2015 was a year of peaks and valleys for the New Orleans Pelicans. The 2014-2015 season showed all the promise and excitement New Orleans basketball fans could possibly desire including the first playoff games since the team became the Pelicans. Expectations were high going into the new season, and unfortunately they did not pan out the way fans had hoped.
The New Orleans Pelicans are now 10-21 as 2015 nears its end. And while they are only four games out of a playoff spot in the muggy Western Conference, the team has not performed the way everyone saw in late March through April. The beginning of this season can only be described as “disappointing.” The blame has been hefty and scattered.
Some say it’s Omer Asik‘s ability to stay on the floor and be a factor against centers who are more athletic and quicker on the break. Other’s say it’s Alvin Gentry‘s inability to get the pieces into the system he wants to run effectively or the fact his system is flawed in the first place. Then there is the camp that blames Dell Demps in the creation of this roster and it not mending together well.
With all of the problems ideas like trading Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon or making trades for available bigs like Markieff Morris or Joakim Noah, have been running rampant for a while now.
The first step to fixing a problem is realizing there is a problem, which seems to be happening in New Orleans.
However, the solution is probably not as simple as making one trade, dumping one player or firing one person. The major problem with the New Orleans Pelicans goes much deeper than that. The Pelicans overachieved last year due to just how good Anthony Davis played all of the 2014-2015 campaign and how big Quincy Pondexter came up throughout the second half of the season. Even with that, an NBA team’s ultimate goal is to win an NBA title. And with the current “vision” of this team, that’s just not going to happen.
Now sure, it would be easy to say “Well no matter what they are not beating Golden State” throughout this article, but the Pelicans have the amount of talent to be right up near the top of the Western Conference. Anthony Davis is still a player few in the history of the league can match potential wise. The talent is there with players such as Jrue Holiday, Anderson and Tyreke Evans as key players with unique capabilities. Their new coach has already won a title as a main assistant and has potential to build a juggernaut of an offense. So whose fault is this “vision problem” and what exactly is wrong with it?
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To put it plain and simply….everything.
It’s great to have pieces that are electric and each have unique skill sets on the court, however forcing those pieces to try to play in a system that does not let them operate to the best of those abilities is disastrous. And it gets even worse when their major negatives are exploited.
Last year saw a lot of surprises in production, from players such as Alexis Ajinca, Norris Cole, Dante Cunningham and Luke Babbitt, who all outperformed their expectations by great amounts last year. Pondexter fit beautifully into a system that needed him desperately. Even Asik played strong on the defensive end and was the anchor inside the defense that locked down in the second half of the year. After an injury ridden start, everything fell into place. An offseason later, those overperformances are starting to backfire on New Orleans.
Omer Asik has been a problem on both ends. After netting a massive deal in the offseason, this year has highlighted the fact he doesn’t have the hands to catch passes inside and lacks the inside moves to finish at the basket at a consistent rate. His defense has become even more exploitable with the pace New Orleans is running.
Pondexter is hurt, and it’s a major injury that could bother him when he returns to the team for some time. The replacements for him, which include Cunningham and Babbitt, haven’t translated to the fast-paced system well at all, since guys like Babbitt and Cunningham don’t have the speed to get back on defense or the confidence in their offense to make shots consistently enough.
Norris Cole and Tyreke Evans have had major issues with ball movement in the new system and are constantly seen overdribbling and then forcing a bad pass or even taking a worse shot. Then there’s Ajinca’s injury, which has added to the fouling issue that’s become even worse with how fast New Orleans is moving up and down the floor.
Everything that worked last year has self-destructed into madness with Alvin Gentry’s new system. The year prior, Monty Williams had the team in a system that fit their slow and methodical style. They liked to work the clock on offense and set up plays to get each player open where they were comfortable. Pinpoint bad matchups and attack. Think before they act. That doesn’t work in a system like Gentry’s. The players have been forced to act without taking time to dissect the defense.
Or in the case of Tyreke Evans, make critical mistakes on fastbreaks by not using his options or over thinking the break. His issues in the half court offense are more chaotic, where he’s doing what he did last year in slowing the half-court pace down to a grinding halt to try to figure out the defense. The phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” could really be made for this team. Alvin Gentry had great success as the assistant coach of the Golden State Warriors.
Why isn’t it working with this team? Simple: The New Orleans Pelicans are not the Golden State Warriors.
Alvin has been trying to take what the Warriors did well in his tenure there and bring it over to the New Orleans Pelicans, despite the fact that the Pelicans do not have the same dynamics and skill sets that Golden State does. Jrue Holiday is not Steph Curry. Omer Asik can not do what Andrew Bogut can do. And the Pelicans don’t have the depth at the wings like Golden State can depend on with Harrison Barnes and Andre Iguodala. Golden State has the depth and the speed to go out and run the lightning speed tempo basketball due to their depth at every single position and their balance, not depending on one or two or even three players for their offense on each trip.
