New Orleans Pelicans prepare better for the worst with non-guaranteed deals
Atoning for last season’s poor worst-case planning, the New Orleans Pelicans signed three safer players to non-guaranteed, camp invite deals late this week.
Popular culture is fraught with horror stories too real for our own imaginations. We face these fears in a cold, dark theater, because they’re a little warmer and brighter than our own thoughts. We face them by jamming stringed pellets into our ears because artists understand pain deeper than we think we’ll ever have to. And we face them by preparing for the worst in our own lives, so that some realistically evil thing like foreclosure or sickness can pale in comparison to what we see or hear trudging sliding through our culture every day. Like Dorothy’s family closing the hatch mere moments after they open it or Leo doing that thing with the dining room chair and the bathtub, we sometimes deal with the inevitable by preparing for the worst.
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Add the 2016-17 New Orleans Pelicans season to that list of tragedies. Despite doing the right thing and plugging depth into the D-League and mini-camp rosters from the outset of the season, the injury tally just got too large to overcome by the time the season began. Guys like Jeff Adrien, Mirza Begic and Bryce Dejean-Jones were supposed to be insurance.
Instead, Dejean-Jones was forced into enough time to prove himself, which was never supposed to happen with the guard spots being the Pelicans supposed strength. After cutting those guys in camp, they lost the ability to use them for depth later, and it came back to haunt them. Adrien got into trouble, Begic signed in Spain, and the Pelicans were forced to bargain bin shopping as the roster crumbled. Remember Orlando Johnson, Jordan Hamilton, and Jimmer Fredette?
This season, the Pelicans are staying more in line with Dorothy’s family and Leo’s character in Inception by signing veterans and promising unknowns to fill out the remaining roster spots. Robert Sacre and Chris Copeland, signed late this week to non-guaranteed deals, fit the mold of bench fill-outs in that they won’t destroy things if they have to play ten minutes per game for a week due to injury. Shawn Dawson, also signed late this week, was a fringe draft prospect out of Israel two drafts ago, and hasn’t really had a chance in the NBA outside of Summer League. Think of them like the Alonzo Gee deal from earlier in the summer, except for that their deals will actually be for the minimum. These non-guaranteed deals really act as official excuses to have these guys around in camp; they can be cut without any financial penalty before the season actually begins.
They are purely placeholders; the dollars given out by the Pelicans in free agency this season make it clear that they value the guys currently on the roster. They will play. Gee and the others who make it onto the roster as 14th and 15th men will not, unless things go awry. But experienced placeholders are less dangerous than inexperienced ones; this is the reason the Pelicans used roster spots on John Salmons and Kendrick Perkins in recent years. Sacre and Copeland aren’t quite as grizzled as those guys (and they still maintain a fraction of upside), but have earned minutes on competitive NBA teams, understand how to play on both sides of the ball, and won’t blow stuff up in limited minutes.
Dawson is an athletic lefty who can finish nicely in close and knock down open threes, but has a long way to go with his focus on defense. The idea of him making the team is intriguing, as he seems most worth the roster spot if the hope is eventually involving the end-of-bench guys more. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Next: Pelicans counting on Anthony Davis to be the veteran leader
The Pelicans have two regular season roster spots to hand out, assuming Cheick Diallo starts out in the D-League and Quincy Pondexter is on the inactive list at the start of the season. It seems likely that, after last year’s injury debacle left them unarmed for a season that was supposed to continue the momentum of a playoff appearance, Robert Sacre and Chris Copeland will join the team out of camp, two catalysts who can provide respite from the awful health luck.