When Charlotte Hornets traded Terry Rozier to Miami Heat, there was one clear winner

Terry Rozier deserved better, and on Monday he got it.

A Charlotte Hornets stalwart since 2019, Rozier was traded to the Miami Heat for a future first-round draft pick, some salary-cap room and veteran guard Kyle Lowry.

The first two things are very important to the Hornets. Lowry is not — I’ll be very surprised if he plays a single game for Charlotte before some other deal sends him elsewhere or a buyout is arranged.

But while trade winners are hard to immediately diagnose — especially one where the key ingredient, that first-round pick, comes up in 2027 at the earliest — there’s one clear victor here. That’s Rozier himself.

Rozier has been an elite player on a bad team for a long time. He came to the Hornets in the deal that sent Kemba Walker to Boston in 2019 — a deal the Hornets undeniably got the better of, although it certainly didn’t seem like it at the time. When Rozier arrived, he was only 25 years old but had already played in 50 playoff games with the Celtics.

You know how many playoff games Rozier has played in since that trade?

Zero.

From one year to the next, Rozier was a constant in Charlotte. He was a widely-admired player who matured before our eyes, taking on more of a leadership role. He would get you 20 points a game most every game, but he couldn’t change the Hornets’ downward slide by himself.

Unlike Gordon Hayward or LaMelo Ball, Rozier was hardly ever hurt and almost always available. Unlike Miles Bridges, he stayed out of trouble. But like them all, he was always a spectator in the NBA postseason.

But that’s going to change soon for Rozier, who at age 29 was averaging career highs in points (23.2) and assists (6.6) for this year’s Hornets (who are a woeful 10-31 at the NBA’s halfway mark) when the deal got made.

The Miami Heat players will soon find out how much they love Rozier, if they don’t know already. Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro — they will all quickly appreciate Rozier’s toughness, durability and the way he wants to take clutch shots and often makes them.

So in the short term, Miami gets a boost. And the Heat needs one -- Miami is 24-19 and only in sixth place in the Eastern Conference at the moment. Sixth place would be an awesome season for Charlotte; for Miami it’s a down year so far.

Although he had complete buy-in from the team’s new ownership group, this was a tough deal for Hornets general manager Mitch Kupchak to make on a personal level. Kupchak brought Rozier in to begin with and saw Rozier prosper under difficult circumstances.

“Rarely does he miss a game,” Kupchak said of Rozier in a Zoom interview with Charlotte-area media Monday night. “The kid — every time he goes in for a layup, he gets thrown to the ground and does a side flip or whatever and gets up and runs back down the court. It’s hard to say goodbye to a player like that.”

But the Hornets did, as they try to acquire draft capital and salary-cap room while building the team around guards Ball and Brandon Miller.

Even though this sure has the feel of the Hornets starting over again — especially given that more trades of veterans could be coming in the next two weeks — Kupchak took pains to say this wasn’t a “rebuild” Monday. I asked him what word he would use instead.

“I don’t have one word, OK?” Kupchak said. “A rebuild is when you start with a bunch of veterans and a team that’s not going anywhere and you just decide to scrap it all and start from scratch. Clearly, we’re down the road from that. So I don’t know what the word would be, but I would not use the word ‘rebuild.’”

I think we’re talking about semantics here. How about this? The Hornets are rebuilding, but they’re rebuilding around the Melo-Miller core. They’re going to have another high draft pick this summer, likely a Top-5 selection.

If that player works out well, they’ll have a chance in 2024-25.

But as of now, the Hornets are probably going to use the second half of the season to experiment, make at least one more big trade and to acquire assets for the future. They’re also going to lose a lot of games, but there’s nothing unusual about that.

Rozier, meanwhile, is going to almost certainly be a key part of a team that will make the NBA playoffs again. He turns 30 in March, and his offseason home is in Miami, and so this really couldn’t have worked out much better for Rozier.

Good for Scary Terry. Rozier has certainly put in his time in the NBA cellar. Time for another trip to the penthouse.