New Orleans Pelicans trying to fix their injury problem

After injuries derailed their once-promising season, the New Orleans Pelicans have decided that it is time to make some changes.

According to The Times-Picayune, the Pelicans plan to restructure their player care and performance team this off-season. Up until now, Aaron Nelson, the vice president of player performance and care, has been running the show (and has been since 2019). Before taking this position, he worked for the Phoenix Suns for 26 years.

You’ve surely heard this story before. The Pelicans were cruising along near the top of the Western Conference at 23-14 before Zion Williamson suffered a strained hamstring against the Philadelphia 76ers that kept him out for the remainder of the season. After that, the Pelicans stumbled their way to a 19-26 finish to the season before getting eliminated in the play-in tournament by the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Overall, Williamson missed 53 of 82 games this year and has only played in 114 of 308 (37%) possible regular season games in his career.

But he’s not the only one who missed time this year. Brandon Ingram missed 37 games. Dyson Daniels missed 23 games. Jose Alvarado missed 21 games. Herbert Jones missed 16 games. Overall, the team finished 7th in the NBA in games lost to injury (per Man-Games Lost).

Games lost to injury is obviously not the kind of statistic that you want to place 7th in the league in, and it’s because of this that the franchise is looking to make some changes.

"“What I don’t want is the narrative about our team is, ‘Oh my God, they have to fix the medical situation,’ ” executive vice president David Griffin said in April. “No, we have to fix a lot of stuff. We have to do a whole bunch of things better. That’s just a part of it.“I really don’t like the conversation being, ‘Player availability, player availability.’ It’s also, ‘Let’s do the right things with the players who are available. Let’s get those guys doing the right things every day. And let’s build the right culture where we can be critical of each other in ways we need to be.’ I failed miserably in that. We have to do a better job in a lot of ways.”"

It remains to be seen exactly what this restructuring entails, but whatever it is, hopefully it serves to end this cloud of bad breaks that is hovering over the franchise right now.