My favorite choice to become the Charlotte Hornets’ new head coach is directing a team in the Final Four this weekend.

Her name is Dawn Staley. She lives 90 miles down the road in Columbia. She’s got deep Charlotte roots and she’s already won a couple of national titles as the head coach of the women’s basketball team at South Carolina.

I made this plea publicly before, to no avail, in 2022. The Charlotte Hornets instead hired Steve Clifford, a likable basketball grinder who did what he could for two years while being dealt a horrible hand in terms of injuries to his best players. Clifford was hired by then-owner Michael Jordan to get the Hornets to play better defense more consistently, which they had done the first time he had the same job from 2013-18, but this time that never really happened.

Clifford, 62, stepped down from the head job Wednesday, effective at the end of the season later this month. He said he no longer had the “certain energy level that you need to be able to have a chance to coach effectively in this league.” He will remain with the team in a front-office advisory role of some sort. Sources say it was indeed Clifford’s decision to give up the job and that he truly wasn’t fired. But there was also no guarantee that if Clifford hadn’t stepped down that he wouldn’t have been replaced regardless.

My bet is that he wouldn’t have been the head coach next season no matter what. New owners generally want a new general manager and a new head coach, especially when the team is on the longest non-playoff streak in the NBA.

For the Hornets, the new GM is already in place, in Jeff Peterson. Co-owners Rick Schnall and Gabe Plotkin now face the big decision of who to put in charge as head coach. ESPN reported Thursday that the Hornets will interview several top assistant coaches around the NBA for the job, including Boston’s Charles Lee, Denver’s David Adelman, Sacramento’s Jordi Fernandez and Phoenix’s Kevin Young.

All of that is commonplace. You would imagine the Hornets would go after a top assistant on a good team. It’s the way things are usually done. It’s what Charlotte tried to do last time, in fact, before assistant coach Kenny Atkinson left the Hornets at the altar and stayed at Golden State instead.

But Staley?! That would shake things up.

I know she is only midway through a $22.4 million contract and has all sorts of other reasons to stay at South Carolina, too. Why leave the best program in women’s basketball for a job coaching one of the worst teams in the NBA, even if you got way more money to do it?

So this is all a long shot. I get it. But contracts can be bought out, Staley has always thrived on impossible-sounding challenges and it’s an option that should at least be explored by the Hornets.

Staley, 53, is tough, smart and knows basketball inside and out, as both a world-class, gold-medal point guard and a coach who understands how to manage big stars. She’s been college basketball’s Naismith Coach of the Year for the past three years in a row, the first men’s or women’s college coach to three-peat that honor. She also once was a star player for the WNBA’s Charlotte Sting.

The LaMelo Ball problem

Whether it’s Staley or a more conventional choice, however, no one is going to win consistently at Charlotte until the LaMelo Ball problem is solved.

Ball’s chronic ankle injuries are so common that by the time this season is over, he will have missed 65% of the games over the past two years. Put it another way: Gordon Hayward, derided throughout much of his Hornets career for supposedly being hurt all the time before he got traded, has played in 40 more games than Ball over the past two seasons.

Could Ball actually be playing right now? The short answer is that it’s complicated. Everything with Ball seems to be complicated. He’s a star player, but he’s also a brand, and he’s only 22 years old and he has a max contract extension already in hand. Would the Hornets (18-58) gain anything by having Ball play in the final handful of games this season and risk further injury? It’s technically debatable, but there’s no debate at the moment, because Ball has already been shut down for the season.

Now if Ball comes back at full strength next season and starts alongside Brandon Miller, Mark Williams (also hurt at the moment), Miles Bridges and Cody Martin, with the upcoming new lottery pick as sixth man — that’s a pretty good team. Prior knowledge would also tell you it’s also a medically fragile team. The Hornets need a “good luck” injury season, and perhaps they are due for one. Maybe the next coach will get fortunate in a way Clifford never did in Charlotte the second time around.

‘My passion is for young people’

I asked Staley about the Hornets job once. This was later in 2022, as part of our “Sports Legends of the Carolinas” series and after Clifford had already been hired. Specifically, I asked her if coaching professionally interested her.

Staley said: “No, it never has and I don’t know why, because … I look for the next challenge. But to me, that isn’t a challenge for me. Even when I was playing in the WNBA, I never wanted to be (former Charlotte Sting head coach) Anne Donovan. … My passion is for young people. … And from an NBA standpoint, it takes a long time to be successful. … I’m not afraid of it at all (though) … I know basketball. I don’t think basketball changes a whole lot.”

That sounded like a “no.” But then again, was it a hard “no?” If I were the Hornets’ new owners, I’d at least find out after this starry women’s Final Four ends.

In the meantime, the Hornets are closing out a season where they will finish so far out of the playoff race that the only real drama left is what pick in the lottery they end up getting.

In other words, a normal season.

There are probably a few coaches who could fix that. Lee at Boston sounds intriguing, for instance.