Barnstorming: Time to start over in New Orleans

What do you do with Anthony Davis?

As the Detroit Pistons showed Sunday night, if that question is asked of a defense, the answer is nothing. His 59 point, 20 rebound game was one of the best single-game performances in NBA history, an extended exhibition of the depth of his offensive skill set and the breadth of his physical abilities. Just 22-years-old, Davis is already one of the best players in the league, based on both present and potential.

So, what do you do with Anthony Davis if you’re the New Orleans Pelicans? I’m not sure they have any more answers than the Detroit Pistons did, but they’ll need to find some soon.

Davis is winding down his fourth season in New Orleans. After modest gains in wins the last two years, the Pelicans are currently 22-33, on pace for about 33 wins this season. That would be a dozen less than they won last season and one less than they won two years ago. With new head coach Alvin Gentry in the fold, this year was supposed to be one of upward momentum for the Pelicans, clearing a few more rungs on the ladder of championship contention. The offense was going to go uptempo and flexible, the defense was going to be more cohesive. Whatever they were supposed to be building towards has not materialized, but even more troubling than the regression is the lack of an obvious path forward.

The Pelicans roster is, simply put, an enormous problem. The rest of the starting five for Davis’ 59-point, 20-rebound performance was Dante Cunningham, Omer Asik, Bryce Dejean-Jones and Norris Cole. When any of that group needed a rest, they were replaced by Alexis Ajinca, Toney Douglas, Alonzo Gee, or Kendrick Perkins. Jrue Holiday has put together a strong performance this season but the 49 games he’s done it in are already the most he’s played in three seasons in New Orleans. As Holiday has bounced in and out of the lineup the past three years, Tyreke Evans often became the de facto point guard, a weighty responsibility that has highlighted all of the inefficiencies and shortcomings in his game, (he’s also out for the rest of the season). Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon have fizzled. The Pelicans probably would have been better off if Asik just disappeared. Davis is a monstrous pillar in the middle of this roster and it’s like the scaffolding has just crumbled around him.

At last week’s trade deadline, the big move for the New Orleans Pelicans was taking Jarnell Stokes from the Miami Heat for a second round pick, and then releasing him to offer rookie D-League call-up Dejean-Jones a three-year contract that is only partially guaranteed in years two and three. The earth remains unshattered.

There is some financial relief coming — Anderson, Gordon and their roughly $24 million in combined salary come off the books this summer. Evans is up the season after that, as is Holiday, which may or may not be a good thing depending on how well his body holds up. The inability to turn those expiring Gordon and Anderson deals into anything but cap space and empty roster spots could be seen as a certain measure of failure. The Pelicans don’t owe any more first round picks but they don’t hold any extra ones either, just their standard allotment of one a year, which means an infusion of young talent is going to come at a methodical pace, at best.

Trying to clear their cap sheet, hunting for extra draft picks, shedding ill-fitting veterans — four years into the Anthony Davis era and it feels like the Pelicans are right back where they started.

Having a player as talented as Davis is an incredible gift, something franchises wait decades for and most never find. It also bring with it an enormous ticking clock. Davis’ prime has not yet arrived, but it is also not indefinite. Making sure that those prime years aren’t wasted, or ultimately spent somewhere else, brings an enormous amount of pressure. And every failure, every draft pick whiffed on or veteran overvalued on the free agent market, just increases the pressure to get the next move right. The New Orleans Pelicans have been victimized, by circumstance, by some of their own questionable decisions, and certainly by the way the pressure has been felt. It’s not a perfect comparison but there is at least a trace of the Cleveland Cavaliers in their first go-around with LeBron James — constantly chasing that one last piece instead of building a roster wholistically.

The good news is, as Davis so thoughtfully reminded everyone on Sunday, New Orleans still has one of the best players in the league and that gives them a certain amount of flexibility. It would seem that there really is an opening for the Pelicans to treat this summer as an opportunity to start this process again from the beginning. Even if Alvin Gentry is back, and there’s every reason to think he will be, even if Holiday stays healthy and fiery hot for the rest of the season, Davis’ talent means New Orleans has the time and space to make themselves into anything they want to be. To not just look for the best pegs of whatever shape to be jammed into whatever holes the roster may appear to have, but to acknowledge that the roster is really just one big hole that can be shaped in many different ways. How do we get better is not nearly as important a question as, “what kind of better do we want to be?”

The emotional weight of this season’s regression will be significant. It will exert that pressure to find solutions and it will make the obvious solutions seem even more obvious. But just like you can’t erase a double-digit deficit in a single possession, the Pelicans are in a hole that will take more than one season to climb out of. Trying to leap back into the optimistic expectations they entered this season with seems like circular path that will bring them right back to where they are now. In fact, the Pelicans should be resisting the urge to follow a defined path at all, at this point their vision quest is a vicious bushwack. What matters is motion and imagination.

They already have their centerpiece, and a glorious one at that. Now embrace the blank slate and all the possibility that Anthony Davis provides.