re: Watching Sports Nation, and they are calling out Demps

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They’re a mess. Their roster is full of mismatched parts that wouldn’t be much good even in their ideal settings; it’s also, somehow, despite its dearth of talent beyond Davis and possibly eternally injured point guard Jrue Holiday, very expensive. If you pinned a printed-out list of every active player in the NBA to the wall, put on a blindfold, and threw a dozen darts at it, virtually any combination of names you hit would suit Davis as well or as badly as his current selection of teammates. Now that I think of it, that may very well be what the Pelicans’ front office has been doing these past four years.

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There’s no way around it: His 50-point opening night notwithstanding, the shine has come off Davis somewhat since he entered the NBA as the most hyped draftee since LeBron and seemed, if anything, to exceed those expectations through his first couple seasons. It’s a weird thing: He’s a fricking astonishing basketball player, possessing gifts and skills so extraordinary that even the most casual basketball fan will find, in any given quarter of watching him play, some reason to go “Whoa, that guy is a monster!”—and yet, somehow, his greatness has not managed to make his team all that good, and most of the time has not kept it from being pretty shitty. That means something! You can debate exactly what it means, or how definitively it means it, but it definitely means something.

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This is not football. Truly transcendent professional basketball players ... well, transcend. Their teams win. LeBron James not only took some bozo-arse teams full of incompetent mutants to the Finals in his first run in Cleveland; he took them to the Finals as top seeds. Carmelo Anthony, for all his supposedly terminal faults, didn’t miss the playoffs a single time in his first decade in the NBA. Dwyane Wade made the playoffs 11 times in 13 years in Miami. Tim Duncan literally never missed the playoffs. Anthony Davis, on the other hand, has been there once, in four seasons, and got swept. If this is a gauge of just how lousy his complementary parts and the organization around him have been (it is; they have been), fine, but still. Something’s missing. This is less than we were promised.

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