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No. 7: New Orleans Pelicans
Last Season: 45-37
8th place in West; Lost 4-0 to Golden State in Round 1
In his third NBA season, 2012 No. 1 overall pick Anthony Davis continued his inexorable march toward superstardom, leading the New Orleans Pelicans to their first playoff berth since Chris Paul played point guard in the Big Easy. The Pelicans overcame a series of injuries (and took advantage of several to the Oklahoma City Thunder) to claim the eighth seed in the Western Conference on the final night of the regular season.
Alas, a sweep at the hands of the Golden State Warriors wasn't enough to save head coach Monty Williams' job. Now, former Warriors lead assistant Alvin Gentry has been entrusted with developing Davis into one of the league's best players. With New Orleans bringing back a similar cast, the Pelicans are counting on a stylistic shift under Gentry and Davis' improvement to help them move closer to the West's best teams.
Year 3 saw Davis take an important step in his development, improving his scoring from 21.3 points per 36 minutes to 24.3 and becoming a more consistent defensive presence. Despite rostering one of the league's best players, the Pelicans were still a .500 team at midseason because of their weak bench and injuries to starting guards Eric Gordon and Jrue Holiday.
General manager Dell Demps worked tirelessly to improve the team during the season. New Orleans acquired Quincy Pondexter and a second-round pick for reserves Austin Rivers and Russ Smith in January, upgrading a huge weakness at small forward. In-season signing Dante Cunningham and deadline acquisition Norris Cole also joined the rotation.
The newcomers were key in an important stretch after the All-Star break when the Pelicans went 4-1 without Davis, keeping their playoff hopes alive. New Orleans finished 18-11 after the break without Holiday for nearly that entire stretch, beating the Warriors in early April and holding off the San Antonio Spurs at home in an emotional final game to clinch a trip to the playoffs for the first time since 2011.
Despite playing shorthanded, the Pelicans were competitive with Golden State in the playoffs. New Orleans held a 20-point lead through three quarters in Game 3 at home before an epic comeback allowed the Warriors to force overtime and eventually win. Golden State completed the sweep two nights later in Williams' last game as head coach.
The Pelicans' boldest move of the offseason was firing Williams after making the playoffs. While Williams did a good job of getting the most out of limited players and built a credible offense, New Orleans' inability to improve defensively after adding center Omer Asik to Davis proved costly. The Pelicans replaced Williams with Gentry, a respected offensive mind with extensive experience as both an assistant and head coach. Since Gentry's focus is on offense, the addition of Darren Erman from the Boston Celtics as a defensive coordinator of sorts may prove as important.
The Asik trade left New Orleans without a first-round pick for a third consecutive season, and the team's activity in free agency was modest. The Pelicans re-signed Asik to a five-year, $60 million contract with the final season non-guaranteed and brought back reserve center Alexis Ajinca on a four-year, $19.5 million deal. Reserves Cunningham (three years, $9 million) and Luke Babbitt (two years, $2.3 million) also got new deals.
New Orleans' biggest offseason addition was journeyman wing Alonzo Gee, who got a two-year contract for slightly more than the veteran's minimum. The Pelicans also signed center Kendrick Perkins to a minimum-salary contract to provide veteran leadership.
Besides the coaching change and Davis' development, New Orleans is presumably hoping for better health. Holiday (42 games), Gordon (21) and sixth man Ryan Anderson (21) all missed extended stretches, while Davis was sidelined 15 games by a variety of ailments. Though the Pelicans lost a below-average number of games to injury, their cost in terms of wins above replacement player was third-highest in the league because of the quality of the players sidelined.
How much better can Anthony Davis get? Offseason buzz on the Pelicans centered on just that. Yes, word got out that the 22-year-old added both about 15 pounds of muscle and a 3-point shot. But Gentry wants to downplay the impact of the latter -- the idea that Davis is suddenly going to kill teams from deep.
"That's way, wayy, wayyy overblown," Gentry says on talk of Davis' new 3-point shot. "He's not going to go from one made 3 last season to making 150, OK? What I'm saying is that I think he has the ability to step out and shoot the corner three and create space for others. But we're not going to all of a sudden change him into Channing Frye."
Gentry coached Frye during the big man's outward migration in Phoenix and encouraged Draymond Green to step out last season for Golden State. But Davis is still going to crush teams in the midrange, where he made 232 jumpers last season, the fourth-highest total in the NBA.
"We're going to do what he does best -- he's a great midrange shooter, he's crafty with the ball and he's quick with it," Gentry says. "And secondly, we're going to be open to shoot 3-point shots. He truly wants to be the best player in the league, and he's doing it on just raw talent right now. He'll get better, because he's stronger. As soon as he learns the tricks of the trade, he's going to be that much better." -- Tom Haberstroh
Projected Real Plus-Minus for starters
Jrue Holiday, PG: +4.5
Eric Gordon, SG: -2.5
Quincy Pondexter, SF: -1.1
Anthony Davis, PF: +6.7
Omer Asik, C: +1.6
Scouting reports on every player on the Pelicans
Using shot data from 2014-15 and projected starters, Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry ranks each team's offensive efficiency based on square footage.
Davis was 29 percent on shots from 15 to 19 feet as a rookie in 2012-13. Last season: 42 percent. And he's improving his 3-point range.
The Pels project to shoot 37 percent from 3, sixth best in the NBA, led by Gordon and Pondexter, who combined to hit 44 percent last season.
All About The Space: 15th (424 sq. ft. of above-average offense)
To identify players who stretch offenses the most, ESPN Stats & Information created the Kyle Korver Effect -- a metric on a 1-100 scale, factoring in 3PT%, 3-point attempt rate (percentage of total shots that come from 3-point range) and influence on teammate FG%.
Korver Effect: Gordon (88.8) shot a career-high 44.8 percent from 3 last season, but SCHOENE projects a decline to 40.9 percent.
With the Dallas Mavericks and Portland Trail Blazers suffering major defections in free agency, New Orleans enters 2015-16 looking like a solid playoff team. Whether the Pelicans can move any higher than seventh in the West will depend on the impact of the coaching change and just how good Davis can get at age 22. He's already one of the league's 10 best players and a slight improvement defensively along with better team performance could put Davis in the MVP conversation.
Unfortunately, New Orleans' health doesn't look any better now than it did last spring. Holiday's minutes will be limited to protect against a recurrence of his leg injuries, Pondexter will miss the start of the season after summer knee surgery and the Pelicans have seen three rotation players (Ajinca, Asik and Cole) suffer injuries during training camp that could linger into the regular season. Those maladies may slow New Orleans' acclimation to new styles at both ends of the court and will make it difficult for the Pelicans to push for 50 wins.
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