NBA Season Preview 2018-19: Will the Pelicans miss Rajon Rondo?

I remember this moment from the summer exactly. Fairly nondescript, but I’d just woken up from a nap. I had no idea what time it was, but I could see it was dark outside. Groggy, I reached for my phone (as all millennials do upon waking up). Oh snap, Rajon Rondo signed with the Lakers? Now I was awake.

Predictably, there was a lot of consternation about what this meant for the New Orleans Pelicans. Undoubtedly, for all his warts, Rondo had played a positive role in the Pelicans’ first-round playoff demolition of the Portland Trail Blazers. It seems odd to open up a season preview by focusing on players not on the team, but that’s sort of how the New Orleans offseason has been framed en masse so far: what happens now without Cousins and Rondo, two of the biggest names from last year’s team?

The Pelicans sort of addressed the Rondo-sized hole by signing Elfrid Payton (now with shorter hair). Very few people would argue, however, that Payton is a similar caliber player as Rondo in terms of reading a game or seeing the floor. This led to another question — how will Rondo’s absence impact Jrue Holiday, who put on quite a show in the playoffs?

While we can debate the merits of Holiday playing at point versus at shooting guard, I went over to Cleaning the Glass to look through a few lineup numbers. When Jrue played at point, per CTG, the Pelicans’ offensive efficiency was a very solid 110.6 points-per-100-possessions, and their defensive efficiency was a sterling 103.2. However, when Jrue played at the two-guard spot, typically sharing the floor with Rondo, the offensive efficiency remained relatively stable at 109.8, but the defense fell, giving up 105.8 points per 100 possessions (a number which balloons to an awful 110.4 when DeMarcus Cousins was also on the floor at center).

Therein lies the rub for the Pelicans. While Rondo provided some offensive value in a specific matchup context in the playoffs, over a longer horizon, he was actually the worst defensive guard pairing for Holiday, as shown in the two-man-lineup tables below:

Additionally, even within the bounds of offense, one of the Pelicans’ points of emphasis leading up to this season has been on running out in transition and getting to the free throw line with more regularity. When Holiday played shooting guard last season, New Orleans sported a free throw rate of 15.9 percent, but when he played at point, that figure spiked to 21.8 percent. And of course, Rondo, being a career 60 percent free throw shooter, didn’t offer much help even in the rare instances when he did get to the stripe. Elfrid Payton last season, by contrast, had an individual free throw rate of 25.8 percent (converting at a 68.5 percent clip), per Basketball-Reference, and the bruising Julius Randle, the Pelicans’ other main acquisition, had an individual free throw rate of 47 percent (converting at a 71.8 percent clip).

The hope is not that Jrue will return to playing point guard full time. Rather, it’s that some combination of Elfrid Payton and the returning Frank Jackson, who has drawn rave reviews so far, will allow Holiday to play some minutes off-ball and retain similar offensive value while providing a higher defensive floor. It’s that adding Julius Randle into the frontcourt rotation will allow the Pelicans to play off of Anthony Davis and be the best versions of themselves on offense while maintaining high-level defensive activity.

While there are certainly concerns about whether there’s enough playmaking on the team sans Rondo and Cousins (Anthony Davis growing further as a passer certainly helps in this regard) and their wing depth (which is a completely different can of worms), the Pelicans have recognized that Davis and Jrue Holiday are the true pillars of the team, and Playoff Rondo, no matter the mythology, doesn’t shift those scales. Rondo and Cousins may have been the more heralded names, but we may find out this season that their exodus catalyzed the most stylistically cohesive version of the Anthony Davis-era Pelicans yet.