NOLA no-fall? How the New Orleans Pelicans have rebounded from their IST embarrassment

The trip to Las Vegas was supposed to serve as an announcement of arrival. It was a chance for the Pelicans to show they’d weathered the storm of an injury-plagued 4-6 start, an opportunity to prove they were ready for the intensity of, well, if not a postseason spotlight, then at least an in-season facsimile.

Instead, New Orleans’ appearance in the semifinals of the NBA’s inaugural in-season tournament authored a different sort of statement: Maybe we’re not ready for this.

It’s not that the Pelicans lost to the Lakers but how. A 44-point blowout on national television has a way of drawing attention and eliciting condemnation. And there was plenty of blame to go around after New Orleans got blitzed 81-41 in the second and third quarters of the embarrassing defeat. The sharpest knives came out for Zion Williamson, whose whisper-quiet performance — 13 points on eight shots, three assists, two rebounds — stood in stark contrast to the total control evinced by a fellow former No. 1 overall pick nearly 16 years his senior and prompted widespread questions about both whether he was fit to lead New Orleans to playoff success and … well, whether he was fit, period. Williamson later summed up the experience succinctly: “It sucked.”

The silver lining to flaming out in early December, though, is that you’ve got plenty of time to rise from the ashes. Indeed, the Pelicans entered Wednesday’s matchup with the Warriors as one of the NBA’s hottest teams — winners of 10 of 14 since the IST debacle and outscoring opponents by 14.5 points per 100 possessions, the league’s best net rating in that span, according to Cleaning the Glass. (New Orleans ended up blasting Golden State, 141-105.)

Three of those four losses came by one possession: a two-point loss to the tougher-than-most-expected Rockets and a pair of defeats at the hands of the Grizzlies, marked by a Ja Morant buzzer-beater in his return from suspension and some late-game referee chaos. They’ve had only one bad performance in the past month — a blowout loss to a Clippers team that has been arguably the best in the NBA lately. They’ve balanced that out by toppling the West-leading Timberwolves twice in the past month and are coming off a Sunday dismantling of the Kings in which they led by as many as 50 points, holding De’Aaron Fox, Domantas Sabonis and Co. to 61 points through three quarters before an entire final frame’s worth of garbage time.

That kind of defensive performance has driven New Orleans’ success of late. Since the loss to the Lakers — which, by the way, they avenged on New Year’s Eve — the Pelicans have conceded a scant 107.3 points per 100, making them the league’s stingiest unit over this stretch. And while some of that has been fueled by icy opponent 3-point shooting — just 32.8% from distance for Pels opponents over the past month and just 34% on “open” and “wide-open” attempts — other underlying numbers suggest that their strong defensive play hasn’t been all smoke, mirrors and shooting luck.

The Pelicans have shown a propensity for applying pressure. Over the past month, they’ve tied for third in the NBA in steals and deflections while ranking 10th in blocked shots, forcing turnovers at the league’s fifth-highest rate. That havoc-wreaking was part of the blueprint that personnel chief David Griffin sketched out when the franchise built a roster replete with great positional size and length. The only players in head coach Willie Green’s rotation south of 6-foot-6 are guards C.J. McCollum, who’s a perfectly cromulent 6-foot-3 with a 6-foot-6 wingspan, and Jose Alvarado, who makes up for his minuscule measurables with an off-the-charts level of Dog In Him:

If you do get a shot up against New Orleans, you’d better make it; only the Lakers and Kings have been clearing the defensive boards more effectively, and nobody’s allowing fewer second-chance points per game. And if you don’t come up with one of those rare second possessions, you’d better get back and get set. The Pels aren’t an elite transition team, but they can punish you if you’re at all scrambled in the half-court, scoring 1.26 points per possession after a defensive rebound in this stretch, according to Inpredictable — tied with Philadelphia for the best mark in the NBA.

