The 2026 NBA offseason is heating up quickly. After the Bucks sent Giannis Antetokounmpo to the Heat on Monday, another blockbuster could be brewing with ESPN reporting that Charlotte Hornets All-Star LaMelo Ball could potentially be moved by this weekend.

Charania noted that Ball wants to be in Charlotte and that his relationship with the team is in a “good place,” but that might not matter with the Hornets suddenly fielding “aggressive offers” that could make a deal too good to pass up.

Who might these teams trying to trade for Ball be? Marc Stein and Jake Fischer are reporting the Timberwolves and Raptors. Chris Haynes is also reporting Minnesota. 

And that’s seemingly just the start of the list. This situation appears to be developing quickly.

Changing mindset on score-first guards

It’s worth noting what we just saw from Jalen Brunson and pondering how much his playoff performance — and New York’s championship — might be reinvigorating the market for these one-way, ball-dominant point guards. 

For a minute, this was the most rapidly depreciating player archetype in the league. The Hawks couldn’t trade Trae Young for a sack of nickels and wound up having to salary dump him to the Wizards. The Bucks decided that paying Damian Lillard $113 million over five years to play for someone else was better than keeping him. 

Fats forward, and Young has gotten a $212 million contract from the Wizards, who apparently believed there were multiple max offers about to come Young’s way. And now a bunch of teams want Ball. There appears to be a bidding war for his services. 

Ball is an extremely talented player, as we saw in the playoffs, how important shot creation is, even if it’s coming from a defensively deficient source. 

The Knicks just showed the basketball world that it is indeed possible to surround such these one-sided stars with enough defensive infrastructure to make them competitively viable on the highest level. Is Ball or Young on Brunson’s level? Absolutely not. But Ball, at 6-foot-8, has the size to eliminate at least one of the concerns with these types of guards. 

He can be a disruptive defender, and we have seen him scale back some his playground antics on the offensive end. Last season he trimmed his turnovers to a career-low 2.8 per game, and he has scored north of 20 PPG to go with seven-plus assists in each of the last five seasons. 

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He’s far from a perfect player, but the bottom line is the Hornets were 9.9 points per 100 possessions better with him on the court last year, per Cleaning the Glass, and Charlotte was one of the best teams in the league from January on. You can’t call him a total losing player with much credibility anymore. 

Ball’s scoring efficiency still leaves a lot to be desired, but he’s a plus 3-point shooter on high volume despite a pretty difficult shot diet. There is no questioning his ability to create offense for himself and others, and he is an incredible pace-pusher. There’s some Tyrese Haliburton in there. A much bigger Trae Young at worst. Imagining Ball on a team like the Wolves, alongside Anthony Edwards and Jaden McDaniels, with that kind of defensive support in place, is an intriguing prospect to say the least. 

Why would the Hornets want to trade LaMelo Ball?

It begs the question: If Ball is this good, and the idea that his type of player can lead competitive teams is now back on the radar, why would the Hornets want to get rid of him? Well, for starters, Charania noted “aggressive” offers. You don’t necessarily have to want to trade a player to be moved to do so by an offer you can’t refuse. 

Besides that, we’ve just taken a total glass-half-full look at Ball. There is still a lot of carelessness in there, and again, the scoring inefficiency is real. It’s hard to imagine a team winning a championship with its point guard launching one-footed 3-pointers as a matter of routine. Plus, he makes a lot of money. He’s owed more than $130 million over the next three years. 

By moving off Ball, Charlotte could be ahead of the curve on a depreciating player, and in doing so could free up a lot of immediate flexibility by taking back expiring money to resign Brandon Miller and begin to build in earnest around him and Kon Kneuppel. 

Perhaps the Hornets could even use Ball to get into the Jaylen Brown sweepstakes by way of a multi-team deal. Whatever the case, the options are much more open with Ball off the books. For a while, it didn’t seem like that would be possible. Again, it wasn’t that long ago that teams were of the mindset that you couldn’t win with the ball-dominant, defensively deficient point guard unless his name is Luka Dončić. Hell, the Mavericks didn’t even think they could win with Dončić. 

But that belief seems to be flipping. How much does Brunson’s success have to do with that? Who knows. But either way, Ball is back in the good graces of the trade market, and things appear to be heating up quickly.