Yahoo Sports' 5 Most Interesting NBA Teams: The New Orleans Pelicans

Before the start of the 2023-24 NBA season, I’m spending the week training the microscope on a handful of the most interesting teams in the NBA (to me, if not necessarily to anyone else). After starting out in Oklahoma City, we move on to New Orleans, where the waiting is the hardest part:

Heading into last season, I found myself transfixed by the Nuggets. Specifically, their big wager that what they saw in the infinitesimal period where their main dudes were all healthy — that measly five-game, plus-60-in-117-minutes sample with Nikola Jokić, Jamal Murray, Michael Porter Jr. and Aaron Gordon on the floor together — was real enough to believe in.

Turns out, it was. After outscoring opponents by 17.1 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with that quartet on the floor in 2021, Denver got healthy and hammered opponents by 15.1 points-per-100 in their minutes last regular season and postseason, riding the group’s scintillating size, skill and synergy — fueled, of course, by its definition-defying titan of a point planet — to the franchise’s first NBA championship.

Here is where we note that, for all the start-and-stop, hurry-up-and-wait frustrations that have clung like a fog to the New Orleans Pelicans, the trio of Zion Williamson, Brandon Ingram and C.J. McCollum has actually played 172 minutes together over 10 games in the past two seasons and has actually outscored opponents by 60 points. Which, according to some sophisticated statistical analysis I’ve conducted with the help of the Elias Sports Bureau, are bigger numbers than what the Nuggets’ guys had before last season.

The standard small-sample-size caveats apply, but the success New Orleans has enjoyed in the vanishingly rare opportunities they’ve had to see their actual squad on the floor feels important — especially considering we just saw a proof of concept for what a (more-or-less) full-strength Pelicans team could do in a crowded Western Conference. Namely, lead it … if only for a few months.

“In that locker room is the No. 1 seed in the West,” veteran big man Larry Nance Jr. told reporters late last season. “Whether we can get on the court at the same time or not is a different question.”

It’s also one of the most important questions in the NBA — one with immediate ramifications for the playoff race in the West and, if the situation doesn’t stabilize and improve, the potential for significantly larger changes down the road.

The pursuit of the answer led the franchise to overhaul its player care and performance operation this summer. Aaron Nelson, formerly the heralded head of the Phoenix Suns’ athletic training staff, moved into an advisory role after several seasons marred by long-lingering injuries and internal clashes over the availability of key players — most notably Williamson, a supernova talent who fundamentally changes the dynamic of every contest he plays in. He just doesn’t play in all that many of them.

It’s hard to believe, but we’re entering the fifth season since the lottery odds fell in the Pelicans’ favor and Williamson first invited New Orleans to dance. It’s hard to believe because, well, really, it’s only the fourth season, since Williamson missed the entire 2021-22 campaign recovering from foot surgery. And, if you want to get technical about it, I guess, actually, it’s kind of only Year 2, on account of they typically play 82 of these things a season, and Williamson has suited up for just 114 out of a possible 317 Pelicans games since his draft.

The persistent absences effectively submarined New Orleans’ chances of competing last year, as Williamson missed the final 45 games with a strained hamstring. With him in the lineup, the Pelicans outscored opponents by 7.8 points per 100, relentlessly pounded the paint — nearly 45% of their shots came at the rim in his minutes, which would lead the league every year by a mile, and they rebounded more than 31% of their misses when he played alongside bruising center Jonas Valančiūnas — and looked like a legitimate title contender.

After Williamson’s injury, though, the Pels went 19-26 with a negative point differential and the NBA’s 25th-ranked offense, needing a late-season surge just to finish over .500 and make the play-in tournament, where they were beaten by the visiting Thunder. It was a disappointing end to a season that had begun with such promise, before once again providing insufficient support for the fundamental precepts underpinning New Orleans’ case for contention.

“The core and the nucleus of what we have here is very, very good,” Pelicans executive vice president of basketball operations David Griffin told reporters after the season. “We haven’t seen it play enough minutes together to say, ‘Yes, this is a championship-caliber roster.’”

