New Orleans Pelicans: With Zion Williamson, focus is always negative

I don’t like to get into conspiracy theories about the media, but with Zion Williamson and the New Orleans Pelicans, the tinfoil hats may be right.

Pelicans’ fans have often bemoaned the team’s lack of positive coverage in national media, and it’s hard to argue, as positive stories about Zion Williamson tend to get buried while any slight nugget of negativity gets put in every headline.

If Zion says he likes Madison Square Garden the headline is “Zion is going to the Knicks!” If someone anonymous member of Zion’s family says they didn’t like how New Orleans handled his injury then the headline is “Zion is unhappy in New Orleans.”

But when Zion himself says that he is, not a peep. It’s not hard to see why fans of the New Orleans Pelicans get fed up.

New Orleans Pelicans: Can we just take Zion Williamson at his word?

Take the recent media day as a perfect example.

Zion sat there and said as clearly as possible that he loves the city of New Orleans. But did this crack a headline? Not really, at least not outside of the Pels’ beat writers, who mostly do a fantastic job by the way.

There was so little coverage of it that Zion had to go on radio and repeat himself, not that anyone noticed:

You can tell Zion Williamson is getting sick of having to answer this question. Can we just accept that he likes the city of New Orleans? Is that so hard to believe?

This is a guy from a small town in the south who likes his privacy, which he is afforded in New Orleans where people stay out of his business, so much so that he was injured all summer and we didn’t even know. Think that would be possible in New York?

Look, I get that people are interested in Zion and things like his injuries or play are fair game, but this notion that everything about his experience in New Orleans has been negative is just trash. I don’t care if people want to criticize the organization for their handling of certain things, but that has nothing to do with whether Zion likes the city.

Zion might leave someday and probably will, as very few players stay with the same team for their whole career, but it won’t be because Zion “hates New Orleans,” one of the greatest cities in the world and one that caters to his desire for privacy.

The only way this is going to stop is if the New Orleans Pelicans start winning, so luckily, Zion Williamson has some control over the narrative, but until then I’m sure we’ll have to hear more about how Zion hates New Orleans from people who have never bothered to ask him.