2015-16 NBA Preview: New Orleans Pelicans

NEW ORLEANS PELICANS

New Orleans is Anthony Davis’ sandbox now as he ascends from the mortal basketball realm and conquers everything below. Like a few other legendary players with immense gifts, his support on the team is lacking and the organization did not do well in surrounding him with talent. But with a major positive change, bringing over Alvin Gentry, there’s some hope and intrigue in New Orleans because with their available talent they should be better on defense and Davis has become an offensive anchor. The west is competitive, but Anthony Davis is immortal.

2015 in review:

For the first time in the Davis era, New Orleans made the playoffs, but it wasn’t a completely successful season. The team was 22nd in defensive efficiency, according to basketball-reference, even though they had just acquired Omer Asik while Anthony Davis had a breakout season (again.) They were okay at defending shots and rebounding, but they created an abnormally low number of turnovers. The team was hit hard by injuries, as usual, with Jrue Holiday missing half the season; only a couple rotation escaped serious ailments or long stretches of missed games. The Pelicans were swept in the playoffs by the Warriors — they were a couple classes below the best teams in the conference.

Rotation players in: Kendrick Perkins.

Rotation players out: Austin Rivers.

As you can see from the two players listed above, the team has few relevant personnel changes and I was so desperate to list someone that I included Kendrick Perkins. New Orleans did, however, make a few changes last season, like getting rid of Austin Rivers and remaking some of their bench. The biggest change is replacing coach Monty Williams with Alvin Gentry.

2016 Projected

Anthony Davis had a season with few peers. He was stupefying. His PER has progressed from 21.7 his rookie season to 26.5 to 30.8 last season, and his BPM went from 2.3 to 4.5 to 7.1. His shot volume numbers and efficiency have been on a steep upward trajectory as well, and his turnovers have been shrinking every year too. What could year 4 possibly bring? How could he improve?

Comparisons have been made involving some unholy combination of Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Marcus Camby, and others, but I would actually compare him to David Robinson. Both players were phenomenal shot-blockers and good rebounders with the fluidity and length to cover large portions of the court. On offense, he’s not a low-post scorer who camps out on the block; instead he’s a flexible force who works well within the offense and is an impossible cover in a pick and roll or running down the lane in general. David Robinson shared those qualities too — he wasn’t a polished, methodical scorer in the low post.

Unlike Robinson, Davis’s defensive impact has been pretty underwhelming, though the evidence is pretty mixed. ESPN’s RPM, for example, lists him as one of the best defenders in the league, and New Orleans played better defense with him on the court. But if you quickly sort by blocks for rim protection at the NBA’s stats site, you’ll see that most high block players have much better rim protection numbers, and he’s in the range of DeAndre Jordan and Pau Gasol. The Pelicans allowed the highest proportion of shots at the rim, via basketball-reference, despite having Anthony Davis, Asik, and even the huge Alexis Ajinca. There are two questions that consequently arise: is Anthony Davis not as good as he appears on defense or is this a team-wide problem?

Alvin Gentry is known for his minds on offense, but he could restructure the defense and improve the results. He has the resources. Jrue Holiday is a plus defender at point guard and big for his position. Quincy Pondexter is a 3/D wing they can use for the tougher assignments. Tyreke Evans has been a liability for most of his career, but he’s never actually been committed to defense either and could improve at at least a league average level. Asik was part of a fearsome Chicago defensive unit for a couple years and then had a fantastic season with Houston — injuries have driven him off course, but in the right system he should be valuable.

Offensively, the Pelicans have some talent outside of Davis. There’s enough outside shooting, mostly in the form of Eric Gordon and Ryan Anderson, for a workable modern NBA offense, and when healthy they have some solid playmaking. Gentry could prove his worth here, as he’s been a well-respected coach or assistant on many great offenses. And this is scary: he’s provided tutelage for stretch big men before, from Channing Frye to Draymond Green, and now he has uber-weapon Anthony Davis draining three-pointers in pre-season. The term “unguardable” has been used too often, but with Davis it could be an accurate term.

Quick statistic/graph

The biggest issue New Orleans has is rim protection, and Davis isn’t being used correctly in many situations. In the table below, players are ranked by opponent field-goal percentage at the rim with the number of attempts per 36 minutes listed to the left. This is not a perfect measure, but it’s a rough guide of when the team is successful and unlike SportVU rim protection stats it’ll include plays when a defender gets beat and the scorer gets to the rim unguarded[5. It includes every field goal at the rim when the listed New Orleans player is on the court.]. Davis is supposed to be some mythical shot-blocker, but the opposition scored efficiently and often at the rim when he was on the floor.

Table: Opponent FG% and FGA at the rim, 2015, NOP (source: stats.NBA.com)

Summary

New Orleans is a vessel in which Anthony Davis can assert his might, but they’re slumping in a few areas and should be a lot better on defense. It’s impossible to tell what effect Gentry will have, but with the right system where their big men drop back more into the paint and Davis prowls the rim, not the midrange area, they could have an effective defense. But the team made no significant personnel changes and they have few assets. Injuries are also a concern, considering Eric Gordon[7. His history of injuries is pretty scary.] and others regularly miss games. There are too many good teams in their division, much less the conference, and it’ll be a tough climb into relevance for the Pelicans even with a mythical four-armed, precognitive athlete catching lobs, hitting three’s, and blocking everything.

PBP-Metric[1. This is the initial version of my own metric, which uses a full range of stats collected from play-by-play logs and tested extensively to avoid overfitting.]: 43.4

PT-PM: 45

Nick‘s[2. For a short description, the predictions use regression models and neural networks to apply various stats like BPM, RAPM, and Win Shares to 10,000 simulations of the season game-by-game to select the “best” result.]: 46

Nathan Walker: 43