New Orleans Pelicans: Big Man Depth Already Challenged
By Phil Watson
It gets real for the New Orleans Pelicans in 16 days and it’s a return to the scene of the crime, of sorts, when they open the season Oct. 27 at Oracle Arena, home of the defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors.
That would be the same Warriors squad that swept the Pelicans out of their first postseason under the new moniker last spring.
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Earlier this week, ESPN’s Marc Stein reported that starting center Omer Asik would miss at least three weeks with a calf strain. That came less than a week after backup big man Alexis Ajinca strained his right hamstring. He’s expected to miss four to six weeks, according to a press release issued by the club.
Pelicans announce that Omer Asik is out three weeks with a calf strain. NOT what the Pels needed after losing Alexis Ajinca first
— Marc Stein (@TheSteinLine) October 8, 2015
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If my fourth-grade math skills don’t fail me, that would mean the Pelicans won’t have either Asik or Ajinca for at least the opening back-to-back of the season. New Orleans goes from Oakland to the Pacific Northwest to visit the Portland Trail Blazers on Oct. 28 before returning to The Big Easy for its home opener against—wait for it—the Warriors on Halloween night.
Asik might be available for the return engagement with Golden State as a sort of best-case scenario.
But that leaves the Pelicans severely limited at the center spot, with Kendrick Perkins the next man up and undersized camp invitee Jeff Adrien about the only other option.
That’s not optimal when you’re facing the defending champs twice in your first three games.
The simplest solution, and the one many would-be coaches and general managers have immediately turned to on social media, is to deploy All-Star power forward Anthony Davis at center.
Sure, Davis played there earlier in his career and at 6-foot-10 and 253 pounds certainly possesses the size to pull it off.
But here’s the thing and it’s really where the real world and the world of fantasy sports and video games diverge: Do you really want Davis banging bodies with Andrew Bogut, Festus Ezeli and Chris Kaman for 120 minutes or so in the season’s first five days?
According to Basketball-Reference.com, Davis has spent roughly 17 percent of his 6,659 career regular-season minutes playing the center spot—including 42 percent of the time in his breaking 2013-14 season.
The pounding he took that year was part of the reason the Pelicans swallowed the poison pill that was the final year of Asik’s contract with the Houston Rockets and re-signed the Turkish big man to a five-year, $58 million deal on the first day of free agency this summer.
And if Davis has a flaw in his game—a game that apparently has added 3-point shooting this season, based on early preseason returns where he is 2-for-3 after going 1-for-12 from deep all of last season—it is has been a question not if he will miss time but rather how much.
Last season, Davis set a career high by playing in 68 games, missing 14 with a shoulder injury. He missed 15 games with a potpourri of maladies in 2013-14 and was out 18 games as a rookie because of a knee problem.
So again, do you really want Davis mixing it up with centers early in the season?
A quick scan of Real GM’s list of available centers isn’t something that inspires optimism, either.
There are the ageless ones, Brendan Haywood and Nazr Mohammed. Then there are the kids, younger players such as Alex Kirk, Sim Bhullar, Michael Holyfield and Justin Hamilton.
In between, there are Bernard James and Miroslav Raduljica.
Greg Smith was thought to be an option, but the former Houston Rocket and Dallas Maverick failed his physical, according to The Times-Picayune, and will not be signing with the Pelicans.
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So instead it appears the Pelicans will be rolling early with Perkins, who was even mostly a reserve for Scott Brooks last season with the Oklahoma City Thunder after three-plus years of inexplicably starting, before taking a seat at the end of the Cleveland Cavaliers bench last February after being waived by the Utah Jazz.
He only wound up in Utah because his contract was used to balance out the three-way deal that sent Enes Kanter to OKC.
What to expect from Perkins? Not a lot. He’s basically six years removed from his last truly productive NBA season, when he averaged 10.1 points and 7.6 rebounds in 27.6 minutes a game for the Boston Celtics in 2009-10.
With the Thunder over most of the last five seasons, Perkins flirted with being the least productive starter in the NBA, posting a Player Efficiency Rating of 7.9 over 6,315 minutes while racking up a whopping 6.1 Win Shares for a team that won 213 games between Feb. 25, 2011 and Feb. 18, 2015—the day after Perkins was acquired and the day before he was traded.
On the other hand, it’s not every day you can declare proudly that your starting center is a guy who put together the shot chart shown below in 1,148 minutes the previous season:
OK, maybe not so much with the whole “proudly” thing.
The injuries to Ajinca and Asik aren’t season threatening. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s going to take all of the magic new coach Alvin Gentry can muster to avoid having to dig the Pelicans out of a significant early hole in the Western Conference standings.