New Orleans Pelicans: How to overcome Zion and Ingram’s poor defense

New Orleans Pelicans: Learning from the Trail Blazers

Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum have made the playoffs every year since McCollum was drafted in the summer of 2013.

In the eight years since Dame and CJ have been paired up, the Trail Blazers have finished top ten in points per game seven times. In those same eight years, the Blazers have been a bottom ten defense five times. The only year Portland’s defense was better than their offense was the 2017-18 season when their offense finished 16th and their defense fifth, all Pelicans fans remember how that season ended for Portland.

Despite that continued success, the team has only once made the Western Conference Finals and even then they got swept. Now I’m not saying this to bring down Portland, they’ve lost to a Finals team in five of the duo’s seven playoff appearances. Just making the playoffs eight years straight now is a remarkable accomplishment and something I’m more than a little jealous of.

But what these playoff losses show us is the flaws in Portland’s style or roster or both. I’m not suggesting the team take the ball out of Dame’s hands because that would result in my immediate arrest should I ever go to Portland. What I’m saying is the players around Dame and CJ need to have a greater impact on the game.

The biggest problem with the Portland duo is their size, CJ is the tallest at 6-3. Playing two shorter guards at the same time presents defensive challenges that the rest of the roster needs to cover. The Pelicans don’t have the same issues when it comes to teams being able to pick on Zion and BI just because of size (I don’t want to piss off the person who makes Zion look small), but the defensive issues occur nonetheless.

Both Zion and Ingram have more than enough size for the Stan Van Gundy to play around with defensive assignments when it gets to crunch time. The problem is that neither is even an average defender. Zion gets a little pass on this because he’s so young but he was such a great defender in college that I thought he’d be better than he has so far.

Ingram doesn’t get as much slack in this department as he’s shown the ability to be a capable defender in the past. You could make an argument the amount of offense both are being asked to create takes so much energy and it’s only natural for them to be worse defensively. But that ignores that most of the best players in the league make an impact on both ends of the floor. I’m not asking for Ingram or Zion to become Kawhi Leonard on defense, just become average.