It's time to add the New Orleans Pelicans to the list of legitimate title contenders

Heading into the season, two questions hung over the Pelicans like Original Nightmare Pierre preparing to dive-bomb upon you and feast on your soul.

One: Would a New Orleans roster that developed a playoff-caliber identity in Zion Williamson’s absence be able to seamlessly adjust to his presence after his long-awaited return from injury? And two: Could a squad that surprisingly fielded an above-average defense over the final five months of 2021-22 take another step forward with several shaky stoppers, including Williamson, in line for major minutes?

There’s a long way to go, but after they swept a two-game set against the Suns over the weekend — and did so in style, leading to some fireworks — it sure looks like the Pelicans have answered both of those questions with a resounding, “Hell, yeah.” Which, in turn, raises a new question: Rather than a potential “team of the future,” is New Orleans a title contender right now?

The Pelicans enter Tuesday’s meeting with Utah on a seven-game heater that has them atop the Western Conference at 18-8. They feature one of the league’s most devastating offenses, ranking fifth in the NBA in points scored per possession — even with four starters missing at least a handful of games, even though injuries have limited the expected big three of Williamson, Brandon Ingram and C.J. McCollum to just 172 minutes together, and even though only the Bulls and Hawks take a smaller share of their shots from 3-point range. (The 3-point rate ticks up a bit when Jose Alvarado — 39% from deep for the season; yes, he can shoot — and Larry Nance Jr. check in, helming a second unit that has been blowing opponents’ doors off.)

How do you dominate offensively without shooting a bunch of 3s? Well, one good way is to relentlessly battering-ram your way to the rim and finish at an extremely high level once you get there. Luckily, New Orleans has a guy for that:

While watching Williamson repeatedly bulldoze his way to the cup, you might've noticed that, wherever he is on the floor and whichever way he starts moving, the southpaw just about always eventually gets back to his dominant left hand.

You are not the only one to notice it! NBA teams are aware, too. But while knowing is half the battle, it’s the other half — doing a damn thing about it — that has proven awfully difficult.

Williamson is tied for 14th in the NBA in drives from the perimeter to the basket per game and sixth in points scored per game off those drives. He’s scoring 1.13 points per possession finished in isolation — eighth out of 58 players who go iso at least twice per game, according to Synergy. This is where we remind you that he’s shaking all those defenders and creating all those advantages at 6-foot-6 and 284 pounds.

The truly frightening thing for opposing defenses? Williamson might be just getting warmed up. Over the past two weeks — which just so happen to coincide with New Orleans’ seven-game winning streak — Williamson is averaging 30 points and 9.1 rebounds in 36.3 minutes per game, scoring a league-high 22 points per game in the paint and shooting a scorching 70.6% on those interior tries while going to the foul line nearly 10 times per night.

With Ingram and McCollum both missing time recently, head coach Willie Green has put the ball in Williamson’s hands more often, in the “Point Zion” approach that predecessor Stan Van Gundy came to favor. After running just over four pick-and-rolls per 100 possessions through his first 14 appearances, Williamson has run nearly 20-per-100 during the winning streak, according to Second Spectrum; he has dished out 5.3 assists and 13.1 potential assists per game in that span, both of which would blow away his previous career highs.

All told, the Pelicans have continued to score at a top-five rate when Williamson plays without Ingram or McCollum — a testament to both the quality depth with which personnel chief David Griffin has stocked New Orleans’ roster (Alvarado, Naji Marshall and Trey Murphy III, in particular, have been great in larger roles) and Williamson’s ability to absorb even more responsibility and elevate that cast.

As special as Williamson has been offensively, though, the quiet key to New Orleans’ rise up the standings has come on the other end. While nobody doubted that a team featuring Williamson, Ingram, McCollum and bruising center Jonas Valanciunas would be able to put up points in bunches, plenty of us wondered whether the Pels could get enough stops. The results so far have been sensational: New Orleans entered Tuesday third in the NBA in defensive efficiency, according to Cleaning the Glass, behind only Milwaukee and Cleveland.

The one big caveat to the Pelicans’ defensive success: It seems at least somewhat dependent on shooting luck. Without a monster shot-blocker to lock down the lane, New Orleans prioritizes packing the paint, ranking eighth in preventing shot attempts at the rim. The trade-off for selling out to limit up-close shots, though: Only the Heat, Rockets, Knicks and Magic allow a higher share of field-goal attempts from 3-point range than the Pels.

The good news: Opponents aren’t making those shots, shooting just 33.5% from long distance against New Orleans, the second-lowest mark in the league. The glass-half-empty take: Studies have shown that there’s only so much a defense can do to control whether opponents hit their 3-pointers — not sure if you’ve heard: it’s a make-or-miss league — especially if you’re not exactly closing out with your hair on fire on every kickout. (According to Second Spectrum tracking, just under 17 of the 3-point tries the Pelicans allow per game are heavily contested, while just over 20 per game are lightly contested or uncontested.) If a few more of those misses turn into makes, New Orleans might look less like the West’s best defense and more like a fringe top-10 unit.

“Fringe top-10,” though, would be a great outcome for a team that hasn’t finished better than 18th in five years. It seems doable, too, thanks largely to a rotation-wide devotion to wreaking havoc. The Pelicans are full of what draft evaluators might call “event creators” — guys who short-circuit offensive possessions and pressure opponents into losing the ball.

