As he gets set to hit free agency, All-Star guard Kemba Walker pledged his allegiance to the Charlotte Hornets on Thursday.

As seen in the following video courtesy of WCNC’s Kelsey Riggs, Walker expressed his desire to remain in Charlotte:

“Nothing’s changed,” Walker said. “This is where I want to be.”

The 28-year-old Walker has spent his entire, eight-year NBA career in Charlotte since originally getting selected by the then-Charlotte Bobcats with the No. 9 overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft out of UConn.

Walker is coming off the most productive season of his career, as he appeared in all 82 games and averaged 25.6 points, 5.9 assists and 4.4 rebounds. He also shot 43.4 percent from the field and 35.6 percent from three-point range.

Despite the three-time All-Star’s elite level of play, the Hornets finished ninth in the Eastern Conference at 39-43 and missed the playoffs for the third consecutive season.

Without Walker, it seems likely that Charlotte would revert to being one of the NBA’s worst teams in 2019-20.

Walker has often been asked about his free agency plans this season, and he has remained firm in his desire to stay with the Hornets. In an interview with NBA.com’s Shaun Powell in February, Walker talked about how badly he wants to help the Hornets develop into a contender: “I want to build something here. I want to try and make us one of the top teams one day. I love this place. I want to help take this organization to places it has never been.”

Walker also discussed how much it means to him to play under owner Michael Jordan: 

“Michael drafted me. When that happened, the first thing that went through my mind is this guy is giving me an opportunity. So I’m going to give it everything I got. That’s what I do for MJ, ever since I’ve been here, each and every night. To try to play the game the right way. Play hard. And a lot has to do with him.”

If Walker hits the open market, he figures to be among the hottest commodities in a stacked free-agent class. Other potential free agents include Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors, Kawhi Leonard of the Toronto Raptors and Kyrie Irving of the Boston Celtics.

Walker is arguably as good or better as a pure scorer than any of them besides Durant, which is high praise considering he has played in relative anonymity with the Hornets.

If Walker and the Hornets are unable to reach a deal that keeps him in Charlotte, Walker will be a target for multiple teams looking to take the next step, potentially including the Los Angeles Lakers, who desperately need another star to play alongside LeBron James.

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If Luke Walton gets fired as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, he may not have to go far to find his next job.

According to Sam Amick of The Athletic, Walton is the “clear front-runner” for the Sacramento Kings‘ head coaching job. Amick noted Philadelphia 76ers assistant Monty Williams and San Antonio Spurs assistant Ettore Messina are also candidates.

Amick also confirmed an earlier report by ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski that Kings general manager Vlade Divac plans to fire head coach Dave Joerger on Thursday.

Walton’s future with the Lakers is very much in question after L.A. went 37-45 this season despite signing LeBron James. In his previous two seasons as head coach of the Lakers, Walton went 26-56 and 35-47, giving him a career record of 98-148.

It was widely assumed that Magic Johnson would fire Walton, but Johnson abruptly resigned as the Lakers’ president of basketball operations this week, leaving general manager Rob Pelinka and owner Jeanie Buss in charge of deciding Walton’s future.

Despite his struggles with the Lakers, the 39-year-old Walton would undoubtedly be a hot coaching candidate if he gets fired. In his two seasons as an assistant coach with the Golden State Warriors, Walton won an NBA championship and went 39-4 as an interim head coach while Steve Kerr was out after undergoing back surgery.

In his third season as Sacramento’s head coach, Joerger led the Kings to a somewhat surprising 39-43 record in 2018-19, which marked their best finish since they last made the playoffs in 2005-06 with a record of 44-38.

While the Kings finished nine games out of a playoff spot, they ended up ninth in the Western Conference and have a strong foundation to build on moving forward.

Guards De’Aaron Fox and Buddy Hield enjoyed breakout seasons under Joerger, while 2018 No. 2 overall draft pick Marvin Bagley averaged 14.9 points and 7.6 rebounds per game as a rookie. If Walton goes from L.A. to Sacramento, he will arguably benefit from an upgrade in young talent.

