigs: Hannes Steinbach, Ryan Kalkbrenner

Depth

Guards: Christian Anderson, Pat Connaughton, Kylan Boswell*
Wings: Sion James, Liam McNeeley, Michael Ajayi*
Forwards: Tidjane Salaun, Dorian Finney-Smith
Big: PJ Hall*

*Denotes player on a two-way contract

So first, astute observers might notice that there are currently 17 players on full contracts. That’s two too many. Two guys are going to have to go or be consolidated in a trade before the regular season starts in late October. As it currently stands, my guess is that Pat Connaughton and Dorian Finney-Smith are the most likely to be cut should the Hornets take the simplest route. Both are on the last guaranteed years of the deal, so there’s no future penalty to releasing either one.

Next, I currently have six players in the second string because I don’t know how the team plans to deploy Hannes Steinbach. He looked really good at the end of summer league and he played almost exclusively as a big there, but I don’t know if he’ll beat out Ryan Kalkbrenner for the right to back up Moussa Diabate right away. I’m sure he’ll get there before long though.

Most of the bench is fluid. We’ve seen Charles Lee mix and match pieces of the rotation depending on matchups and who’s playing well at a given time. I think most of the second string is going to comprise of veteran players to start, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sion James and Liam McNeeley make some inroads as the season progresses.

Minutes Distribution

I expect White, Knueppel, Miller, and Reid to all average between 30 and 34 minutes per game given that Lee seems to be relatively light on starters minutes. I think Diabate will play a few minutes left to keep him fresh and protect him from the foul trouble bigs are more prone to.

The bench minutes will likely be split pretty evenly among Kalkbrenner/Steinbach, Williams, Schroder, and Allen while O’Neale is more of a gap filler. Schroder will probably spend a couple of minutes sharing the floor with White and Williams will probably spend a few minutes as a small ball center just to throw some different looks out there. It should all come out in the wash where Schroder, Allen, Williams, and Kalkbrenner/Steinbach play about 16-22 minutes per game while O’Neale plays between 12 and 16.

We did see a few instances where Lee would vary the rotation and use 10 or 11 guys just to get people on the floor, and I’m sure we’ll see some of that early in the season, particularly at the big spots. There will also inevitably be injuries and rest situations to deal with that will shift things around.

This is probably the hardest this exercise has been in a long time. There are a lot of good players in the rotation, and it’s hard to pick out guys to lose minutes should the rotation get cut down to eight or nine players. That’s going to come in handy over the course of a long season, and hopefully it’ll translate to plenty of wins.