MKG cleared for full-contact Hornets practice after labrum surgery
One morning after basking in the warming glow of a franchise-record-setting scoring explosion by point guard Kemba Walker to earn a much-needed victory, the Charlotte Hornets doubled down on the positive vibes with some surprising good news: their defensive leader, widely expected to be lost for the season, could return to the floor sooner than expected.
From the Hornets:
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The Charlotte Hornets announced today that forward Michael Kidd-Gilchrist has been cleared for full-contact practice by team orthopedist Dr. Marcus Cook. The fourth-year player suffered a torn labrum in his right shoulder on Oct. 3, 2015, in a preseason game at Orlando and underwent successful surgery performed by Dr. Cook on Oct. 6. As part of his rehabilitation, Kidd-Gilchrist has participated in non-contact practice for the past two weeks. There is no timetable for Kidd-Gilchrist’s return to the active roster.
Back when Kidd-Gilchrist suffered his preseason shoulder injury and it became clear that he’d need to go under the knife, the initial expectation was that he’d miss six months and, most likely, the entire 2015-16 NBA season. Even as he spent his time rehabilitating and working as an unofficial member of the Hornets’ scouting department, though, the 22-year-old forward remained confident that he’d not just beat that timeline, but blow it away.
From Rick Bonnell of the Charlotte Observer, two weeks ago:
Kidd-Gilchrist was recently cleared for all non-contact activities, following shoulder surgery in October to repair a torn labrum. If he progresses successfully in non-contact drills, he could be cleared in the coming weeks to start contact drills, the next step toward playing. […]
“For sure. No question I’m going to play this season,” Kidd-Gilchrist told the Observer Wednesday at shootaround. “I’m going to play. It’s a matter of when now.” […]
“He’s been doing all the 5-0 and 3-0 drills in practice. Frankly, it’s just nice to have him around because he brings such energy to everything he does. They seem pretty ‘So far, so good’ with his recovery,” [Hornets head coach Steve] Clifford said.
“I’m not a doctor, but I think (he’ll play in the regular season). The only thing they’re hesitant about is the nature of these injuries. Literally it has to be step-by-step. They are hesitant to put out a timeline. They just want to make sure.”
Tuesday’s announcement that MKG’s been fully cleared for contact suggests, if nothing else, that none of those steps have been missteps, and that the 2012 NBA draft’s No. 2 overall pick continues to progress further down the road to recovery at a faster clip than anyone would have projected back in October.
“I think he looks good,” Clifford said Tuesday, according to Adi Joseph of The Sporting News. “He’s just trying to get his rhythm back, obviously. I think his conditioning and stuff like that is pretty good. He’s worked really hard, so it’s just going to be a question of building.”
The return of Kidd-Gilchrist, who averaged a career-best 10.9 points and 7.6 rebounds in 28.9 minutes per game last season before signing a four-year, $52 million contract extension this past summer, would figure to offer a major boost to a Hornets club that has dropped 12 of its last 16 games to fall both below .500 and out of the Eastern Conference playoff bracket. Charlotte’s nosedive has been particularly perilous on the defensive end of the floor; after allowing just 99 points per 100 possessions through their first 25 games, making them the league’s eighth-stingiest defense, the Hornets have been gashed to the tune of 107.1 points-per-100 over the last 16 outings, the NBA’s fifth-worst mark over the past month.
On that score, the reintegration of Kidd-Gilchrist — a 6-foot-7, 230-pound lockdown artist, one of the game’s premier perimeter defenders — seems awfully attractive, especially considering how significant and glaring a bellwether for Charlotte’s success he’s been, as I wrote back in October:
Clifford’s club had a 27-28 record when Kidd-Gilchrist was in the lineup last year, a winning percentage that would’ve been good for the No. 7 seed in the Eastern Conference. The Hornets went just 6-21, however, when he was sidelined by an early-season stress reaction in his right foot and a late-campaign left ankle sprain. MKG missing one-third of the season was arguably the biggest single factor in the Hornets missing out on their second straight playoff berth. […]
The damage went further than that. The Hornets outscored their opposition by 73 total points in the nearly 1,600 minutes Kidd-Gilchrist played last year, an average of 3.1 points per 100 possessions, according to NBA.com’s stat tool. When MKG was off the court, though, Charlotte got outscored by a whopping 333 points in just under 2,400 minutes, an average of 7.7 points-per-100. In effect, then, having MKG in the lineup was the difference between the Hornets performing like the 55-win Memphis Grizzlies and the worst-season-in-franchise-history Los Angeles Lakers.
At the time, those on/off numbers portended all types of doom for the Hornets’ hopes of returning to the postseason. And yet, Charlotte has persevered despite the absence of its defensive captain, making a surprising early-season push to the No. 2 spot in the East thanks in large part to an overhauled, uptempo, fire-away-from-3-point-range offense led by Walker, key offseason acquisitions Nicolas Batum, Jeremy Lin and Jeremy Lamb … and mostly strong two-way play from veteran forward Marvin Williams, who has started at small forward in place of Kidd-Gilchrist since the season’s opening tip. (It’s worth noting, however, that the Hornets’ offense has plunged over the past month, too, from a near-top-five 104.2 points-per-100 mark through 25 games to a bottom-10 clip of 101.2 points-per-100 in the past 16.)
Williams isn’t on MKG’s level as an on- and off-ball defender — that’s not shade; few are — but he is a legitimate outside shooting threat, a floor-spacer who’s making a strong 38.1 percent of his 3-point tries while attempting a career-high 4.3 long balls per game. While Kidd-Gilchrist has put in plenty of work to rebuild his legendarily janky jumper, making just under 40 percent of his midrange takes last season, he’s 3-for-18 from beyond the arc for his career (three seasons, 195 games, 5,114 minutes).
He’s yet to demonstrate a reason for defenders to fear him on the perimeter — beyond a capacity for off-ball back-cuts, which isn’t nothing — meaning defenses can afford to sag off him to muck up more dangerous stuff in the Hornets’ offense. In the past, that’s meant obstructed entry passes and aggressive dig-downs on Al Jefferson post-ups; this season, that means plugging driving lanes that Walker, Batum or Lin could use to penetrate into the paint coming off a high screen, sparking collapses that can lead to the kind of ball swings and open 3-point looks that this year’s Hornets (unlike prior years’ models) have the shooting to actually make.
The prospect of Kidd-Gilchrist’s return, then, presents something of an interesting dilemma for a Hornets team looking for a boost to fight its way back into postseason contention. Can Clifford, who’s proven to be one of the league’s savvier tactical minds over the past few seasons, find a way to comfortably reintegrate the best stopper he’s got to steady Charlotte’s recently rickety defense without losing the additional offensive punch that the Hornets have found with a differentiated identity that includes playing more ball-moving shooters whenever possible?
Finding the right lineups and the right balance could prove a tricky problem to solve, but I’m betting Clifford and the rest of the Hornets braintrust would take a Stanfield-esque approach to classifying it. In the meantime, Charlotte fans can eagerly await the earlier-than-expected return of one of the few bright spots of the team’s recent lean years and hope that the kind of unbridled pedal-to-the-metal energy MKG brings to the floor can rejuvenate a club in need of some pulse-quickening for a second-half playoff push.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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