Brandon Ingram, Kyle Kuzma, Lonzo Ball and Josh Hart had mixed results under Walton in 2018-19, and the trio of Fox, Hield and Bagley may give Walton more to work with. The biggest negative is the fact that Sacramento doesn’t have a true superstar like LeBron.

Walton would have his work cut out for him with the Kings given their 13-year playoff drought, but with less pressure to perform in Sacramento and perhaps more talent at his disposal, it may be his best landing spot.

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The Milwaukee Bucks are a juggernaut. This season, they led the league in points per game and scoring margin; they placed second in threes made, and so on. Giannis Antetokounmpo, perhaps the league’s MVP, is central to the team’s identity. Everything starts with him, and it often ends with him too. He is a 7-foot point guard who initiates offense, a 7-foot center who jams everything. In the half court, with Giannis at the wheel, the Bucks scored more than one point per possession this season, one of just four teams to do so, per Synergy Sports. There is not a man alive who can stop him from twirling toward the rim and exploding.

But for Giannis and the Bucks, there is one odd outlier: the team’s performance against zone defense. When teams forced Milwaukee out of its swift rhythm, its offense ranked 10th in the league. Its turnover percentage against the zone, 13.4, was the worst mark in the NBA. Antetokounmpo, who typically makes professional basketball appear comically easy, turned the ball over nearly a quarter of the time against the zone, nearly doubling his usual rate. It’s no wonder the Bucks faced more zone than all but two teams, per Synergy.

Now, with the playoff bracket set and the Bucks owning home-court advantage throughout, we should see this strategy in the spotlight. Particularly in the early going—against underdogs like the No. 8 Pistons—zone defense may be the only way to stop Milwaukee. Any opposing game plan starts with Antetokounmpo, who averaged 27.7 points, 12.5 rebounds and 5.9 assists this year. It’s crucial, if you’re the team facing Milwaukee, for him to not have the ball. That’s what the zone can offer: an alternative way out, and a thorn in the Bucks’ side.

Consider the game they played April 1 in Brooklyn. After starting at a gallop and building a 22-point lead, the Bucks stalled as the Nets switched to a zone. Milwaukee, one of the league’s fastest teams, stopped running. Players stood along the perimeter and swung the ball around, lazily killing clock. When it came time to press forward toward the rim, guys found a crowded paint and were coaxed into challenging layups.

“Every offense has pace and tempo, and they’re able to get to their pick-and-roll early, but with zone, now they’re forced to think,” says Steve Jones Jr., who worked for the Nets’ video department from 2013 to 2015 and provides extensive tape studies on Twitter. “It forces you to do something you don’t want to do, which for a defense is always going to be key.”

Perhaps taking too much time, and thinking too hard, is kryptonite for some supercharged teams of today’s NBA. Yet we rarely see the zone deployed, as only two teams ran it at least 10 percent of the time this year (Brooklyn and Miami). That’s partly because, basically, it’s uncool, somehow deemed both a sort of cheat code and an ineffective last resort. According to Nets coach Kenny Atkinson, it’s considered “borderline blasphemy” across the league. For a coach, he adds, “It feels like you are a man without a country when you play zone in the NBA.”

This year, Atkinson’s Nets went for it anyway, running zone more than 25 times the league’s median rate. “You have to be committed. Not many believe, which is understandable,” Atkinson says, adding that when it comes to the zone, there is a “strange dynamic with coaches and players.” Zone is pure rotation and communication; it pulls zealous defenders away from their counterparts and into the team concept. It’s “not macho. Not mano a mano, like you’re shying away from your individual matchups.”

It’s true that the zone is anticlimactic. It even brings an offbeat amateur feel to the NBA floor. But it is a defensive scheme well-built for the moment at hand. The current NBA is hyperactive; not every team always feels like swinging the ball from side to side, waiting for a shot to open up. Of course, if they do swing it around, jumbling the defense, a zone can fall apart. But that’s life in the NBA, where all defensive solutions are imperfect and temporary at best.

