A couple of days ago, we broke down what the New Orleans Pelicans starting lineup might be next season. This was an important exercise because how a team starts a game sets the terms of engagement for the rest of the night. Also, in some cases, your starting five may be your best five.
However, that isn’t always the case. On a lot of teams, their best five may not be the five guys they originally started the game with. Those teams often close the game with a different five-man group than the one they began the evening with.
What kind of team should the Pelicans be moving forward?
To figure this out, we looked at some data from Cleaning the Glass that was pulled up and displayed brilliantly by the NBA University Twitter account (a great follow).
What he did was take the team’s seven most-played five-man lineups and showed what their Net Rating was when they played together in non-garbage time situations (there can be a lot of noise in data when players get minutes during a blowout).
The reason we are looking at the team’s most used lineups to figure out which one is their best is because we want to avoid falling prey to the small sample size trap. So while there theoretically could be a better five-man lineup the Pelicans could have turned to this season than these seven, we are better off analyzing these because they give us a larger sample to examine.
Now, without further ado, here is that tweet we mentioned:
I’m showing the 7 most played 5-man lineups of every non-playoff team this season. Included is their net rating and how many non-garbage-time possessions they played together. Hope it’s a helpful resource!
— NBA University (@NBA_University) April 25, 2023
New Orleans Pelicans 42-40 pic.twitter.com/YwWqzxlH1t
So, it looks like in the Pelicans’ case, their starting five (for most of the second half of the season) was their best five-man lineup last year. The lineup of CJ McCollum, Brandon Ingram, Trey Murphy III, Herbert Jones, and Jonas Valanciunas posted a +14.7 Net Rating in their 258 non-garbage time possessions together this season.
For some reference, if an entire team played with a +14.7 Net Rating for an entire 82-game season, their expected win pace would be 73 games.
Some other contenders for the crown were the lineup featuring McCollum, Murphy, Valanciunas, Josh Richardson, and Naji Marshall (a Net Rating of +11.9 in 193 non-garbage time possessions) and the one with McCollum, Marshall, Valanciunas, Murphy, and Jones (a Net Rating of +11.4 in 242 non-garbage time possessions).
One big caveat to add to all this is that Zion Williamson is only featured in two of the Pelicans’ seven most-used five-man lineups because he missed a majority of the season with injuries (he only played in 29 of 82 games).
If he was healthy, it is likely that not only would he be involved in more of these lineups but that he’d be a part of their best five-man lineup.