Tim Frazier is ready to re-create the Pelicans offense

The Pelicans are at a competitive disadvantage already this year by not having enough guards to fill a rotation and lingering injuries having devastated the team. Tim Frazier will be asked to take a leadership leap to make up for lost time.

In purely mathematical terms, the New Orleans Pelicans remain thin at the guard spots minus Tyreke Evans, Jrue Holiday, and Quincy Pondexter to start the season. For a team that added two guards and retained one more in restricted free agency, that’s almost impossible to believe. Yet there it is, true as can be: the Pelicans added only enough guys to replace those who will be unavailable to start the year. Add in Buddy Hield, and you’re looking at a guard rotation of new additions E’Twaun Moore and Langston Galloway, the draftee Hield, and the retained restricted wunderkind Tim Frazier.

Galloway is best served in a wrecking ball combo guard role, with too few offensive skills or playmaking abilities to truly run an offense. Moore’s most successful stretches come with other capable ball-movers on the court and lots of room to work. Hield is a question mark, and Frazier has only half a season of fun moments against B-teams to draw from. Yet with so much up in the air, it appears Frazier has a good chance of being the Pelicans’ starting point guard come the regular season start date of October 26th.

Is he ready? The answer seems like a fairly certain no; at this juncture, there is too much inefficiency and one-sidedness in his game for Frazier to succeed against starters over long stretches. For one, he can’t really shoot. Per NBA.com, 49% of Frazier’s shot attempts were pull-ups, of which he made only 36.3%. He too often falls into the traps that successful point guards like Kemba Walker and John Wall had to work hard to avoid; after creating separation through speed and suave, they crush the potential of an open drive toward the hoop by taking the first open shot they see.

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The young lead guard made only one-third of his nearly fifty three-point attempts; on “wide open” looks (those in which the nearest defender was more than six feet away), Frazier shot only 32%. Even his catch and shoot three-point numbers (35.3%) draw his versatility and value into question. If he can’t play off ball or make the most of his time handling the ball, why play him?

Plainly stated, the answer is his passing. Nylon Calculus (NC) has a stat called “True Usage” that measures the percentage of possessions used to create shots for others, coughing the ball up, or scoring on one’s own. By their data, both Holiday and Frazier fall in the league’s top ten for this category. That is a result of the heavy reliance the Pels place on their point guards, but for Frazier, it’s also an indicator of just how prolific a passer he has become. NC also uses a metric known as “Playmaking Usage”, which measures the percentage of possessions a player uses which result in a potential assist or free-throw assist. Within the True Usage top ten, only John Wall and Chris Paul rate higher in Playmaking Usage.

He turns the ball over on a microscopic 5.2% of those playmaking usage possessions and feeds his teammates toward a 61.8% effective field goal rate on those plays. The dude can distribute.

Also, he just might be the most fun player the Pelicans have. Whether Frazier is ending the Nuggets on a deep bomb or slaying gravity on a drive to the hoop, his appearance late in the season coincided with the most fun stretch of Pelicans basketball last year, even while surrounded by a second-rate rotation. For a small market team with only Anthony Davis and Buddy Hield to market, a super fun playmaker is perfect and vital.

The stats (like a 109 career defensive rating) say no, but my heart says “oh, hell yes”. Frazier’s upside is as high as any of his young fellows in the backcourt, and his floor is honestly lower. We clamor for players to demonstrate one marketable skill to put a baseline on their value, and Frazier has done exactly that by setting his teammates up perfectly and chucking his way into 16 points on 13 shot attempts per 36 minutes. If nothing else, you know you’re getting traditional points and assists from him; anything more, and you’re counting each blessing like it’s your last.

While the guards around him get healthy and comfortable, perhaps his role will fade. But in a period of turmoil, a constant like Tim Frazier from even one season prior is vital. And like nearly every move made this offseason, the goal was raising the floor, diversifying the roster’s portfolio of skills, and adding depth. Starting Tim Frazier allows the team to maintain its quick pace and half-court motion while getting increased production out of lesser players. It also means less of a defensive drop-off than you’d think, considering Jrue’s worsening play on that end in recent years. If Holiday is a drain plug with a hole in it, Frazier is a sieve, which is to say they are both incapable of stopping bad things from dripping down through them, and they are reasonable approximations of one another defensively.

Reducing the point guard’s role while dropping from Holiday to Frazier of course means more scoring and playmaking responsibility for the rest of the roster, who is up to the task. There’s value there as well; when Holiday returns, the rest of the team will be humming a sweet scoring ditty after taking on more responsibility in his absence.

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Again, common sense tells you to wave goodbye to our sweet prince as he disappears once and for all from the rotation. But something about the story and stylings of Tim Frazier make him ripe for love; a few game-winners and impregnable passion will do that for a kid.

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