While Pelicans preach pace, their star big man practices patience
— -- Set your gaze on Alvin Gentry in the midst of a New Orleans Pelicans game, and it won't take long before you see the head coach flash one of his go-to moves: the one-handed spin.
Gentry, in his 30th consecutive season as an NBA coach, has made a career as an offensive accelerant. The Pelicans, for instance, are averaging six extra possessions per every 100 than the season before his arrival because of his pace-pushing directives.
So when the action lags, the head coach will remind his players -- and sometimes any official delaying the game with a trip to the review monitor -- by making a circular motion once, maybe twice, with his hand.
His message doesn't exactly require deep analysis: Pick up the pace.
Anthony Davis, for one, has benefited statistically from the speed. The fifth-year big man has never utilized more possessions or played more minutes in his pro career, and as a result, his season line has puffed to career-high rates (albeit via a career-low shooting percentage, as he chooses more often to shoot over the top of the crowd he draws). But the season as a whole has thus far been an exercise in patience for the 23-year-old superstar.
Outside of Davis' Godzilla-like destruction of defenses throughout the first month of the schedule, the opening leg of the Pelicans' season has been a waiting game. New Orleans waited for Jrue Holiday to return from tending to his wife and newborn. It waited on Tyreke Evans after the once-core player missed 11 months because of a problematic right knee, and through dings to Dante Cunningham (12 games missed), E'Twaun Moore (3) and Holiday again (3). It's also still waiting on the development of rookies Cheick Diallo and Buddy Hield, the latter of whom has found his range since a bump to the first unit (52 percent from 3 in December). Pelicans players have missed 107 games this season, with 79 a result of injury, illness or injury-related rest.
The sliding-door rotations have taken a toll on the Pelicans' playoff chances, which, after a win in Philadelphia on Wednesday, brought them to 3-3 since an 0-5 dip to start December, coming in at a measly 1.4 percent, according to ESPN's BPI. That's 18.5 percent less than their current odds of landing the top pick in the 2017 draft. Even Davis hasn't been at his usual all-world peak of late, having shot just 43 percent from the floor this month despite sitting out one game to rest and seeing his minutes sag to under 40 in each of the past five games.
But the Pelicans' struggles haven't sent Davis into any sort of public upheaval.
"I'm just real patient," he said recently. "Nothing really gets to me ... except the other night."
That other night would be Dec. 8, when a loss to the 76ers led to Davis grumbling in his greatest display of discontent this season via mostly one-word responses. An injection of reinforcements since has bought the Pelicans some time -- even if it's just another week or two.
"I just let stuff play out until it's time to really say something, [then] I'll say it," he said. "But other than that, I like to see where stuff goes, see how stuff works out. Just 'cause something doesn't work out one game or two games or whatever, you don't want to jump the gun. I kind of just see how it goes over a period of time and then make a decision from there."
With trade season officially open, the Pelicans are coming up on another decision in what figures to be a long, much-parsed game of chess leading into Davis' third NBA contract. Details emerging about the "designated veteran player exception" -- a new addition to the latest collective bargaining agreement that would make another deal with New Orleans potentially far more lucrative -- would appear to give the Pelicans more incentive to think ahead.
But even with two games separating them from the last-place Dallas Mavericks, the Pelicans find themselves just three games back of the eighth spot in the Western Conference, with 52 games to play and five straight at home on deck to close out the calendar year.
An active Holiday has made a major difference: New Orleans is 8-7 with the deliberately paced guard in the lineup and 2-13 without, and has the West's ninth-best net rating since his return on Nov. 18. Yet the disparity also underscores the importance of surrounding Davis with elite-level talent, which the Pelicans have no obvious route to obtain outside of the draft lottery.
Living life in the fast lane is fine, but at some point, the NBA amounts to one big horse race. The pace the Pelicans keep from here on out could determine whether the franchise can rise from a stretch of four out of five seasons as an also-ran, and, perhaps more important, how long their lone superstar will stay so calm, cool and collected.
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