The New Orleans Pelicans gave away another game, this time to the OKC Thunder.
Fans were hoping the New Orleans Pelicans would bounce back from a tough loss to Indiana but instead they made things worse by losing to the OKC Thunder.
This was a bad loss for the Pelicans. Not only did they blow another lead, but they lost to the youngest team in the NBA, a team they just blew out by 33 points in the previous meeting.
This is the type of game a team must win if they want to make the playoffs. OKC is scrappy and plays hard but they barely have any players who are old enough to buy beer.
Adding the fact that the Pels were coming off one of the worst losses in memory and it would have been nice to see them come out, play angry and blow the Thunder out.
They didn’t, which led to some overreactions that are no longer really overreactions, they are responses to obvious trends.
New Orleans Pelicans: The Pels are blowing too many leads
Overreaction #1: The Pelicans can’t hold a lead!
Like I said, not an overreaction.
The Pelicans have had a lead in every game thus far and continue to blow them. Part of this is the ebb and flow of an NBA game, as scores can swing wildly from one direction to the other. Fine.
The other part is that the Pelicans’ bench is absolutely horrible (more on this next) and just keeps giving back what the starters have taken.
The Pelicans were up by nine against OKC and looked like they were going to blow them out again. Enter the bench and suddenly they are losing.
I wrote about why the Pelicans were struggling to close out games, but they’ve been blowing leads at every point, not just the end.
Good teams put bad ones away when they have them on the ropes and right now the Pelicans are not doing that. If you let NBA teams hang around, eventually they’ll beat you.