New Orleans Pelicans All-Time Franchise Team: Wrap-Up Roundtable

Apr 25, 2015; New Orleans, LA, USA; General view of t-shirts placed on the seats before game four of the first round of the NBA Playoffs between the New Orleans Pelicans and the Golden State Warrior at the Smoothie King Center. Mandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports

The New Orleans Pelicans are a unique franchise. With just 13 seasons in the franchise history books, New Orleans lacks the historical length of most of the NBA’s members, which leads to interesting discussions surrounding the team’s best players.

With that in mind we here at Pelican Debrief decided to use the final dead part of the offseason to have some fun and put together our own All-Time New Orleans Pelicans teams.

The rules were simple. Each member of the staff would choose a “starter” and “backup” at each position based on who they felt were the best players to have come through the New Orleans franchise since the 2002-2003 season. When looking at players overall talent mattered in the sense that it was the talent the player displayed in their New Orleans career, meaning if anyone decided to take Tyson Chandler it was the New Orleans version of Chandler that would be on the roster, not the Defensive Player of the Year version.
For positional qualifications a player had to play a significant amount of their minutes at a spot, meaning Jrue Holiday does not qualify for the shooting guard spot nor Tyreke Evans for the small forward role, though Evans does qualify for a shooting guard spot due to the way his time is ambiguously distributed.
After each person decided on their picks they wrote a short explanation of it and over the course of the past week everyone’s picks and explanations were revealed in positional posts. With every person’s team revealed it felt like the perfect way to wrap-up this project was to get together for a roundtable discussion touching on players left out, off-court contributors and lineups to close out games with before we move on to looking ahead to the 2015-2016 season.

As always feel free to jump into the comments section below and leave your answers to each question.

Next: The Easy Selection