Since the season started, New Orleans Pelicans fans have been trying desperately to keep their optimism afloat, plugging the leaks that sprung up with every season-ending surgery, bailing out the flood of lesser injuries by the bucketful, and desperately scanning the horizon for signs that the team had finally jelled in new coach Alvin Gentry’s system.
Now, though, with the recent news that starting point guard Tyreke Evans will miss the rest of the season after surgery on his right knee, the last dregs of hope are hissing away like air from a punctured lifeboat. The playoff berth some had glimpsed in the distance has been revealed as the Pacific Trash Vortex of the lottery, and the Pellies are irreversibly caught in its rapidly accelerating gyre.
Now that the team is going under, general manager Dell Demps has taken most of the criticism for their ill-fated voyage through the regular season. After all, he’s the one who built the roster, trading away three consecutive lottery picks in the process. He’s the guy who watched Anthony Davis drag his supporting cast to the eighth seed and took it as a sign he should bring them all back. He’s the guy who seems to exclusively target injury-prone players in free agency and trades.
But before judging Demps too harshly, think back to how optimistic folks were about the Pelicans before the season. In fact, Demps’s acquisition of Gentry and associate head coach Darren Erman inspired basketblog messiah Zach Lowe to predict that AD would take home both DPOY and MVP as the cornerstone of a vastly improved Pellies defense. Now, those hires haven’t worked out all that well – the Pelicans are still a bottom five defense – but the moves themselves were still smart.
And as far as the roster goes, sure, two first-round picks was a lot to give up for Holiday. But after seeing less court time than a towel boy over the last two years, his PER, TS%, free throw rate and Box Plus/Minus are all above his All-Star season in Philadelphia, according to Basketball-Reference. He’s still playing limited minutes, and his future health is about as clear as the ending of A Serious Man, but early returns are positive.
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Plus, there’s really encouraging precedent for a talented point guard overcoming early-career leg issues to become one of the league’s impact players, as Oleh Kosel pointed out at The Bird Writes. That doesn’t mean Holiday is the next Stephen Curry, but the Pelicans guard is taking a similar approach to the one that’s helped Curry stay on the court.
Pelicans fans should still feel free to call for Demps’s head, though. Holiday is just one roster spot, and there have been myriad missteps in building this team. The Evans signing is particularly germane to the present circumstances, and not just because he’s out for the season. The move was criticized when it happened and still looks bad today, despite Evans playing well in New Orleans.
It might seem insane to say a team that started Nate Robinson this season has too many point guards, but hoping your two injury-prone playmakers can put together 82 games between the two of them was never the most logical strategy. But it’s the moves made because of the Tyreke signing that are the real issue: trading away Robin Lopez started a chain of events that ended with a bloated contract for Omer Asik last offseason.
Look, Demps was under ownership pressure to win ASAP, and he couldn’t have known how quickly the small-ball revolution would sweep the NBA. Remember, it was only three years ago that Daryl Morey reportedly wanted two first-round picks in exchange for Asik.
Still, the team he built isn’t going anywhere this year, and with the trade deadline approaching some sort of shake-up seems inevitable. The obvious candidate for relocation is Ryan Anderson, who’s reportedly unlikely to re-sign with New Orleans when he hits unrestricted free agency. While ownership may still be unwilling to concede the season, they’d likely prefer to flip Anderson for proven players on reasonable deals than lose him for nothing. The hope though is that the Evans injury has finally broken management’s spirit, and they’re looking to reload for next season.
The good news is New Orleans owns its pick this season, and trading Anderson should only help them sink higher in the lottery. Assuming they hold on to that, however, they just don’t have much else to offer in a trade. Even with his stated desire to test free agency, they should be able to get something for Anderson. There will be a lot of money floating around this summer, and as Zach Lowe noted, teams may value the ability to offer the Flamethrower a longer contract.
Beyond that, they’ve got Eric Gordon’s expiring contract and…not much else. The chance to pay Omer Asik? Three years of Alexis Ajinca? Tyreke Evans warming your bench for the rest of the season? The cupboard, as they say, is bare.
There’s a chance a contender wants Gordon’s shooting off the bench for their stretch run. The Cleveland Cavaliers are interested in Asik, ostensibly? Who knows, maybe there’s a team out there salivating over Dante Cunningham! But since Anderson is the only player likely to bring back real assets (although his impending free agency could hurt that), it’s worth considering what the team actually needs. And since by reading this piece you are at least nominally asking me, we can start by saying my view hasn’t changed much since December. Aside from giving up on the season, I mean.
Basically, the Pelicans are one of many NBA teams hurting for a 3&D wing, and there just aren’t that many of them available. The trade with the Rockets I suggested here still makes sense if you cut out the Suns, but it also still seems pretty unlikely. There are rumors that Iman Shumpert is available, but unless the Cavs really are interested in Asik, the presence of Kevin Love makes a deal unlikely.
If you want to get a little crazy, Anderson for Rudy Gay works straight up in the trade machine, but at 29 he’s on a different timetable than the rest of the team. The Kings have also expressed a willingness to move on from Ben McLemore, but he’s an inconsistent shooter who can’t make up for it on defense.
There are more trades that work, more marginal players with varying degrees of upside the Pellies could bring on board, assorted draft picks they could pry away. The point is there’s no magic bullet: either this roster is better than their record indicates and has been held back by injuries and learning a new system, or Demps has some work to do. Their lottery pick could help a lot towards those efforts; so could the right moves in free agency.
There’s also potential for real change from within, depending on how Davis feels about his position with the team. With all the buzz around the rise of the stretch 5, you have to wonder if The Brow makes sense as a power forward in a small-ball league. It’s a question the team should find an answer to quickly, or at least before they put too much energy towards bringing Greg Monroe back to Louisiana.
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