Is Hassan Whiteside a possibility for the New Orleans Pelicans?
In this piece, Brendon Kleen will be taking you down the trail of speculation, as he examines the practicality and merits of a trade that brings Hassan Whiteside to the New Orleans Pelicans.
It’s boring to speak generally about something you’re passionate about, right? The All-Star break is over, and there are no New Orleans Pelicans games to dissect or team press releases to interpret. Generalities are the commandments of these newly-installed extra All-Star days. But again, they’re really no fun.
What’s fun is to extricate rumor and spew conjecture. So if you’ll have me, I’d like to join you in a deadline daze where we’ll spend the next two days doing both. Come on, friend, let’s me and you ride our Ultra Light Beams toward the horizon that separates fantastical hypotheses from Woj-sponsored truths.
One frequently mentioned trade, as far as fit goes, is a potential Hassan Whiteside move from the Miami Heat team that gave him his first honest chance in the league to the New Orleans Pelicans. Ideally, this move would result in the Pelicans’ ability to sign a younger player long term and dump some salary on the Heat. It would also be a move back toward the short-lived euphoria we collectively experienced on that fateful June day in 2014 when the Pelicans momentarily had Nerlens Noel. Hassan Whiteside is better at playing center in the NBA than Nerlens Noel, so why not go all in on a trade like this?
Unfortunately, Pelicans General Manager Dell Demps is the man at fault for the team’s poor salary cap situation. Dell Demps is also the same guy who has to rebuild the team in spite of his previous mishaps. Demps has not done well the past few years, but the team has kept him around long enough that he will now be heading into the deadline in the odd circumstance of having to fix his own mistakes. That, in a nutshell, is why it might not be prudent to dive headfirst into the Hassan Whiteside experience.
Priority number one in the coming days should be to get something of value for one or both of Eric Gordon and Ryan Anderson. Priority two should be to unload the contracts of Omer Asik and/or Alexis Ajinca. Those two goals likely won’t both happen in one fell swoop. One way that it could work though, considering that Miami will likely want to escape the luxury tax this year, is for the Pelicans to take back some salary as well.
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Because Whiteside will likely get something close to a max this summer, Miami might be okay biting the bullet on a contract like Asik’s because it is shorter and costs less than that of the league’s elite bigs. Additionally, their most potent lineups still feature Bosh at the five, which is the position that Omer Asik plays. He would play even less minutes for Miami than he does for New Orleans.
Considering the Pelicans are likely to miss the playoffs this year and should probably be setting their sights on the lottery, they ought to be happy to take a veteran expiring contract or two back in a deal like this. Likewise, the Heat could get off of a long-term deal or two to help their own flexibility moving forward.
Something like this works in theory:
Being of the belief that the Pelicans should not sign Ryan Anderson to a market value deal this summer, it’s easy to pull the trigger on eating the last three years of McRoberts’ deal. He is the perfect kind of Lamar Odom/Draymond Green-like toy for Gentry to work into the frontcourt rotation, and his decent shooting touch is ideal next to Anthony Davis going forward.
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The Heat are eager to jump off the Birdman train, and that $5 million goes a long way toward avoiding the tax this season. One more deal on their part (like shedding Udonis Haslem or Luol Deng) can get them there. They can get the most out of Asik defensively in the same ways they maximized Whiteside, and Asik’s defensive awareness is already miles past Whiteside’s.
Asik really only has three more guaranteed years on his deal, giving the Heat plenty of time to flip him as his clock winds down. As AD’s offensive game expands, he will fit more ideally next to Whiteside, who is already a better post-up player and offensive rebounder than Asik. Paying a 26 year old through his prime is a better investment for Demps and the Pelicans than paying a veteran in Asik when he is 32.
Unfortunately, the Heat can ill afford to do a deal like this without getting much more in return. And in the NBA, “more” most often refers to draft picks. The Pelicans, as is well documented, have very few of these. They traded two for Jrue Holiday in 2013, and one to Houston two summers ago for Omer Asik. Rumors recently have suggested that Demps might not have the green light to shotgun anymore out of New Orleans.
Perhaps giving away a newly-signed Bryce Dejean-Jones or convincing Pat Riley that Alexis Ajinca is an amazing basketball player will be enough to get it done. Miami is in nearly the same position as the Pelicans, needing to win this season to maximize the latter years of their veterans’ careers. Either way, the Demps’ position heading toward Thursday is far from enviable.
Next: The Pelican Debrief Podcast: trade deadline edition
These cap-escaping, player matching, style-molding decisions are just a few among the many that GMs like Demps navigate in February and July. There will be many rumors circulating in the coming days, both reported and unreported. All we can do as fans is read up, try to understand it all, and toss our best guess up in the air like a New York pizza dough.