Frank Kaminsky played the 100th game of his NBA career on December 5th against the Dallas Mavericks. On the Hornets’ first offensive possession he set a pick at the top of the key, slipped to the basket on the roll, caught the ball and made one long stride to the rim for a layup. It was a glimpse of the length, mobility, skill and awareness that motivated Charlotte to use a lottery pick on the Wisconsin big man in 2015.

That glimpse came and went in those opening seconds. Kaminsky finished the game with six points on 3-7 shooting, three rebounds while accruing zero assists, steals or blocks. On the possession after Kaminsky’s layup, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist bricked a three-point attempt so badly that he might as well have been throwing a football at the rim.

The Hornets eventually defeated the Mavericks largely because Roy Hibbert and Jeremy Lamb were more effective and stole fourth quarter minutes from Kaminsky and Kidd-Gilchrist. In their next game (a win over the Pistons), Kidd-Gilchrist scored zero points in 20 minutes, and Kaminsky was taken out of the starting lineup for Marvin Williams who returned from injury.

Kidd-Gilchrist was drafted number two overall in 2012 and Kaminsky was selected with the ninth pick in 2015. The Hornets have constructed a formidable and successful team built around the coaching style of Steve Clifford. The formerly projected ceilings of Kidd-Gilchrist and Kaminsky represent the pinnacle of that construction: a team knocking on the door of title contention. The trouble with a team in Charlotte’s position is that falling short of those ceilings is more costly than it is for some other teams.  

It’s easy to take for granted how difficult it can be for a team to lock down players as talented and reliable as Kemba Walker and Nicolas Batum and to have a coach that can make as much of a difference as Clifford. That said, without a superstar the path to success means getting almost everything right. 

When a patient team like the Hornets selects successful college players like Kaminsky and Kidd-Gilchrist they do so with the glimmer of hope that they will become stars, the demand that they are willing to adapt the mindset of role players, and the expectation that they will probably fall somewhere in between.

So the Hornets could have hoped they were selecting two players that would develop into Andre Iguodala and Pau Gasol. Falling short of those ceilings is not a disaster by any means, but failing to be reliably consistent players very well might be.

Rob Mahoney recently wrote for Sports Illustrated (in an article about Myles Turner) that, “everyone who’s drafted – particularly in the lottery—can do something. Making a career of it means finding ways to do it well often enough to really matter.”

That’s where Kaminsky and Kidd-Gilchrist fall short. There’s nothing wrong with having strengths and weaknesses in the NBA, but they cannot be equally prevalent. You either have to nearly eliminate your weaknesses or dominate with your strengths to have starting caliber value.

Kaminsky is a seven-footer who can’t block shots. He’s got good lateral mobility for a big man, but not so much that he could reasonably defend a wing. He can knock down jump shots all the way out to a three-point line, but to call that a strength means hitting at clips that the Nowitzkis, Aldridges and Loves of the world can. He has a multi-faceted skillset, and his ability to put the ball on the floor is probably the most promising part of his game that could continue to develop. But it’s not there, and asking Kaminsky in his second year to stand out over Tyler Zeller, Spencer Hawes, and Roy Hibbert is not unreasonable.

Kidd-Gilchrist has defensive skills and an influx of energy. That’s always worth something in the NBA, but he barely exists on the other side of the floor. When I asked Clifford if he ever designs anything to get Kidd-Gilchrist the ball he all but said no.

“For the most part, unless I look at a timeout and he has no shots or something like that, we just let him play," said Clifford. "And you have to have guys like that. You have to. If you have all guys out there that need play calls to get going it’s very difficult to do.”

Clifford is right about that sentiment, but it implies that Kidd-Gilchrist can score without plays being run for him, and he very rarely can. He’s at the point where Tony Allen’s offensive game should be a goal for him.

The Hornets’ path to playoff success is to be to a defensive version of the 14-15 Blazers who had a balanced starting lineup with reliable production and efficiency from everyone. Batum and Walker are talented enough to carry their weight as stars of the team, but they aren’t top tier superstars that can drastically raise the level of play for their teammates. They shouldn’t have to. Walker and Batum are good enough to win a lot of games, but their teammates have to be considerably better.

Kaminsky and MKG can’t necessarily be faulted for their current level of production. They are NBA-caliber players without a doubt. And Clifford does an excellent job implementing them.

The fault falls onto the front office, and it’s perhaps unfair because their margin of error is so small. The NBA’s five or six best players give their franchises so much flexibility in terms of how to build a team. Without one of those players you can’t “almost” execute a plan and not expect small misfires to manifest themselves down the line.

In other, if you live in the NBA’s middle class you can’t afford to get anything less than the value that is available to you in the draft. The Hornets could have drafted Bradley Beal and Myles Turner with those two selections. The “what if” game is harsh and can be applied to plenty of teams, but the reality and causality of the Hornets’ situation is pretty simple.

Kaminsky and Kidd-Gilchrist probably hold the value of the 18th-24th picks in a draft. As a result they are probably eighth or ninth men in a good NBA rotation.

These aren’t monumental blunders by any means. The difference between what Kaminsky and Kidd-Gilchrist are and what the Hornets need them to be is not necessarily gaping, but it’s far from inconsequential.