The New Orleans Pelicans bench is a problem that will only get worse

Entering this season the New Orleans Pelicans biggest problem looked to be depth. The team had five and a half players that they could count on to be at least above-average on a nightly basis, something that would help them compete most nights.

Beyond those players (Anthony Davis, Jrue Holiday, Tyreke Evans, Ryan Anderson, Omer Asik and maybe Eric Gordon), things were questionable. Austin Rivers looked like an NBA caliber player last season and Luke Babbitt had some nice moments, but it remained to be seen just how much those players could do in different roles.

So far this season the results haven’t been pretty at all and it is starting to hurt the Pelicans more and more, especially now that Eric Gordon is out.

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The numbers on the surface aren’t good. The Pelicans rank just 21st in points per game off the bench with 30.1 and 22nd in the league in field goal percentage off the bench at 42 percent per Hoopstats.com. But even those below average numbers are vastly inflated by the play of Ryan Anderson who is essentially a starter. Anderson plays the fifth most minutes on the team and consistently plays a large amount of minutes with the rest of the starters in place of Omer Asik, (The Pelicans second most used lineup by minutes played is Anderson with Holiday, Gordon, Evans and Davis.)

Replace Anderson with Asik, who plays the sixth most minutes on the team, and the Pelicans lose seven points per game off the bench and the result would rank them tied for 29th in the league in bench points per game.

So far this season the Pelicans non-Ryan Anderson bench players have scored just 221 total points in 768 minutes. Per game those seven players (Rivers, Babbitt, Ajinca, Withey, Miller, Fredette and Salmons) are averaging a combined 17 points per game and 2.4 points per player, with Rivers carrying the load with his 7.5 points per game. That just won’t cut it.

It isn’t like the Pelicans bench is stifling opponents to make up for it either. According to Hoopstats.com, opposing benches are shooting 47.3 percent from the floor against the Pelicans this season, the third worst mark in the league. This comes a year after the Pelicans allowed opposing benches to shoot 45.3 percent, which finished 23rd in the league. At the end of the day the Pelicans are bringing just one good defender, Austin Rivers, off the bench and teams are starting to take advantage.

Last night against the Kings, Carl Landry, Ray McCollum and Nik Stauskas, hardly a world-beating combination, combined to go 12-18 from the field for 30 points in just 59 combined minutes. Meanwhile the Pelicans bench, including Anderson, finished 13-31 from the field for 39 points in 94 combined minutes.

Monty Williams is doing what he can to minimize the damage done by the mess that is the back of the rotation but there is only so much he can do. Unlike some other teams with bad benches like the Oklahoma City Thunder or Houston Rockets, the Pelicans don’t have two starts to use to carry offensive units that rely heavily on bench players. Williams has done what he can by rotating in bench players with starters as much as possible but at the end of the day the Pelicans replacements are drastically inferior to most opponents.

What that leads to is heavy minutes tolls on the top six rotation players. So far this season Davis, Evans and Holiday all rank in the top 40 players in the league in minutes played per game and Gordon ranks in the top 75. That heavy of a workload for three injury prone players and a player coming off a stress fracture in his leg just isn’t good.

The problem is that Eric Gordon’s injury makes things even worse for the Pelicans. Now Austin Rivers will be elevated into the minutes Gordon’s injury caused meaning that the Pelicans “bench” has lost yet another player to the role of a starter who will play a large chunk of his minutes against starters. Now the team will look to Darius Miller, Babbitt, Jimmer Fredette and Jeff Withey to find offense against opposing benches which is hard to image.

So far this season Miller, Babbitt, Freddette and Withey have scored a total of 69 points in 13 games. Alexis Ajinca has the most total points of any player on the Pelicans bench not named Ryan Anderson or Austin Rivers right now with 48, but he has seemingly fallen out of the rotation because of his inability to stop fouling.

The Pelicans bench may not be the biggest problem that the team has right now but it is one. Someone needs to start producing in the role of the 7th, 8th and 9th men off the bench. They aren’t the most important roles in the league but they matter and right now the Pelicans don’t have any.

And that is a problem that is going to start hurting even more in the coming games.

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