Rebuild and Retain: New Orleans Pelicans

From Upside and Motor on the state of the Pellies and what they can do moving forward.

quote:

---

The Pelicans represent the teams whose expectations and impatience have landed them in this seemingly never ending cycle. Dell Demps traded away what ended up being two lottery picks for Jrue Holiday, gave a long term deal to Tyreke Evans and traded another first round pick for Omer Asik. Those players are fine, but New Orleans hasn’t finished any higher than the 8th seed in the playoffs with this core group around superstar Anthony Davis. They may have added talent in the short term, but by trading away first round picks, they’ve sacrificed depth and long-term ceiling.

---

quote:

---

They could’ve used that depth for this season, too. The Pelicans have become the turn that is plagued by the injury bug, with Holiday, Davis, Asik, Evans and other key rotation players all missing time. Their inability to put competent NBA bodies on the floor each night has turned a team with 50 win hopes into a 4-13 underachiever with the fourth worst point differential in the league.

---

Pretty fair summation of where they stand. They made a win sooner play and it just hasn't worked out. Interesting to wonder if they just bet at the wrong time. They went with a top heavy team as the league seems to be moving towards deeper and deeper rosters.

They then look at the assets a team has, defining assets as rookie contracts. For the Pels, this is only Davis. There is a nice breakdown of Davis w/ video. They end with this:

quote:

---

Is it now or never for this Pelicans core?

The answer to this question looks more and more like “yes” every day, as the losses pile up and the bodies continue to fall to the inactive list. Davis is a once in a lifetime type player, but even he can’t win games by himself if the Pelicans are fielding a roster made up of fringe NBA guys and players who were out of the league just a year ago.

---

Still time to turn things around. But many Pels fans thought they still needed to make at least one more big move, even if everything had gone well to start the year. These results are making it hard to deny that there a major structural flaws with just about everything they are doing on and off the court.