Williamson’s injury wasn’t the only reason for that steep second-half decline. Ingram, a 2020 All-Star and one of only nine NBA players to average at least 23 points, five rebounds and five assists per game over the past four seasons, spent two months on the shelf with a toe contusion. McCollum missed only seven games, but fought through a torn ligament in his right thumb and a torn labrum in his right shoulder — ailments that likely played a role in the veteran scorer posting his worst 2-point shooting percentage in a half-decade.

Nance, a versatile defensive big who helped unlock some of New Orleans’ most potent two-way lineups, was hampered by shoulder and ankle injuries for large chunks of the season. Point-of-attack ace Jose Alvarado, in whose floor time the Pels defended like a top-five unit and who ranked in the top 20 in steals and deflections per 36 minutes (minimum 500 minutes played), missed the final 20 games with a stress fracture in his right leg.

Any team that sees five of its top eight players miss serious time or deal with significant injuries is going to struggle. On that score, it’s been a bracing start for the Pels, who will already begin the regular season without rising third-year swingman Trey Murphy III and Swiss Army knife wing Naji Marshall, and who have also seen Alvarado, Nance and All-Defense-caliber perimeter stopper Herb Jones suffer preseason injuries.

When you’re beset by injuries in the supporting cast, you need your superstars to carry you. That’s what makes it so hard for Griffin and Co. to just chalk it all up to tough luck and bank on the small sample like the Nuggets did, though: While Denver’s never had to worry about whether the centerpiece of its operation can be counted on — Jokić has never played fewer than 69 games in his eight-year career — Williamson will remain a question mark until he turns himself into an exclamation point. Which, as he begins the five-year maximum-salaried contract extension that could be worth as much as $231 million if he meets certain performance criteria, the Pelicans sure would like to happen as soon as possible.

Williamson, listed at 6-foot-6 and 284 pounds, acknowledged his role in his ongoing injury woes, telling Gilbert Arenas this summer that he was “in the process of fixing those wrongs.” Griffin said at media day that Williamson had reported to training camp "in good condition," thanks in part to a change in approach during the offseason: “This was the first summer where we've seen Zion take his profession seriously like [Ingram and McCollum have done] and invest in it off the court on his own in a way that I think is meaningful."

The hope is that all the summertime work was meaningful enough to keep Williamson on the court more than he’s ever been before — say, 65-plus games, and more than 2,200 minutes. That would provide the foundation for so much of what head coach Willie Green could explore with this Pelicans team.

More of Williamson running point from up top or operating from the elbows, flanked by floor-spacers like Murphy and exciting rookie Jordan Hawkins, with more off-ball activity to allow him to use his court vision to find open shooters and cutters. More of Williamson working away from the action while Ingram, McCollum or Alvarado facilitate, taking advantage of defenses sagging off him as a non-shooting threat on the perimeter by cutting for backdoor feeds and lobs. (He’s averaged 1.4 points per possession on cuts for his career, according to Synergy Sports tracking, shooting 71.9% from the field on those plays.)

More of Williamson slotting in at the 5, forcing opposing centers to deal with him in deep water, weaponizing his gifts as a screener and 4-on-3 playmaker and potentially opening up more runways to the rim. (Provided, of course, the defensive rebounding can hold up.) More switch-everything defensive units, with the likes of Ingram, Jones, Murphy, Marshall and rising sophomore Dyson Daniels exchanging perimeter assignments in front of Williamson and Nance. Maybe even more weirdo small-ball groups with Jones at center to leverage all the length that New Orleans can bring to bear (and to mitigate the offensive dangers of having multiple non-shooters on the court at the same time).

Possibilities abound with this roster. If they don’t start crossing over into practicality, though, it’s worth wondering just how long ownership’s willing to shoulder a top-10 payroll for a non-contender — and whether another down campaign might mean that Ingram (who’ll have one year left on his contract after the season), McCollum (who’ll have two) or even Williamson (whose name made a noticeable appearance in trade rumors this summer) find themselves facing uncertain futures.

“I think everybody understands there is a great deal riding on this season,” Griffin said.

And specifically on the player the Pelicans hope can be their definition-defying titan of a point planet.

“There’s a lot of greatness within this organization,” Williamson said on media day. “But I’m not going to sit up here and talk about it too much. We just have to show y’all.”