Kemba Walker keeps getting better - but can the Hornets make it matter?

After his aging but still star-laden Boston Celtics dispatched the Cleveland LeBrons in the 2010 Eastern Conference semifinals, Kevin Garnett was asked about the impending free agency of Northeast Ohio's homegrown hero.

"Loyalty is something that hurts you at times, because you can't get your youth back," said Garnett, who'd been fiercely devoted to the Minnesota Timberwolves before being traded to Boston three years prior, and had consequently spent the first 12 seasons of his magnificent career surrounded by middling supporting casts that he carried to very-goodness but never greatness. "I can honestly say that if I could go back and do my situation over, knowing what I know now ... I'd have done it a little sooner."

Two months later, James went on national television and uttered the eight infamous words that set the template for the modern superteam and irreversibly reshaped NBA power dynamics. Being the sole elite player on a team has never really been a recipe for contention, but it's become increasingly untenable since The Decision. (Look no further than James' latest free-agent adventure for evidence.) And just a few months ago, Garnett's come-to-Jesus moment resonated with another superstar who'd spent his first six NBA seasons marooned on an island of mediocrity.

"When you hear that, it makes you think," Pelicans big man Anthony Davis said of Garnett's comments this past March. "I'm not gonna lie, it makes you think. Because you wonder if you're following in that same path."

With that in mind, let's talk about Kemba Walker and the Charlotte Hornets.

First off: Walker is not Garnett, or LeBron, or Davis. He's not a generational talent capable of dragging a team to relevance by himself or altering the entire landscape of the NBA with one swoop of the pen. There's also been no indication that he intends to look elsewhere when he becomes a free agent for the first time in the summer. In fact, when trade rumors about him bubbled up last season, Walker said he'd be "devastated" if the Hornets dealt him, and when he was asked this past summer about one day playing for his hometown New York Knicks, he said, "I doubt it. I'm a Hornet, and I'm planning on being a Hornet for a long time."

But Walker is a shipwrecked superstar who's blossomed into one of the NBA's best, wiliest, and most watchable players; a skittering waterbug of a point guard who's built one of the game's deadliest pull-up jumpers basically from scratch, adding it to his expansive toolbox of feints, hesitations, and herky-jerky dribble moves. He's a virtuosic ball-handler, a purveyor of whip-quick crossovers, a step-back artist, a three-level scorer, and a master of tight-space manipulation. He doesn't turn the ball over. He doesn't miss games. He plays with joy. He plays with fire. His game is full of flavor. Kemba Walker is good as hell, and he's getting better all the time.

Alas, the same cannot be said of his team, which has topped out at "pretty good" and bottomed out at "literal worst of all time" since drafting Walker in 2011. The Hornets have settled somewhere near the former since Walker's full-fledged breakout in 2015, but they still haven't surrounded him with the requisite talent to pull themselves out of the middling morass. Walker's now in his eighth season with Charlotte, and he's played in just 11 playoff games, never even tasting the second round.

This year, once again, the lone-star squad populated by so-so role players looks like it might be good enough to sneak into the bottom half of the Eastern Conference playoff bracket. But the best-scenario doesn't extend far beyond that. Then, in the summer, if the Hornets keep Walker through this season, they'll be able to offer him more years and higher annual raises than any other team in free agency - but would that be enough to keep him if this turns into another desultory campaign?

For now, Walker's doing his utmost to nudge the Hornets' ceiling higher, elevating his game to yet another level. Through 11 contests, he's averaging 28.1 points on 61.5 percent true shooting, combining massive 3-point volume with sterling efficiency. He's second only to Stephen Curry in made threes per game, and second only to James Harden in made threes off the dribble. He's complementing that long-range bombing campaign with a healthy diet of rim runs, ranking fifth in points and third in assists off of drives, per NBA.com. He's quietly carried the Hornets to the league's fourth-best offensive rating.