To put it in context: The Timberwolves’ league-best defense has allowed just 108.9 points per 100 this season. New Orleans has held six opponents below that mark over the past month, getting attention to detail, buy-in and contributions from everyone — including, very notably, stars such as Williamson, McCollum and Brandon Ingram.

“When your best players are playing defense, what reason do the rest of us have for getting beat?” veteran big man Larry Nance Jr. recently told reporters. “They are scoring 20 a game and playing defense? The rest of us need to be on our P’s and Q’s.”

They have been: The Pels boast the NBA’s best bench net rating in this stretch.

Nance has looked great since returning from a fractured right rib, providing rebounding, rim protection, connective passing and the occasional throwback yamming. He and Alvarado form perhaps the most disruptive reserve tandem in the league, combining for 4.5 steals and 9.2 deflections per 36 minutes of floor time in this span. Sophomore Aussie Dyson Daniels and veteran Swiss Army knife (or maybe just “knife”) Naji Marshall slot in as tag-team partners on the perimeter behind All-Defensive candidate Herb Jones, capable of coming off the bench to pull shifts on some of the game’s toughest ball-handlers while having enough size and strength to scale up and guard some opposing 4s, helping ease the defensive burden on the Pels’ offensive stars.

Heading into the season, the Pelicans’ biggest question surrounded those stars. Due to a variety of ill-timed, staggered and prolonged injuries, Williamson, Ingram and McCollum had shared the floor for only 172 minutes over 10 games — a vanishingly small sample on which to base any conclusions about how New Orleans’ investment in their theoretical fit would bear out.

After a rocky start to the season, New Orleans is 12-6 when Williamson, Ingram and McCollum have played together. The trio has started to develop more cohesion of late, logging 188 minutes together over the past month — more than they had across their first three seasons following McCollum’s arrival from Portland. New Orleans has outscored opponents by 31 points in those shared minutes, thanks in part to Green and his three best shot creators finding pathways for them to work together more often and more effectively.

Some of the success stems from a more concerted effort by Williamson to attack as often as possible. Through the first six weeks of the season, barely two-thirds of his field-goal attempts had come at the rim — by far a career low. Over the past month, that share’s back up over three-quarters of his shots, as he routinely looks to get downhill to finish around and through (if not, as frequently, over the top of) interior defenders and to use his great touch if he can’t get all the way to the cup; he’s shooting 49% on shots in the paint but outside the restricted area and dishing four assists per game, finding a balance between forcing the defense’s hand and taking what it’s giving him.

“I think we are figuring it out,” Williamson recently told reporters. “I think the more we are on the court, the more we are figuring out what spacing we like. When one player is going to attack. The more games we play, the better we are going to get at it.”

You can have a good offense simply by playing three guys capable of beating individual defenders, distorting layers of help behind the play and setting up teammates to take advantage of that bent coverage. Your best chance at having a great one, though, is by blending those skill sets together, allowing them to augment and magnify one another to become something greater than the sum of their discrete parts.

Identifying who has the mismatch and orchestrating an isolation should be part of the menu when you’ve got players as adept at one-on-one scoring as Williamson, Ingram and McCollum. But when you sprinkle in more flavor — straight Zion-BI pick-and-rolls with a spread floor, Ingram screening for McCollum with Zion lurking as a cutter out of the weak-side corner, inverted pick-and-rolls with C.J. setting the brush screen before flaring out for a catch-and-shoot, dribble handoffs with an empty corner that allow Zion to roll into open space, Zion post-ups with Ingram or McCollum one pass away, etc. — baby, you’ve got a stew going:

Since the IST elimination, the Pelicans have scored 119.4 points per 100 with Williamson, Ingram and McCollum on the floor together — a top-five rate, according to NBA Advanced Stats. That number could improve with sustained health, more reps and an increased understanding of which plans of attack produce the best results.

“The biggest thing I know is that we need space,” Ingram recently told reporters. “When guys attack in space, we’re really good.”

