New Orleans Pelicans: 8 most important storylines to follow this season

The New Orleans Pelicans season tips off tomorrow. Here are some things to follow as the season progresses.

With regular-season NBA games so close we can almost taste the action, here are a few things to monitor throughout the New Orleans Pelicans‘ season.

8 Things to Keep an Eye on This Pelican’s Season

Zion Williamson’s Dribble Moves & Landings

Like most fans, my eyes were trained on Zion during the preseason and there’s no denying the sheer force he is on a basketball court. How someone with a six-inch height disadvantage just bullies the big men of the NBA leaves us all in awe every game. It’s just incredible how Zion Williamson seems to score at will without trying very hard.

There are moments over the course of each game where the broadcast will show stats or you’ll be looking at your phone and holy s*&$, how does Zion have 16 points and eight rebounds already, it’s just the second quarter. I think I’ve come up with the answer, so many of Zion’s points come from tip-ins that we forget about them because there was no soaring highlight or step-back three to catch over and over. There are too many bodies near the rim for Zion to stand out.

That being said, Zion needs to diversify his scoring profile. Take a look at this tweet from Will Guillory of The Athletic.

With how unstoppable Zion is from that range, you may be thinking “why should he change what he’s doing, it’s clearly working”. I can’t argue with that but what he can change is how he gets to that spot. In his rookie season, Zion’s main dribble move was to spin to his left when he had the ball in the paint. That should continue to be his go-to move but he needs to throw in a couple of others just to keep the defenses from loading up on the spin.

The good news is that in the preseason we saw Zion attacking from the perimeter more and attempting to break down defenders off the dribble. As long as he shows flashes of being able to beat defenders in multiple ways, the easier it will be for him to get his spin any time he wants it (that’s a scary thought for opposing defenses).

While we’re talking about Zion there’s another piece to his game that needs continuous improvement, his landings. With Zion the concern, for now, is his weight, can he keep it at a manageable level or even lose some of it. For me, the concern is how he lands.

This goes back to a sports science piece done before the 2019-20 season, The Physics of Zion Williamson. The video does just what the title says, it explains how someone with Zion’s height and weight can fly the way he does.

The part that stands out the most is the section on how he lands, mainly for the injury risk of all that weight coming back to the Earth. The video shows a few clips of Zion landing awkwardly after dunks, the more times he does that the higher chances of something going wrong.

But while watching the preseason I saw way more soft landings from Zion than the hard or awkward variety. These landings are something that will always need to be monitored if Zion is going to stay as healthy as possible.