Rebuild and Retain: New Orleans Pelicans
In the modern NBA, team building has become all about collecting assets. The best way to do that is by bottoming out, trading away all your mediocre players and building with young players and high draft picks. The hope is that by doing that, you’ll hit on a couple picks and trade for a couple All-Stars and boom — you have a contender.
The NBA lottery has incentivized this way of team building by giving the highest draft picks to the worst teams in the league. There is no incentive, however, to be in the middle because it gives you no chance at competing for a championship and no chance of getting a high pick to grab another potential impact player. This way of thinking has colored the perception of team building for franchises, and no team knows the middle better than the New Orleans Pelicans.
The Pelicans represent the teams whose expectations and impatience have landed them in this seemingly never ending cycle. Dell Demps traded away what ended up being two lottery picks for Jrue Holiday, gave a long term deal to Tyreke Evans and traded another first round pick for Omer Asik. Those players are fine, but New Orleans hasn’t finished any higher than the 8th seed in the playoffs with this core group around superstar Anthony Davis. They may have added talent in the short term, but by trading away first round picks, they’ve sacrificed depth and long-term ceiling.
They could’ve used that depth for this season, too. The Pelicans have become the turn that is plagued by the injury bug, with Holiday, Davis, Asik, Evans and other key rotation players all missing time. Their inability to put competent NBA bodies on the floor each night has turned a team with 50 win hopes into a 4-13 underachiever with the fourth worst point differential in the league. Their schedule has been tough to start the year, making it even harder to overcome the deficit they’ve put themselves in.
Even as guys come back healthy, it is hard to imagine a scenario where this team miraculously makes the playoffs after the hole they’ve dug this early.
The Pelicans are the next team in this Rebuild and Retain series going through each NBA squad not considered a title contender and assessing the young players they have on their roster. Player development is key in building a championship contender, and this series looks at whether or not the young players these teams have will help them reach that level in the future.
Note: Only players on their rookie contracts will be considered for this series — so in this case, Anthony Davis. If a team has signed a player to a second contract, that more than likely means that they are considered a core member of the roster.
ANTHONY DAVIS
Despite a possible mismanagement of assets by the front office that may have cost them depth, it is nice that your one rookie scale contract on the roster happens to be the best asset in the entire league.
Davis’ production in his first three plus years has been absolutely astounding, something that we haven’t really seen before. The best way to put it into perspective: There are only 17 players in NBA history to register over 4,000 points, 2,000 rebounds and 500 blocks while shooting over 50 percent from the field in their first four season. Amongst those players, Davis ranks ninth in win shares — an estimate of how many wins a player accounts for. His numbers will undoubtedly climb as well, seeing as we are only 17 games into his fourth season. Davis is in elite company with the likes of Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Shaquille O’Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon.
If Davis never improves on anything for the remainder of his career, which is highly unlikely, he would still be a top five player in the league. Even after slow start to the season, Davis is eighth in the NBA in points per game (23.9), sixth in rebounds (10.5) and fifth in blocks (2.4). He is still shooting 50 percent from the floor and 75 percent from the free throw line despite a 4-20 stinker against the Warriors opening night, a 3-12 performance against the Magic and 9-23 outing versus the Spurs.
Davis established himself as one of the best shot blockers in the league from day one. His length and athleticism also allows him to stick with perimeter players and makes them look like helpless souls. Steph Curry made this shot, but Davis did about as good as anyone ever has at containing Curry.
That is what makes Davis the perfect piece for a modern NBA defense. He can switch out on to perimeter players thanks to his nimble feet and length, guard bigger post players and recover in a blink of an eye. For example, watch him make a crucial block by stunting towards one player and recovering in enough time to block Mirza Teletovic’s corner 3.
Davis’ length also comes in handy on the boards. He puts up gaudy rebound totals by snatching balls out of the air when nobody can reach them. One second, you think the other team has the board corralled, the next second Davis is grabbing the ball out of their hopeful hands and putting it in the basket, sort of like this:
Davis has incredible touch around the rim to go with his length, which is a deadly combination. He is currently shooting 71.6 percent inside five feet — making him almost automatic. One thing that makes it hard for teams to reject his shot is that he is extremely quick when finishing. He might be the fastest big man in the NBA at getting that ball to the rim before the defense has a chance to react.
Davis might be at his best out in transition. He is an incredible defender but also looks like a gazelle when he runs up the floor. It takes a lot of effort to play hard on the defensive end and then push yourself to get out and run in transition. His motor always makes him one of the first players down the court, and that normally results in a bucket for the Pelicans.
Obviously, the most fun part is when Davis catches alley oops that make everyone go crazy. His teammates can literally throw ball up in the air wherever they want because they know he will go up and get it. That is nice safety valve to have if you ever get in trouble.
The craziest part about all of this is that there are still areas of his game that he needs to improve. Davis is shooting an astounding 45.5 percent from 15-19 feet, one of the best marks in the NBA, let alone for a big man. With his improved jump shot ability, though, he is starting to fall in love with it a little too much. There are times early in this season where he will set a ball screen and then float out to the 18-foot area, not really going hard in one direction. With how athletic and long he is, it would be nice if he would roll more instead of pop after setting a ball screen.
The one main knock on Davis, however, is that he struggles to create his own offense. Most 22-year-olds do, but for a guy with as high of a ceiling and as high of aspirations as Davis, creating his own offense is something that he needs to excel at. Right now, he is a great pick-and-roll finisher and an effective post-up player. But without someone initiating the offense for him, he can’t really create a shot for himself. His one face up move is to jab right and go left, but smart teams and defenders will scout that and take it away, most notably the Warriors on opening night.
All of this is nitpicking, of course, as Davis will probably figure those things out sooner rather than later. He is a big man, so initiating his own offense off multiple dribbles or without a point guard isn’t a necessity for him to succeed. It will help for him once he gets settled under their new head coach Alvin Gentry beyond just one month and hopefully they can put together a competent rotation of players when they have more guys come back healthy.
Is it now or never for this Pelicans core?
The answer to this question looks more and more like “yes” every day, as the losses pile up and the bodies continue to fall to the inactive list. Davis is a once in a lifetime type player, but even he can’t win games by himself if the Pelicans are fielding a roster made up of fringe NBA guys and players who were out of the league just a year ago.
Regression has hit hard this year for the likes of Alexis Ajinca and Omer Asik, two players who the front office committed lots of money and years to over the offseason that are now darn near unplayable. Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon are expiring contracts, and no signs indicate whether or not they will remain with the team beyond this season or if the team even wants them past 2015-16. Holiday and Evans haven’t proved that they can coexist yet, with both being ball dominant guards that like to be the lead ball handler. After trading away all their first round picks, it would be unwise for them to move any of their future ones just to scramble together a few extra wins and maybe make the playoffs.
This ultimately seems like this is leading to a break up of a few of the key members on this New Orleans Pelicans team. The Pelicans have accomplished the hard part — lucking into the good fortune of landing one of the greatest players of our generation. The process in building around their star, however, has not gone so well. As a result, they have a long road ahead of themselves when it comes to building a competitive core around Anthony Davis.