One good way to create space might be for Ingram to launch more long balls himself; a 36.3% career 3-point shooter who has drilled 46.7% of his triples during this recent run would be well within his rights to get more than three or four hoists up a night. Another pathway for Green and his coaching staff? More frequently getting sharpshooting swingman Trey Murphy III on the floor with Williamson and Ingram.

After missing the first quarter of the season while recovering from a meniscus injury, the third-year forward has averaged 13 points in 26.4 minutes per game since the IST loss, shooting a blistering 43.1% from 3-point range on nearly six attempts a night. He has the green light to let it fly from deep, too: Despite missing 23 games, Murphy’s 26th in the NBA in makes from 27-plus feet out this season, and of the 25 players ahead of him, only Klay Thompson (31-for-66, 47%) has connected at a higher clip than Murphy (19-for-41, 46.3%).

Combine that sweet, long-range stroke with strong finishing inside (76.2% inside the restricted area), a minuscule turnover rate of just 5.5% (third-lowest of any NBA player averaging at least 20 minutes per game this season), and the length and athleticism to guard across perimeter positions, and you’ve got a pretty valuable player. The Pelicans have outscored opponents by a whopping 15.9 points per 100 with Murphy on the court this season, the largest on/off differential on the team.

Despite that, Williamson and Ingram have played just 50 minutes with Murphy this season, according to PBP Stats; that troika has logged only 30 with McCollum, the team’s best marksman. Finding more ways to get that foursome on the floor together — whether with starting center Jonas Valanciunas gleefully mauling his way to high-efficiency double-doubles, with Nance in small-ball looks or in no-center alignments that have performed about as well as more traditional JV-at-5 lineups this season — could further vault the offensive ceiling of a Pelicans squad that has already been cranking at a top-10 clip for the past two months.

Put that together with what has become one of the league’s stoutest and most disruptive defenses, and you’ve got a recipe for an awfully tough team to beat. Maybe not precisely the kind of contender New Orleans appeared to be through the first half of last season — before Williamson’s hamstring strain derailed both his and their season — but maybe close enough to make the likes of the Wolves, Thunder and Nuggets sweat a little bit as they jockey for position atop the West.

Caveats persist. New Orleans has shown a propensity to struggle after intermission, blowing several 15-plus-point leads and getting outscored by neary six points per 100 possessions in second halves this season, the sixth-worst mark in the league. Those struggles have been particularly pronounced in tight-and-late scenarios, with the Pels just 6-8 in games in which the score was within five points in the final five minutes, owing partly to a flagging “clutch” offense and partly to instances in which Green’s decision-making — his rotation choices, the defensive matchups he opts for, etc. — have come under fire.

With the notable exceptions of those wins over Minnesota, as Zach Kram noted at The Ringer, New Orleans has mostly risen by beating up on sub-.500 opposition; an upcoming slate that includes road games against the Nuggets, Mavericks, Bucks and Celtics should go a long way toward determining whether the Pelicans have what it takes to stay in contention into springtime. And, of course, there’s the ever-looming specter of Zion getting hurt again, with a similar injury, prolonged absence and subsequent collapse potentially having major long-range implications, especially now that the final three seasons of Williamson’s maximum-salaried contract extension are non-guaranteed (though it’s considered highly unlikely that New Orleans would waive him, barring a catastrophic turn of events).

How the Pelicans deal with those challenges and any others they might face in the three months that separate them from the postseason will teach us something about both the state of the organization and the individuals who comprise it. It’s worth remembering, though, that the last time we raised all these questions, Williamson, Ingram, McCollum, Green and the rest of the gang spent the next month answering them by reminding us all just how much talent they’re working with. Coming off that loss to the Lakers, we wondered if maybe these Pelicans aren’t ready for the brightest lights. If they keep performing like this as the schedule stiffens, though, it might be time to start believing they are.