Pelicans: Rebounds, Zion Williamson weren’t enough to overcome defense

The season is mercifully over, sparing us all a few more games of frustrating bliss. Don’t get me wrong I thought the New Orleans Pelicans would hold a firm spot in the play-in tournament once that was announced. But I didn’t see a way this team would make a whole lot of noise in the real playoffs.

It wasn’t all bad though, we witnessed Zion Williamson ascend to All-NBA level. His  25 game stretch of 20+ points was the kind of intoxicating run that calls out to new fans like sirens on the shore. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from past Pelicans seasons, the crew will steer towards the rocks and sink. Let’s hope Zion had all his teammates fill their ears with wax.

That’s the storyline of this season, Zion putting on remarkable show after remarkable show just for the team to end up in the same position as last year. This was a building season and parts of this roster took some pretty big steps towards becoming quality NBA players.

The underlying stats may give us more insight into what the front office saw as the strengths and weaknesses of this roster. Let’s take a look at the team stats and see what clarity that provides when evaluating the season as a whole.

New Orleans Pelicans: Team statistics

The Pels finished the 2020-21 season with a 31-41 record (.431 winning percentage), essentially the same record as the 2019-20 season (30-42). According to basketball references underlying numbers, the team should’ve finished with a 35-37 record. That still only would’ve gotten the Pels into 10th in the Western Conference, so not that much would have really changed if the team had played up to their stats.

Yes, this team blew 14 leads of at least ten points during the season and there are no excuses for doing so but the outcome, on the whole, wouldn’t have been too different from reality.

New Orleans’s average margin of victory was -0.29 this season and while that number can seem confusing it means New Orleans was outscored by less than a third of a point per game. That tracks with the 113.5 Offensive Rating the Pels had this season and their 113.8 Defensive Rating.

On the season, New Orleans had an ok offense, that 113.5 Offensive Rating is good for 12th in the league. There were stretches early in the year where the Pels were an awful offense; remember the 86 points scored against Phoenix?

However, as the year went on and the Pels offense shifted to become more Zion-centric, the offense became much more formidable and started climbing from awful to really good. It was a long way to climb though, that’s why even with the gains made with Point Zion, the Pels ended the year around the middle of the pack.

The defense was almost the exact opposite story; New Orleans had a top-five defense over the first couple of weeks, then the wheels came off and their rating plummeted. That 113.8 DRtg landed the Pels firmly in the bottom third of the league. If they had allowed just one more point per 100 possessions (how ORtg and DRtg are calculated), New Orleans would’ve been as bad as Houston was on defense.

Under head coach Stan Van Gundy, the Pels played a little slower this season than they did in the past under Alvin Gentry, but there wasn’t as big of a difference as many fans feared. The Pels 100.1 pace rating (the estimated number of possessions per 48 min) was only down about two possessions. Actually, this year’s rating would have finished 15th last year but was ninth this season.

Let’s take a look at the offensive and defensive stats to see what they can teach us about where this season went wrong.