New Orleans ranks second in the NBA in steals and deflections per game and third in loose balls recovered on defense. It starts with Herb Jones, a revelation defending on the perimeter as a rookie who has picked up where he left off in his second season. Before missing the previous five games due to a sprained left ankle, Jones was clamping down on No. 1 perimeter scorers of all shapes, sizes and styles — from Trae Young all the way up to Kevin Durant — while also raising hell in passing lanes and tying for sixth in the league in charges drawn per game. Alvarado keeps it going with his work as an effervescent demon on the ball — he’s averaging 2.1 steals and four deflections per 36 minutes of floor time — whose untrammeled tenacity, as James Herbert of CBS Sports recently put it, “changes games the way a stick of dynamite alters architecture.”

The ball pressure continues with Dyson Daniels, currently enjoying his rocket-ship ride from Australia to the G League Ignite to the No. 8 pick in the 2022 draft and, for the moment, a rotation role on the best team in the West. Daniels has followed in the footsteps of Jones and Alvarado as the rare rookie to earn big minutes with his defense; they don’t make too many 6-foot-8 dudes who can lock up like this, and they damn sure don’t make ’em at age 19:

Since inserting Daniels into the rotation in mid-November, Green has thrown the rookie into the deep end, tasking him with slowing down the likes of Luka Doncic, Devin Booker, Chris Paul, Jamal Murray and Pascal Siakam. And the kid has more than held his own: He’s averaging four combined steals and deflections per-36; opponents are shooting just 41.4% from the field when he is the contesting defender, according to Second Spectrum, and both estimated plus-minus and FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR metric peg him as one of the league’s highest-impact defenders on a possession-by-possession basis thus far this season. (ESPN’s real plus-minus isn’t quite so bullish, slotting Daniels 106th out of 456 qualifying players, but it still marks the teen as a plus defender.)

Jones, Alvarado, Daniels and Marshall — who recently told reporters, “I just feel like I’m tougher than everybody in the world,” which sounds like a nice thing to feel — give Green multiple excellent options at the point of attack. When they’re off the ball, Jones, Ingram, Murphy and Marshall — all between 6-foot-7 and 6-foot-9, with wingspans of at least 7 feet — offer fantastic length on the wing, allowing New Orleans to shrink the floor in the halfcourt, plug up passing lanes and still be able to fire back out to the perimeter.

The versatility continues to a center rotation that enables the Pels to play multiple coverages well. Valanciunas — never a big shot-blocker but huge and smart — can hold down the fort in drop coverage, in which the Pelicans have prevented points at a near-top-10 rate this season. The addition of Nance at the 2022 trade deadline, though, combined with all that wing depth to unlock their potential to switch screens: New Orleans is allowing just 0.858 points per chance on switches, tied with the 76ers for the best mark in the NBA.

One big reason the Pelicans are able to switch more often and more effectively this season? Now healthy and in shape, Williamson is looking more engaged and active on and off the ball, and he's starting to look more and more like the help-side destroyer he was during his brief stay in Durham:

Williamson remains a work in progress on the defensive end; he’ll still sometimes lose his man off the ball and get beaten on backdoor cuts, close out off-balance and give up a driving lane. It’s getting better, though: He’s allowing 0.852 points per possession when he’s defending the screener in the pick-and-roll, according to Second Spectrum, the eighth-lowest mark among 79 players to guard at least 200 picks, and he has very much joined the Pels’ chaos-creation party.

During New Orleans’ winning streak, Williamson has notched a steal on 2% of opponents’ offensive possessions and swatted a shot on 2.9% of the offense’s trips — steal and block rates closer to the level he reached as a freshman at Duke than what he mustered in either of his first two pro seasons. He has also logged 3.1 deflections per game, which would be a top-15 mark over the course of a full season. (He’s becoming quite the chase-down menace, too.)

Combine all that disruption with an uptick on the defensive glass and an elite foul rate for a big man, and you’ve got a recipe for a net-positive defender. Which, according to EPM, RAPTOR, RPM, defensive box plus-minus, among other numbers, is exactly what Williamson has been this season — a significant upgrade from his previous two seasons. With a healthy Ingram and a version of McCollum that makes more than 40% of his shots, the Pelicans will have enough weapons to hang with any postseason opponent, provided they can hold up defensively. That gets a lot easier when your best player’s no longer a liability.

If Williamson can hold his own against elite opponents scheming against him, and if New Orleans can comfortably play big or small — including, perhaps, super-small with Williamson at the 5, a look Green has only barely experimented with thus far — in a variety of pick-and-roll coverages, with an All-Defensive First Team-level wing and multiple capable perimeter defenders behind him, then why can’t the Pelicans be a credible postseason defense? And if they can be that with this offense, and with a playoff matchup nightmare as terrifying as Williamson to inflict on opposing defenses … well, why can’t they win the whole thing?

The odds are against New Orleans surviving both the Western Conference gauntlet and whichever beast comes out of the East. For what it’s worth, FiveThirtyEight’s model suggests the Pels have about a 4% shot of winning the championship, while the more bullish Basketball-Reference.com projects their chances at a robust 22%. Whether you think they’re closer to the former or the latter doesn’t really matter, though; what matters is that it doesn’t at all seem absurd to have the conversation.

This time last year, New Orleans’ hopes for something better seemed all but dashed. Now, the franchise and its fans have real reason to dream bigger than they ever have before. Heading into the season, the Pelicans had questions; now, they have answers, and what’s hanging over them isn’t uncertainty. It’s a brass ring — and it’s looking like they’ve got everything they need to reach out and grab it.