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Can The Pelicans Make It Work?

Pelicans bigs Anthony Davis and DeMarcus Cousins

Much is being made of this tumultuous NBA offseason, and rightfully so.  But today I want to focus on a team that got a jump on all this craziness last season.  The New Orleans Pelicans weren’t going anywhere.  They were a club wasting a transcendent prime with no real direction.  But then they decided to go full nuclear and trade for beleaguered Sacramento star DeMarcus Cousins.  Now the Big Easy is home to two of the game’s best bigs.  Sprinkle in a powder keg at point guard (Rajon Rondo and Jrue Holiday) and there is just as much potential for glory as there is a disaster.  New Orleans invested a lot in putting this quartet together at the expense of the rest of the roster.  But the question is, can they make it work?

In the Western Conference these days, it is hard to make an imprint.  Drafting superbly like Golden State and San Antonio can lead to you being a viable destination and a champion.  Houston hopes that trading shrewdly and striking when teams are their most vulnerable can produce similar results.  New Orleans is hoping to meld those two philosophies together this upcoming season.

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They won one of the more important lotteries in 2012 with Anthony Davis.  Conspiracy theories aside, the team was under league ownership roughly a month before the lottery, Davis’ arrival was a proper ointment to alleviate the sting of Chris Paul‘s messy departure from the club.  Yet the team was bare bones at best.  After making the playoffs three of the four previous seasons, Davis’ first two seasons as a Pelican/Hornet ended with last place divisional finishes.

The club began putting pieces, albeit some ill-fitting, around Davis and in 2014-15 the Pelicans made the playoffs for the first time since his drafting.  It ended unceremoniously at the hands of the Warriors, but it was the first step in the right direction.  Or at least it was supposed to be.

Injuries, poor performances, and a messy coaching divorce made these past two years miserable for the Pelicans.  Affected most of all was their biggest star.  Last year was the closest Davis has come to a full NBA season.  With that came career highs in points and rebounds per game as well as a renewed confidence in his jump shot from both inside and outside the arc.  He finally showed the willingness to battle through little injuries that had kept him in street clothes in previous campaigns.  Yet still, the Pelicans couldn’t make a dent in the Western Conference playoff picture.  Desperate times called for desperate measures.

For once, the Pelicans had foresight.  As we’ve seen this summer, conjecture about a player’s happiness on a mid-tier club can become reality in a snap of a finger.  Anthony Davis is arguably the greatest young commodity the NBA has.  They had to at least try to show their seriousness about keeping him in the fold.  So instead of waiting for this summer, the Pelicans struck the most talked about deal leading up to the 2017 trade deadline.

New Orleans traded three shooting guards, first round pick Buddy Hield, Langston Galloway, and Tyreke Evans, as well as two picks in the 2017 Draft, a first and a second, for DeMarcus Cousins and Omri Casspi.

The Kings may have been viewed in a similar light to the Pelicans.  A team with a star that just needed that little bit of luck, or a big move, to push them to that next level.  But Cousins had slowly become more of a bother than a leader to the Kings.  Personally, I think that neither side was entirely professional about the whole ordeal, but taking shots at the Kings is an entirely different piece altogether.

Call the last few months of the 2016-17 a wash.  The move for Cousins wasn’t immediately going to propel them from the cellar to Western Conference ascendancy.  This year will be the litmus test as to whether or not they can make this work.

In the Eastern Conference, I’d probably give New Orleans a home series come the playoffs.  The East is just that devoid of talent.  Having two players of Davis and Cousins’ pedigree would be enough.  But as everybody knows the Western Conference is a completely different ballgame.

Maxing out Jrue Holiday has its risk, but it was necessary to keep the Pelicans remotely in the running for a playoff spot.  Rajon Rondo began to revive his free-falling career at the end of his Bulls run, but he’s still a wild card as a “veteran leader” for this group.  The rest of the roster doesn’t provide much zest in terms of name value but is solid. But nobody is inquisitive about the integration of Ian Clark or the Asik/Ajinca minutes split.   Can a tandem of Cousins and Davis work for a full season with improved results?

I’m leaning towards no.  Both players are eerily similar.  They can drag you all over the floor and attack the rim on both ends of the floor.  The Pelicans have two alpha dogs with a desire to have the ball as much as possible.  Competitiveness is never a bad thing, but it can be detrimental when that fire spreads uncontrollably.  Davis is the man for the Pelicans.  He has to be or he’s going to be the next star to demand his way out.  No matter what happy face DeMarcus Cousins puts on, that fact alone will never sit well with him.  He is nobody’s second fiddle.

All you have to do is look at usage rate, a fancy way of saying how many plays are run through a particular player.  The Pelicans are the only club to have two players in the top 10 of usage rate (for players who played more than 50 games).  Granted the 2016-17 numbers take Cousins’ Sacramento stats into account, but it is still a problem that needs addressing.  Just ask Oklahoma City about having too many mouths to feed.  Not learning from history makes one doomed to repeat it.

I don’t want the Pelicans to fail.  Having volatile teams in the NBA is good for First Take and Undisputed, but it is bad for the fans.  DeMarcus Cousins on the Pelicans will bring more eyes to the team.  They will put more butts in the seats of the Smoothie King Center than ever before this season.  But this is bound to end poorly and that’s a shame.  New Orleans fans, be sure to get your fill of fun because the Pelicans won’t make this work.  And for you, as well as the NBA as a whole, that is a bad thing.

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