New Orleans Pelicans: How they can beat the Toronto Raptors

Assessing three ways the New Orleans Pelicans can beat the Toronto Raptors in the 2021 season opener

Today’s the day we’ve all been waiting for, the start of the 2021 NBA season. Unfortunately, though, tonight’s not the opener for the New Orleans Pelicans. That game will take place tomorrow when they tip-off against the Toronto Raptors.

With game-day coming tomorrow, we thought that now’s the best time to take a look at how the Pelicans will stack-up against the Raptors. Specifically, how can this young Pelicans team beat this Raptors team that has been one of the best in the NBA over the past two seasons?

When looking at the Raptors, we all know that they went 58-24 in two seasons ago, and won the NBA championship with Kawhi Leonard. Last year, they lost Kawhi but still finished with a 53-19 record, and the 2nd-best defense in the NBA.

Now, this year’s team is a little bit different. Franchise point guard Kyle Lowry is a year deeper into his thirties, and the veteran frontcourt duo of Serge Ibaka and Marc Gasol are gone. However, with the additions of Aron Baynes, Alex Len, DeAndre Bembry, and Malachi Flynn, I wouldn’t sleep on this team being really competitive in 2021.

So how can the New Orleans Pelicans beat them? Here are two strategies I think they can use to win the game tomorrow night.

Offensive Strategy- Beat Nick Nurse’s zone defense with strong set plays, and 3 point shooting

This first strategy is why I believe this game is going to be a tough one for the New Orleans Pelicans. Last year, head coach Nick Nurse showed that he loved to confuse his opponents by installing a variety of zone defenses.

For those of you that don’t know, zone defense are defenses where players don’t defend their matchup straight up, instead, they defend a specific “zone” to close off driving lanes to the basket. These zones come in a variety of shapes and combinations, and Nick Nurse uses them all.

Box-in-ones, Diamond Zones, 2-3 Zones, you name it and Nick Nurse uses them. This is dangerous for the Pelicans because we saw this preseason that Stan Van Gundy is trying to engineer this team’s offense to be great at attacking the basket since they don’t have a ton of shooting.

If the Pelicans want to beat the Raptors’ defense, it looks like there are only two ways they can do it. The First would be to fire a ton of 3s on the Raptors zone and force them to play man defense. Given the Pelicans’ lack of shooting, I wouldn’t advise it, but if they make a lineup adjustment and insert Josh Hart into the lineup, they could try it.

The better option though would be scheming up some plays that can break the zone and get to the basket. This is what the Boston Celtics did when they beat the Raptors in the postseason, and I’d love to see Stan Van Gundy dig into his bag of tricks with some creative play calls that’ll expose Nurse’s zones.