re: We're officially in the middle section of starting to feel good about the team again

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I’m old enough to remember a particularly active poster around here saying that blowing it up by as soon as the deadline was inevitable. Same guy was shitting his pants over the fricking preseason.

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Preseason times were hilarious.

Heck, just a month ago, I was told that I was naive for thinking that we could be a player away from contention. I think that only ATL actually agreed with me in that conversation.

The Pels are moving toward contender status, but I'd caution about being too optimistic, they are not there yet. This team has a lot of good wins but no signature win to date. Golden State, for all their cache, is a a broken team. Good news is the Pels will have an opportunity tomorrow to make a statement against an agitated Nuggets team that will playing to win on their home-court.

Ideally, you'd also like to see wins against top teams from the East (Boston, Philly /w Embid, Milwaukee, and Miami) to determine the extent of moves that need to be made before the trade deadline.

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This team has a lot of good wins but no signature win to date.

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What's a signature win?

Or better question, what is a signature win if beating the #1 seed in the West who was 14-1 at home while on the 2nd night of a B2B in a blowout is NOT a signature win?

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What's a signature win?

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Yeah that was a bad argument.

A lot of us agreed when the streak started that we need to see sustained play for at least 20 games.

You've gotten that for about 15 games now and then some.

Willie is changing his rotations slowly, but the biggest difference is your bench absolutely blowing away motherfrickers. Trey, Dyson, Larry, even Naji on most nights is a big problem, and Willie finally fricking woke up and said hey maybe I should play hawk with trey a lot when cj needs a break.

The offense looks good, but it also looks easy. We're generating good looks based off of our decision makers in Zion, Ingram, and CJ all taking turns.

It gives teams too many different looks to defend and react to, and if that lane starts opening up for Zion with this level of play, we're a finals team this year, with no changes needed.

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don't think there is much this team can do to get me to really believe in them except to do it the rest of the season.

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That’s kind of what I was most wondering; what the Pels have to do to make you believe. Thanks for letting us all know.

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What's a signature win?

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Denver, OKC, Bucks, and Celtics, all this month, will go a long way to answering that question.

It's a 6-8 week recovery time and he's barely a month in. Probably see him at the end of the month at the earliest.

[quote]The propels talk guys said hes running and conditioning but no shooting as of yet[/quote

Thirty minutes before the Clippers game he was getting up shots at the SKC. He had one guy passing him the ball and he was moving into his shot. Probably put up at least 75 or so shots. Oddly enough all mid range shots. Never saw him take a three, unless I missed it.

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This team has a lot of good wins but no signature win to date.

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I don’t think these really exist in the NBA regular season. Just want to see the pelicans be consistently competitive.

In the 15 games since the IST loss, Pels are 11-4. Their average margin of victory in 20.7 points.

Of the four losses, the average margin of defeat is 5.25. However, three of those four losses were by two or fewer points.

The competition hasn’t been the best, but the Pels have been far better or competitive in 14/15 games. It’s one of the best stretches we’ve seen from this group.