Walker gets more confident and ruthless as a pick-and-roll operator every year, and those reads are coming so easily to him right now. He needs very little daylight to get his compact jumper off. When defenders play him close, he uses airtight handles to shimmy into the paint, where he's increasingly able to finish over bigs or sling pinpoint kickouts to the corners. He has the patience and geometric awareness to find pocket-pass angles on the move, or to split a pair of defenders when he gets trapped. He'll barbecue just about any big man unfortunate enough to get switched onto him.

In their most recent matchup, the Bulls hit Walker with just about every type of pick-and-roll coverage, and he cooked each one. Defenders dropped back and got toasted; they trapped and got toasted; they switched and got burnt to a crisp:

Chicago's among the worst defensive teams in the league, but Walker's picked apart stingy outfits, too. The Bucks' new-look deep-drop scheme has carried them to a third-ranked defensive rating, but it didn't hold up against the Hornets on opening night when Walker splashed six pull-up threes on his way to 41 points.

He's also gotten really good at leveraging all the attention he attracts, firing some slick passes while placing a special emphasis on looking off defenders whose eyes are glued to him:

Even when defenses manage to foil the high-screen action, Walker keeps his dribble alive, keeps probing, and finds ways to squeeze through narrow corridors until an opportunity presents itself:

That Walker's off-the-bounce game has gotten this effective is partly the product of necessity. Charlotte's lack of other high-end creators has meant he needs the ball in his hands constantly, and he's ranked in the top five in time of possession per game for five years running (he's fourth this season).

But this year more than ever, the Hornets are also weaponizing Walker in an off-ball role. He's shooting 43.4 percent on catch-and-shoot threes, on nearly twice as many such attempts as last season. His footwork is so precise that he barely needs any time to get squared up and fire away:

Walker spends a lot of his off-ball time chilling near the logo, but he's also liable to unexpectedly go zero-to-sixty off the catch, sometimes sprinting into pick-and-rolls with a full head of steam. Getting him a runway is usually a good idea, and the threat of his jumper, even from 30 feet out, opens up all kinds of avenues for his shifty drives:

The arrival of Tony Parker has made a lot of this possible. Nic Batum is the only other player on the roster who you'd call a facilitator, and while he remains a capable playmaker on the wing, he's too slow and mechanical to break down a defense at the point of attack. Parker may be a shadow of the player he once was, but his ability to shoulder the primary playmaking load frees up Walker to rove, and the Hornets have murdered teams with that two-point guard look. In 61 minutes with both Parker and Walker on the floor, they've posted an absurd 124.1 offensive rating and a stout 103 defensive rating. Walker has shot 12-of-19 from deep in those minutes.

That defensive mark is unlikely to last for that downsized backcourt, but Walker's good enough to make it passable. He doesn't get enough credit for the canny work he does at that end of the floor, where he fights through screens, battles hard on switches, and and routinely beats guys to the spot. Even at a generous 6-foot-1 in shoes, his strength and low center of gravity make him a nightmare to post up. Watch Walker force a travel on Giannis Antetokounmpo - a guy with a 10-inch height advantage - using only footwork, balance, and anticipation:

Walker's game is aesthetically reminiscent of Kyrie Irving's, but spiritually (and functionally) closer to Kyle Lowry's, another undersized point guard who simply processes the game at a higher speed than others (Lowry and Walker rank first and second, respectively, in charges drawn this season). But Walker has never played with anyone nearly as good as DeMar DeRozan, let alone Kawhi Leonard. Outside of Batum during his red herring of a 2015-16 season, and Al Jefferson during his last-gasp-of-a-dying-breed campaign in 2013-14, you can argue Walker hasn't even played with anyone as good as Jonas Valanciunas. Who is the Hornets' second-best player right now? Cody Zeller?

