Pelica Debrief
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The New Orleans Pelicans Are Building Unlike Any NBA Finalist in 15 Years

By Matt Cianfrone

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Trying to predict exactly what the future holds for the New Orleans Pelicans is hard. While the team is set up to chase Kevin Durant, and to a lesser extent Al Horford and the second tier of stars next summer, it seems unlikely that they will land a splash name. What that means is that the roster the Pelicans have now may in fact be very similar to the one they try to contend for an NBA title with.

While the way this roster has been built and the way specific players fit in has been debated ever since the Pelicans traded for Jrue Holiday, one thing hasn’t been talked much about specifically. Just how rare what the Pelicans are trying to do is.

I went back and looked at the rosters of every NBA Finalist over the last 15 seasons to see how many players that finished in the top 10 in minutes played for the team had only played for that franchise in their careers to that point. What I found was that every one of those NBA Finalists had at least two players who meet that criteria.

This matters for the Pelicans in a big way. Currently, New Orleans has just one player on the entire roster who would fit that criteria and while Anthony Davis is a great starting point the team is clearly trying to buck a trend going back a long time. 

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The Pelicans biggest problem is that this trend goes beyond just two players. Over that 15 year span, NBA Finalists have averaged four players who had spent their entire career with one franchise and finished in the top 10 in minutes played. In fact there have been more teams who have had five or more of those types of players (nine) than teams that have had only two (five). Things get even worse lately, as in the past ten years only two teams, the 2005-2006 Miami Heat and 2010-2011 Dallas Mavericks have gotten to the Finals with just two of these players.

Considering the way the Pelicans have valued draft picks over the last few seasons it just doesn’t seem likely that they will have a player join Davis in that category soon, especially when taking into account where in the first round they will be drafting.

So can the Pelicans be the outlier? It is possible.

The biggest thing that stands out when looking at the list of players on each team who fit into the category is that almost every team found their best player fitting into this category (the early 2000s Nets and Jason Kidd and the recent Heat teams with LeBron James stand out as the differences) and the rest of the pieces were rotational depth along the lines of Mario Chalmers, Marquis Daniels and Tristan Thompson.

The Pelicans have the hard part. With Anthony Davis in town and locked up for at least another five years, they don’t have to go searching for the top piece. Instead they need to find the Chalmers type pieces who can fill out around the core players and do so at a cost-effective rate.

What should help with that is the rising salary cap. With Alexis Ajinca, Omer Asik and Quincy Pondexter locked into deals that could very well be steals when the salary cap explodes the Pelicans may have taken undervalued players and made them their “draft picks”.

The next step now comes in finding a second star to join Anthony Davis and in many cases that player has come from outside the organization. If the Pelicans can find that there is a real chance they buck the trend of the last 30 NBA finalists. No matter what though it will be fascinating to watch a team be so different.

Next: Four Reasons the Pelicans May Fall Back this Season

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