The New Orleans Pelicans appreciate Dante Cunningham’s development
The New Orleans Pelicans have not shown much in the way of development this season, but Dante Cunningham has shown that he is continuing to improve.
With the injuries mounting for the New Orleans Pelicans, players on the roster capable of developing into legitimate building blocks for a competitive team are few and far between. One of the few players showing the capacity to do so, Dante Cunningham, has shown improvement throughout the season as a floor spacer.
Dante Cunningham is shooting 34.2% on three-point field goals this year. That’s something to hold onto as this season winds down, no? A lonely tick in the progress column of this season’s summary, that league-average three-point efficiency comes from 53% of his total attempts, per nbawowy.com.
In the past few months (since around the start of the calendar year), coach Alvin Gentry has started to move away from the head-scratching, completely unspaced lineups that featured both Cunningham and Alonzo Gee. Instead, he has placed Cunningham back into the starting lineup in Gee’s spot. That has meant Cunningham has taken the primary defensive wing assignment and occupancy of the open weak-side corner in the high pick and roll.
And would you look at this; making shots reaps more benefits than just the points you get create for your team when the shot goes in! Look here as the
(and then Patty Mills) treat Cunningham like an actual player on offense, especially when the ball is reversed to his side of the floor.
Everyone breathes a little easier when Cunningham is cooking, and he’s earned enough respect this year as a shooter that this sort of defensive attention is the default. However, the individual talent on the court when the Pelicans have had anything resembling their full armada of players available is usually enough to still spring him free:
He’s also become more aware of what to do in those situations. He can scroll through the defensive set, watch the offense work in sync around him, and know when to pop in versus out on a given play:
Alonzo Gee was simply not providing anything near this sort of room on offense early in the season. Excitingly though, he has injected some ferocity into the bench units he’s played with since the switch. I called him a poor man’s Tony Allen this week, and if he can dedicate himself to that sort of offensive rebounding/spazzball style on offense, he could be really helpful in transition and at the end of possessions for a few minutes a game (he had 10 FGA following offensive rebounds in the month of January, so…progress?).
The team is shooting around 50% on two point attempts when Cunningham is on the floor compared to around 46% when he’s off, again per nbawowy.com. Marginal, but that’s around 1,000 shot attempts for each sample. We can at least assert that the effects of Cunningham’s increased attention have been beneficial to the team.
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Oddly, though, the team’s corner three-point shooting has been worse when Cunningham is on the floor (23.7% compared to 26.7% when he’s on the bench). So if he’s not the one taking that shot, it’s probably not going in. Unfortunately, as I have become so used to saying on our Pelican Debrief podcasts, that’s probably more a symptom of the talentless roster than a real statistical indicator moving forward. And as I so eloquently put a few pods ago, it sucks that our front office wasn’t given a real shot to evaluate the talent on the roster this year.
At the very least, Cunningham has proven he has a place on a competitive team’s roster. He has been an instrumental part of several stretches where the team has resembled something real, and that in itself should have earned him a place in the team’s immediate plans, if not necessarily their future ones. Another year of Dante next to Jrue Holiday and Anthony Davis is exactly the sort of bridged gap that a developing roster should be able to count on. What comes of it remains to be seen, but remember that this is only Cunningham’s second legitimate season as an NBA player. It makes sense that he would be adding skills every year. Tally an improved shooting stroke in that box, and we’re at two marketable abilities.
Next: Cunningham was a bright spot early in the season
And hey, that’s more than most guys on the roster can claim.