Could the Hornets be a possibility? Michael Jordan has said great things about Kawhi, and if they trade a contract (Batum) + #11 + a future pick and roll out a "Big 3" of Kemba/Kawhi/Howard... that's a playoff team for sure IMO.
No, they could not be a possibility. It would take #11 and 3 more unprotected future firsts to get that deal done. Batum’s contract is — one of the worst in basketball. I like Batum a bit, but at $24, $25.5, and $27 million over the next three seasons for a guy who’s probably about average these days as a player and is now entering his 30s, that contract handcuffs the Spurs for years.
Contracts like Batum’s and Evan Turner’s are why I wish the CBA had changed it’s trade rules. Batum is useful, but overpaid by 2-3x. Say he should be paid $10 million a year. Good teams can’t take him on because he is an inefficient use of payroll space. Bad teams will, but will want compensation to do so for the $25 million per year he wastes of their tax space, since they don’t care about his contributions, whereas Charlotte only will want to pay for the $15 million of value that he doesn’t provide them. Right now the only way he gets traded is if another team has a bad contract to send back to Charlotte to help make up the difference (this is what the Blazers and Nets did in the Allen Crabbe trade). But if they had changed the CBA to allow Charlotte to keep paying some of his salary on an annual basis, and make his cap number for the new team the remainder, it would make him a lot more tradable. This is what baseball does (although they don’t need to match salaries in trades) and the NBA had sort of set up this mechanism in the prior CBA with bidding on amnestied players. I wish they had brought it into the new CBA, since they did a total rehaul of the agreement and fixed a lot of issues.
Sorry for my tangent, but Nic Batum’s contract is a trigger for me. Useful players that are paid star money are some of the hardest to move, and it’s a shame. The team that has them can’t go in a different direction, and other teams can’t make use of these players.