Whereas the Pelicans have had at least one person on the floor at all times this year that is an offensive liability. There are the players that lack any offensive game at all in the case of Alonzo Gee and Asik. There are players that have extreme limitations to how they can score the ball, like Cunningham and Babbitt. That leads to players trying to do too much on their own and not moving the ball, like what Tyreke and Cole have been doing so far this year. It is not great to have that dynamic at all, but in a system that’s goal is to run, run and run more to bring things fast tempo, a flawed offense that has players who aren’t threats leads the team to more self-destructions than successes this season. It gets even scarier when the stats show the slowest pace player on the Pelicans is their superstar Anthony Davis. Why? He’s tired. REALLY TIRED.
Sure, he’s only playing an extra minute a game compared to last year, but think about how much faster the pace of the game has been for New Orleans. The Pelicans were one of the slowest pace teams in the entire league last year. AD could probably handle a massive minute load when you’re only running so many plays. However, now he’s being asked to go up and down the floor every possession down, which he’s not even used to doing in his time at Kentucky. That might not be a great idea for a guy who battled a plethora of injuries last year, that caused him to play in only 68 of the 82 Pelicans games last season. Not to mention he was fighting through injuries to play in at least a fourth of the 68 games he did play in. But let’s get one thing straight here…this problem is not only on Alvin Gentry.
Alvin had a clear vision with what he wanted with this team. He was one of the more sought after coaches on the market this past offseason. The New Orleans Pelicans ownership and Dell Demps went after him from the get-go, knowing what kind of style he was going to try bringing to this team. They knew what they were getting into. The injury issues on the entire roster last year didn’t seem to worry them about turning the pace from slow-ish to a constant up-and-down the floor marathon. Neither did the fact many of their players, especially Omer Asik and Anthony Davis, had troubles getting back on the defense end against teams that could effectively run the fastbreak. Nor did the fact that this team was one of the teams that stayed away from throwing up three-pointers in the past campaign due to their strengths in inside scoring and working the defense. They bought into the team being able to fit Alvin’s system.
One thing is clear. The vision of this team being a successful high-tempo juggernaut is a flawed vision. It’s time to change course.
Firing Gentry or even Dell isn’t going to change the simple fact that the vision fans and personnel alike had going into this season is probably not going to happen. So the vision as a whole needs to be altered if not completely thrown out before any really changes that better the team in the future can be made. This doesn’t mean the team has to go back to what last years was like. It doesn’t mean the team has to start trading players like wild-fire. It just means they have to take more of a consideration to the players they have excel at, and build their vision around that.
The high-tempo fireball offense some thought the Pelicans are capable of is just not to be. So it’s up to management and Gentry alike to really get a grasp at who this team is as a whole and what they could realistically succeed with going forward. It doesn’t have to be a slow-pace. It doesn’t have to be a grind it out offense with a defensive wall. However, it has to be something the roster of the team is capable of. This could be where Dell can shine just like he did last year.
The Pelicans going into the All-Star Break weren’t a great mix of a team. They still struggled to score efficiently and could not lock down the league’s better small forwards night in and night out. Dell made the acquisitions of Norris Cole and Quincy Pondexter at a time the team desperately needed and gave Monty Williams the pieces he needed to fill the holes in the system he wanted to run on realistic players that were in the budget. Demps needs to do the same while Gentry figures out a realistic system and vision the team can manage. The pieces will be there with teams already fielding offers on players they don’t feel fit their system. Dell got to keep his job going into this year because of his success in late season transactions. The duo of him and Alvin, along with ownership need to take the new year as a chance to dish out how the team can create a vision capable of being successful. If last year’s team had the capabilities to do it, this team’s most certainly does with the talent level on the roster.
So what can they look at when trying to build a vision for the future? What kind of team will the Pelicans have to try to be for success in this league? What direction is the “right” direction? That’s pretty tough to say at the moment. What can be said is the vision this team came into 2015 with is unrealistic. Friday will be 2016. A brand new chapter.
Next: The other part of the Pelicans problem is at the top with Tom Benson
When the vision you had at the beginning of the year becomes unrealistic, you throw it out and look to the new year to bring something that will bring success, but is also much more realistic than the previous year’s vision. It’s on the New Orleans Pelicans to do just that and see the new year not as a “panic zone” for trying to fix their team to fit an ideal that’s unreachable, and bring forth a new vision this team can see themselves thriving in the short and long-term future.