New Orleans Pelicans, the Laggards of the NBA
Breaking down the Pels’ obsolete philosophy and roster construction.
There is no reason for a victory lap after the first 3 losses of the season.
There is no reason to blame any fan who thought this team and its identity would tangibly evolve/grow when the roster not only stayed the same — but doubled down on what it is.
A plea of ignorance is all they need to absolve themself of any guilt.
Joe Dumars’s only plea is one of insanity.
I hate to be dramatic; after all, it’s just basketball.
However, it takes delusion or complete apathy to take a fundamentally broken basketball team and not shift philosophy, or change anything for that matter.
You can’t ask a group of players to fix that; they are who they are.
You can’t ask a coaching staff to make a roster into something it isn’t.
This is the plight of the New Orleans Pelicans, the National Basketball Association’s laggards.
The title photo is Roger’s Bell Curve. Everett Rogers was a sociology professor whose research became widely renowned for how willing people are to accept and adapt to social and technological innovations based on their awareness, interest, evaluation, experience, and ultimately adoption.
To put it simply, I’ll let Brad Pitt’s character in Moneyball, Billy Beane, help you understand with his iconic quote "Adapt or die."
The conflation between the Pelicans’ “talented” and “deep” roster gets in the way of what they are: a bunch of mismatched puzzle pieces jammed together in an attempt to win basketball games.
Analytics? Never heard of him.
My qualms with the Pelicans and how they’re run can be summarized into one grand frustration — their way is broken, medieval, and yet constantly repeated.
The Pelicans have no real, modern basketball process for roster construction, on-court rotations, or talent evaluation.
In the last five seasons, the only team to have a rim shot attempt frequency of 37.5% or greater is the 2025-26 Pelicans.
A team shot diet this unbalanced and so rim-dependent produces a suffering offense, not to mention the consequences it has defensively and in late-game situations (as we’ve seen time and again).
Back to Roger’s Bell Curve. It’s not always about being out in front on a trend because if that were the case, the Pelicans would be flourishing, but in this particular case, their unaccompanied playstyle is something they don’t even do well.
The Pelicans shot 63.9% at the rim last year, ranking second-to-last in the NBA.
Rim abundance with a total lack of efficiency equals not only a one-dimensional, ancient machine… but one that performs all too poorly.
A Zion Williamson team will tilt this way regardless; he’s a rimfluence machine in the modern game, comparable only to Giannis.
It’s unfair for a defensive juggernaut who impacts the floor on both ends such as Giannis to be compared to Zion, but in terms of building an offense from the ground up, their likeness is extremely noteworthy, and for those paying attention — a building block to make the Pelicans better.
Giannis and Zion share the same offensive influences. Play them, and your offense is centralized in the restricted area and moves away from the perimeter.
The large discrepancy is in the bottom row. The Bucks ranked 6th in 3-point frequency over that 13-season span, while in the Zion era the Pelicans ranked 24th and 27th last season, and dead last this season on a small sample of 3 games.
This team’s structure suffocates the unique advantages Zion brings to a 5-man unit.
Jeremiah Fears took 43% of his shots from within 4 feet of the basket his rookie season, which is 96th percentile for Point guards —and a heavy dose, about 43.8% of his college attempts too. A score-heavy guard whose first instinct is to touch the paint, much less than an ideal fit for Z or Fears.
Not to mention the influence Fears and Queen have on team shots at the rim, with Queen ranking in the 97th percentile and Fears in the 87th.
Despite any critiques of both as players, their chances for success and positive development in New Orleans are only limited by Zion’s presence, and vice versa.
As for summer free agent acquisition Benedict Mathurin, whose game is on-ball heavy, and consistently hunting a whistle on his way to the rack. Furthermore cleaningtheglass.com’s table indicates, his team influence is incredibly rim-centric.
To put it briefly, this front office wants to claim they’ll one day “revive” Zion’s career while doing nothing that is required to optimize the system for him, and, on top of that, make it a detriment to his game.
This clearly stems from an anti-analytical approach, a phased-out style of evaluation and team-building.
Over the last two seasons, the Pelicans have the largest percentage-point discrepancy between rim attempts and 3-point attempts in the league.
The only other teams tilting that way are the Sixers, Raptors, and Rockets — yet the gaps are marginal at best, with a maximum of 1 percentage point.
The Pelicans are the only team in the NBA playing this way; the only team so far behind, they’ve become a statistical anomaly.
Chucking threes at an incessant rate doesn’t make you an analytical guru, and far be it from me to want to get into that iceberg of a topic. Nonetheless, the team is built to have exactly one offensive pitch, which isn’t sustainable, especially with their personnel.
I made a graphic that tells the whole story, and shout-out to David Lee and Owen Phillips for the inspiration!
The attempt is to read between the lines of the Pelicans’ personnel, and discover another substantial component behind the lack of offensive gel, which is their skill sets.
They lack the connectivity and skill sets that glue lineups together rather than muddle them up; role fluidity and efficiency leave them in a lot of “clear it out, or come screen for me, either way just let me cook.”
That might work for the Olympic team, not for the Pels (and even then, Team USA really moves the rock).
This is paragraph text. Click it or hit the Manage Text button to change the font, color, size, format, and more. To set up site-wide paragraph and title styles, go to Site Theme.
A quick share helps us a lot!