“It’s more of a constant team effort. If you do your job in the zone, and the guy to your left or to your right is doing his, you can shut a team down,” Heat forward Kelly Olynyk says. Miami was the only team to run more zone defense than Brooklyn this year, and the results were incredible. The Heat’s zone permitted just 0.924 points per possession; the NBA’s best overall defense allowed 0.948, per Synergy. “Whether it’s Houston running high pick-and-roll with James Harden, [they] don’t have that opportunity anymore. They’ve gotta move the ball. Other guys have to make plays.”

During a recent game against the Hornets, the Nets ran a high school-style box-and-one zone against Charlotte‘s version of Harden, Kemba Walker. The do-everything guard was confused. He asked Nets center Jarrett Allen about the scheme and noted he hadn’t experienced it before in the NBA. “It brings a different type of look for the other team,” Allen says. “The NBA has been man for a long time, and bringing a zone just completely throws some teams off.”

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Naturally, more teams are trying it. Last year, only one team ran zone 150 times all season (roughly twice per game), but there were 10 such teams this year. It’s curious what took so long.

Back in 2011, the Mavs led the league in defensive zone possessions. The roster was aging and lacked the athleticism to battle one-on-one. They reached the Finals, where they leaned on zone once again, sparking an upset of the Miami Heat.

A year later, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban joined ESPN’s First Take to discuss that series. LeBron James had faltered, averaging an uncharacteristic 17.8 points per game. Skip Bayless frequently questioned his “clutch gene,” but he missed the root cause.

“LeBron disappeared and shrank in crunch time and the fourth quarter,” Bayless said.

“So we get no credit for not putting him in a position to succeed?” Cuban replied.

“He put himself in—all he did was stand out on the perimeter,” Bayless added.

“How do you think we defended that? Why do you think he was standing out there?” Cuban asked.

“You didn’t have to defend him,” Bayless retorted.

“Oh right,” Cuban said mockingly, “so no matter what we did, he was just gonna stand there and do nothing?”

“Well, that’s all I saw,” Bayless offered.

“That’s exactly right,” Cuban said. On YouTube, the exchange is titled, “Mark Cuban Owns Skip Bayless!” and is approaching two million views. “That’s all you saw.”

In fact, Cuban explained, LeBron was flummoxed by the Mavs’ zone D. He attempted 15 shots per game that series, down almost four from his season average. That was the plan.

If it can work against LeBron—in his prime, no less—there is hope for the Eastern Conference this year. The Mavs “wanted to get the ball out of his hands and into the hands of someone else,” Cuban said. Bucks’ opponents will try to do the same.

For much of the season, Milwaukee’s supporting cast was excellent, but it has stumbled lately at an awkward time. Malcolm Brogdon, the team’s best spot-up and three-point shooter, will likely miss the opening series with a plantar fascia tear. Nikola Mirotic fractured his thumb in late March and might not be ready for Game 1. Eric Bledsoe hit 29.3 percent on catch-and-shoot threes, the type of look that zones often allow. (Antetokounmpo was even worse at 22.4 percent.) Brook Lopez, who was money for most of the season, shot 3-of-20 from beyond the arc in April. It’s unclear whether Khris Middleton is ready to handle the scoring burden if Giannis is forced to defer.

Teams should be happy to take their chances with these second and third bananas. Olynyk would be. “One hundred percent you’ll see it in the playoffs,” he says of the zone scheme.

“Guaranteed,” Atkinson echoes.

If the playoffs go according to plan, and Milwaukee meets Toronto in the Conference Finals, we’re nearly certain to see it then. The No. 2 seed Raptors ran zone on 2 percent of their plays this year—good for 10th-most in the league—to phenomenal results, allowing just 0.93 points per possession, per Synergy. Zone may well help decide which team represents the East in the Finals.

But before we get there, the zone might help underdog Detroit too. The Pistons won 19 fewer games than the Bucks and lost all four against them this year. They might as well give it a go. The NBA playoffs, after all, are often ruled by whichever player hogs the ball most effectively. That’s probably Antetokounmpo.

The Pistons have a worthy counterpart in Blake Griffin. The veteran forward averaged a career-high 24.5 points per game this year. He was a force offensively, namely in pick-and-roll and in isolation. One wonders if a single defender has any chance of containing Griffin. If not, there is a certain scheme that might help.