This was supposed to be Anthony Davis' season. Four games into 2015-16, it's anything but.
About a week ago, Davis appeared to be the co-favorite with LeBron James and Stephen Curry for the MVP award. Now he's a long shot already.
Pelicans making MVP path challenging
Davis' team is one major obstacle to his MVP chances. No player on a team with fewer than 54 wins has won MVP since Michael Jordan in 1987-88. (The exceptions were lockout years, but even then the MVPs came from teams playing at least a 54-win pace.) At best, the New Orleans Pelicans were going to have a difficult time reaching that standard. The ESPN Summer Forecast pegged them for 47 wins, a two-game improvement over last season.
That estimate came before the Pelicans lost key contributors Tyreke Evans (knee) and Omer Asik (calf) to injuries during training camp and revealed that another starter (forward Quincy Pondexter) would remain sidelined by offseason knee surgery.
Without those players (Asik did play 10 minutes off the bench in one game), New Orleans has lost its first four games. While losing twice to the defending champion Golden State Warriors is excusable, the Pelicans also lost to the Portland Trail Blazers and at home to the Orlando Magic, two likely lottery teams.
Now New Orleans would have to go 54-24 (a .692 winning percentage) the rest of the way to match the minimum MVP standard. With Evans out at least another three weeks, starting point guard Jrue Holiday's minutes limited because of his history of stress injuries and Pondexter yet to return, it's hard to imagine the Pelicans coming together so quickly. Even a 50-win season seems a remote possibility.
Davis is part of the problem
Worse yet, Davis hasn't played to his own standards, shooting less than 40 percent on 2-point attempts after hitting on 54.0 percent a season ago. His aggregate game score over the first four games (a measure of game-by-game performance based on weighted box-score stats) is 58.7.
Discounting games where he left early because of injury, Davis never had such a poor four-game stretch at any point during the 2014-15 season. His worst period in terms of game score came from Dec. 30 through Jan. 5, when Davis had a combined game score of 65.9. And even then, Davis really had only one bad night out of four. He shot 56.5 percent during that four-game span.
Davis' season opener against the Warriors, when he shot 4-of-20 with nearly as many turnovers (five) as rebounds (six), was his worst game score (2.7) of the last two seasons. And Wednesday's 14-point effort against the Orlando Magic (11.5) was one of his seven worst performances in that span when Davis played at least 20 minutes.
No easy looks
Looking deeper into Davis' statistics, the most striking change from 2014-15 is how few easy looks he's getting around the basket.
Last year, nearly 40 percent of Davis' shot attempts came inside the restricted area within four feet of the hoop, according to NBA.com/stats. That's down to 16.7 percent of his shot attempts so far this season. Given that Davis finished 71.2 percent of his attempts in the restricted area in 2014-15, that's a big hit to his efficiency.
We can see a couple of reasons why. First, perhaps because of the time he's spending on the perimeter with newfound 3-point range, Davis isn't generating putbacks around the basket. His offensive rebound rate has dropped from 8.0 percent of available misses to 5.8 percent, which ranks 41st among players with at least 100 minutes this season, tied with Orlando Magic point guard Elfrid Payton. Davis' second-chance points have taken a corresponding hit from 3.6 per game to 2.0.
Second, Davis is suffering from a lack of pick-and-roll partners. Last season, Davis led all NBA players with 423 points as a roll man, via Synergy Sports tracking. He shot 57.2 percent on those opportunities. That's down to 44.4 percent so far this season.
Most of those pick-and-rolls last season came with Evans and Holiday, who assisted Davis on 43 percent of his baskets in 2014-15. This year, because of injury, they've assisted him a combined six times in four games.
Playing with weaker point guards has highlighted the weakness of Davis' game. As tremendous a player as he is, Davis rarely creates his own shot without an assist. In fact, among the 15 players on last year's All-NBA teams, only 38-year-old Tim Duncan had a higher percentage of his baskets assisted than Davis.
Worse yet, according to Nylon Calculus' suite of metrics derived from SportVU tracking, Davis shot just 43.5 percent last season on shots considered self-created (taken after holding the ball at least 2.5 seconds), as compared to 57.8 percent on all other shots.
Davis is only 22, and he'll surely improve in this regard, but his dependence on assists is an indication the MVP hype was a tad bit premature.
Inconsistent effort
It's harder to quantify Davis' defensive effort, but a lack of it has been apparent to observers this season, as Zach Lowe tweeted during Tuesday's game. As illustrated by Pelicans blog The Bird Writes, Davis has gone through the motions at times as a help defender rather than actually having an impact on the play.
The Pelicans currently rank 28th defensively -- two matchups with the red-hot Warriors haven't helped -- and for what it's worth over the tiny sample of four games, have allowed 6.8 fewer points per 100 possessions with Davis on the bench.
Here too, the injuries are a factor. The Pelicans have cycled through frontcourt partners for Davis, starting both Kendrick Perkins and Alexis Ajinca with Asik sidelined. With so many players on the sidelines, it has been difficult for New Orleans to learn a new defensive scheme under first-year head coach Alvin Gentry and assistant coach Darren Erman.
The absences have also surely forced Gentry to play Davis more than he'd like at times. He played 41 minutes in the second game of a back-to-back last Thursday at Portland, including the first 23 minutes of the second half. Given that workload, it's understandable Davis might need to conserve energy at the defensive end.
Eventually, the Pelicans will get healthy. Still, a dismal start has dashed hopes of the Pelicans challenging for home-court advantage in the West, and they'll need to play better over the next few weeks just to stay afloat in the playoff race and avoid a lost season. That's going to require better effort and better performance from their superstar.