Hornets fans process Brandon Miller pick with familiar fatigue: ‘It is what it is’

When asked what he made of the Charlotte Hornets’ selection of Brandon Miller with the second overall pick in the NBA Draft on Thursday night — Stephen Scott affirmed his near-lifelong fandom with five words.

“It is what it is,” he said with a smile.

Scott sat on a sofa on the bottom floor of Pinhouse, a Hornets fan-favorite bar about a seven-minute drive from Spectrum Center. He scrolled through Miller highlights on his phone to learn about the new player he’ll cheer on in 2023-24 and beyond. The Charlotte resident of 10 years, who had been coming to games back when Baron Davis was the city’s star and the Charlotte Coliseum was the city’s stage, looked unfazed.

Or was he resigned?

Hopeful?

Confused?

However he felt, his reaction to Miller’s selection seemed to mirror everyone else’s feelings at this particular bar on this particular night.

And that was this:

With this team, nothing surprises me.

The Hornets, in Michael Jordan’s swan song before giving up majority ownership decision-making power, chose 20-year-old Miller out of Alabama over Scoot Henderson. The move shocked the league, and it certainly shocked the bar: The Crown Club, a fan union of the city’s NBA franchise, went viral on Twitter after posting a video of the bar-crowd’s reaction to the Miller selection — one of mostly slumped shoulders and boos.

And yet, just a handful of minutes after the selection, the fan base seemed to return to its trademarked stability.

Nothing can surprise us.

“I had a feeling it was going to be Brandon Miller,” said Kevin Weiker, whose fandom could be seen by the ornate, all-black, Grim-Reaper-looking outfit he wore with a Hornets jersey over it. (He goes by the “Carolina Reaper.”)

Weiker added several of the talking points people had been saying all week leading up to the fateful draft: That Scoot had the higher upside, perhaps, but that Miller might fill a more immediate need.

“It is what it is now,” he said, punctuating his analysis. “So we’ll just have to see how it goes.”

Jameet Kalra and Mili Thaker will be among those to “see how it goes.” The two of them are married and are some of the most dedicated Hornets fans out there. One of their goals is to see the Hornets play in every arena in America; they’ll be at a few of the team’s summer league games to watch Miller play, they said.

“As a team that has been mediocre for the last five, 10, 15 years, you have to take those chances and kind of swing for the fences,” Kalra said, adding that Henderson was the one with the higher ceiling. “You gotta take a chance some time.”

Kalra’s wife then jumped in with a shrug and a smile: “We do not necessarily draft well.”

Draft nights are supposed to be centered around possibility. Around a hopeful future. The Carolina Panthers experienced that earlier this summer when they took a dazzling Alabama quarterback named Bryce Young with the No. 1 overall pick — making for the kind of hopeful moment the city’s NFL franchise hadn’t experienced in a generation.

But Thursday rarely felt like possibility.

At least not like that.

Perhaps it was because draft nights, as several fans alluded to, are not the Hornets’ forte. Think of all the sure-fire choices that didn’t pan out: Adam Morrison in 2006. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist in 2012. Cody Zeller in 2013. Frank Kaminsky was taken over Justise Winslow and Devin Booker in 2015. Malik Monk was taken before Donovan Mitchell and Bam Adebayo in 2017.

Or perhaps it was because there was only one true winner in the 2023 draft, and that was the team that ended up with Wembenyama, the 7-foot-5 French phenom whose potential borders on the unbelievable. And the Hornets were not going to be that team — once again missing out on limitless talent and limitless potential by the closest of margins, being forced to settle for second in an all-or-nothing game that has ascended in an increasingly all-or-nothing world.

When asked why they remained Hornets fans despite all the negatives the team has faced in their lifetimes, many took solace in the fact that they had a team to root for at all.

“I’d rather have a bad team than not have one,” Jacob Friedman, another fan, said on Thursday night.

Another popular phrase might’ve fit as a response, too:

It is what it is.