New Orleans Pelicans Rank: Alonzo Gee Roundtable

Apr 15, 2015; Dallas, TX, USA; Portland Trail Blazers forward Alonzo Gee (33) controls the ball during the game against the Dallas Mavericks at the American Airlines Center. The Mavericks defeated the Trail Blazers 114-98. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

The rankings are everywhere. Sports Illustrated just released their Top 100 NBA Players for the 2015-16 season in the past week. CBS’s Eye on Basketball blog will release their Elite 100 at some point in the coming weeks and ESPN’s NBA Rank will start sparking Twitter debates at some point in September. With that in mind Pelican Debrief decided that ranking the New Orleans Pelicans felt like a logical exercise to do, so welcome to our Pelicans Rank project. In each roundtable we will have staff discussions touching on a few important questions surrounding each player. As always feel free to leave your answers in the comment section below. 

For the most part the bottom end of rankings that involve full rosters, or in NBA rank the full league, are fairly boring. After all the chances that the players who end up in those spots do anything meaningful are very slim.

That isn’t the case for this ranking though. While Alonzo Gee may be the eleventh or twelfth best player on the New Orleans Pelicans, there is a real chance for him to play an important role on the team this season. Part of that is because of injuries, as Quincy Pondexter looks likely to miss at least part of the first month of the season after offseason knee surgery, but it goes beyond that.

Gee is a natural fit at small forward, something that the Pelicans don’t really have outside of Pondexter. Dante Cunningham is a power forward masquerading at small forward and Tyreke Evans is a point guard doing the same as the Pelicans just don’t have talented depth at the position. That means that Gee could potentially earn himself minutes early in the season as the Pelicans wait for Pondexter to get back to full health.

How well Gee plays in those minutes remains to be seen but as you will see in the following questions, the staff is higher on Gee than his ranking may suggest.

Next: General Gee Thoughts