CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player the game has ever seen, soon will no longer own the Charlotte Hornets.
Symbolically, it sounds very important. Realistically, it’s not as significant as it appears.
The team announced Friday that Jordan is finalizing a sale of his majority stake in the Hornets, to an ownership group led by Hornets minority owner Gabe Plotkin and Atlanta Hawks minority owner Rick Schnall. Jordan will, however, oversee the basketball operations through next Thursday’s NBA draft — the Hornets hold the No. 2 overall pick — and the beginning of the free agency period July 1. Jordan will keep a minority stake in the Hornets. Among the new investors in the Hornets will be recording artists J. Cole and Eric Church, the Hornets said in a news release confirming the sale.
Still, this will be the end of an era in several ways. Jordan, who is from Wilmington and played collegiately at UNC, was the NBA’s only Black majority owner of a team. But he failed as the Hornets owner in the way he would consider most important: He never turned Charlotte into a winner.
In 17 years as the team’s primary decision-maker, starting in 2006 even before he bought the team from Bob Johnson, Jordan’s team never won a single playoff series. Not a single one — in 17 seasons! And this from a man who won 30 playoff series and six NBA championships in his 13 sterling years with the Chicago Bulls.
Jordan became Charlotte’s majority owner in 2010, buying out Johnson. The thought at the time was his brand-name allure would be hard to resist for the best of the best free agents. After all, who wouldn’t want to play for Michael Jordan?
It turned out that a lot of people didn’t want to.
Every time LeBron James changed teams, Charlotte wasn’t in the conversation. The same happened with Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, Paul George, Kawhi Leonard or just about any other basketball superstar you can name. They usually wanted to go to a glamorous city, like Miami or Los Angeles or New York. They weren’t coming to Charlotte, no matter who owned the team.
Charlotte’s only chance was to draft superbly — and it has another chance to do that Thursday — but its history there has been incredibly spotty.
Lest we forget, Jordan was in charge when Charlotte drafted Adam Morrison at No. 3 overall in 2006 and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist No. 2 in 2012 (over Damian Lillard, among others). He also signed off on numerous other questionable personnel moves, from hiring coaches like Mike Dunlap and Sam Vincent (each lasted only one year) to signing players like Lance Stephenson and Tyrus Thomas.
Where Jordan and his team did succeed was in business, as the Hornets rode the NBA’s wave of popularity to increase their value exponentially. Jordan thus will sell his majority stake in the team for way, way more than he paid for his share, meaning he can throw a bunch more millions on top of his pile.
To you and me, though, that doesn’t matter. What matters, to repeat, is that Charlotte teams in which Jordan had direct control of the basketball operations missed the playoffs entirely in 14 out of 17 years (including the past seven seasons in a row, culminating in an injury-riddled 27-55 season in 2022-23). And in the three years that they made it to the playoffs, they lost first-round NBA postseason series.
So Jordan’s reign as Charlotte’s most famous sports owner ever was ultimately a PR success but an on-court failure. Charlotte still has never won an NBA championship, made an NBA Finals or even made it to the Eastern Conference finals — and this is a team that’s now been around for 35 years.
The best thing Jordan did as Charlotte’s owner was change the team’s nickname back to “Hornets,” from the ill-fated “Bobcats.” The latter name had produced both the NBA’s worst record by winning percentage — the cinematically awful 7-59 season of 2011-12 — and a bad taste in everyone’s mouth due to its association with Johnson, whose first name was Bob by some “random” chance and who wasn’t well-liked by much of anyone in Charlotte.
It was cool for MJ to own his home-state team. We all liked that. The central figure of “The Last Dance” and “Air” was ours! But by the same token, the bloom was off the Jordan ownership rose in a lot of ways.
While the Hornets still draw well and sell out more often than you would think, Jordan was rarely spotted in the arena in the 2022-23 season. His greatest present to the Hornets was often his presence. After all these years, his players and most of the fans in Spectrum Center remained in utter awe of him.
But by the end, His Airness rarely granted Charlotte an audience. He seemed to be in Florida much of the time.
I actually think a set of new owners isn’t a terrible thing from a sports standpoint. The star power in the owner’s box will no longer be there.
But in terms of actually winning championships? The Hornets have nowhere to go but up.