There are still reasons for optimism. After years of bungling the draft, the Hornets appear to have hit on Miles Bridges - a big, bouncy wing with a nice 3-point stroke and plenty of defensive upside. Malik Monk has looked miles better after a disastrous rookie season, shooting well off the dribble and thriving in the open floor (though Charlotte may still come to rue passing on Donovan Mitchell). Zeller remains a no-stats star who sets dynamite screens, as he and Walker have honed their pick-and-roll dance to a fine point. All told, the Hornets have the league's sixth-best net rating (a robust 7.5), and they're even surviving Walker's minutes on the bench.

And yet, for all that, they've posted a ho-hum 6-5 record, with no quality wins on the ledger. (Their most impressive showing was probably their one-point loss to Milwaukee.) They've also underperformed their point differential by six wins in each of the last two seasons, and that's starting to look more like a feature than a bug. The Hornets are cohesive and precise enough to consistently bludgeon bad teams, but lack the talent to pull out close games against good ones. They have a minus-32.3 net rating in the clutch, and non-Walker players have combined to shoot 3-of-20 in those situations.

Maybe Monk and Bridges eventually grow into complementary stars. Maybe the Hornets find a way to trade for one. But any way you slice it, it's difficult to imagine the Hornets growing into a contender in time for it to matter to Walker, who will be 29 when he hits free agency. Time and again, the front office has failed to construct a team that does justice to his talents - whether through myopia or mismanagement or just plain bad luck.

In Walker's rookie season, the team (then still ensconced in the branding nightmare that was the Bobcats) finished 7-59, the worst single-season winning percentage in league history. That earned them the most ping-pong balls in a draft headlined by Davis, but the Bobcats fell to No. 2 in the lottery and watched Davis fall into the lap of the very franchise that had relocated from Charlotte 10 years earlier. Instead, the Bobcats picked Michael Kidd-Gilchrist - now Walker's longest-tenured teammate. He's hit a grand total of nine 3-pointers across six-plus NBA seasons.

They signed Gordon Hayward to an offer sheet in the summer of 2014, but the Jazz matched so they signed Lance Stephenson instead. Few teams hamstrung themselves as badly with big-money contracts in summer '16, when Charlotte gave Batum, Zeller, and Marvin Williams a combined $230 million on top of the four-year, $52-million extension that Kidd-Gilchrist signed a year earlier. The Hornets also famously turned down a draft-night offer of four first-round picks from the Celtics (an offer Danny Ainge quickly said he would've regretted) so they could take Frank Kaminsky, who's now effectively out of their rotation. They dealt their 2016 first-rounder for one year of Marco Belinelli. They now find themselves butting up against the luxury tax for a roster that is, at best, first-round fodder.

Meanwhile, there are competitive teams that project to have swaths of cap space next summer, on which Walker would fit seamlessly. Imagine him playing off Mitchell in Utah's backcourt, or zipping around beside Victor Oladipo in Indiana, or opening up the floor for Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons in Philadelphia, or joining forces with Jimmy Butler on New Superteam X, or, dare to dream, running the break with LeBron in Los Angeles. If even a washed-up Parker can help Walker reach new heights, it's hard not to dream about what he could do alongside another in-his-prime star.

No one can say what's best for Walker but Walker himself. If he's happy and comfortable in Charlotte, then he should play there for as long as his heart desires, make all the money he can, and enjoy his life, free of judgment. There's more than one way to leave a lasting legacy, and Walker can make his mark by spending the rest of his prime with the Hornets and continuing to be the rising tide that lifts their hastily built boat. There's a case to be made that he's already the best player in franchise history. He's almost certainly the most beloved. It's probably time we stopped glorifying the notion of winning at all costs.

But on an entirely selfish level, I can't help but want a different NBA future for Walker. I want his moxie to be on display on the sport's biggest stages. I want to know what he can do for a contender. I want people to want to watch his team play. More than anything, I can't shake the memory of other players who've been in Walker's situation and said the same things he's said, until realizing what Garnett came to realize: Loyalty can hurt you at times. You can't get your youth back.