New Orleans Pelicans: How hot should Alvin Gentry’s seat be?

The Cons

The first thing to jump out is how little success Gentry has had in his four years with the Pelicans. Gentry has led the Pelicans to just a 138-167 record during his three and a half years at the helm and only made the playoffs once — last year. Gentry’s tenure in New Orleans started off so rocky that the organization considered firing both him and Demps after they finished a paltry 34-48 in 2016-17, just his second season with the team.

Gentry, who has been around the NBA for nearly three decades, has only made the playoffs three time as a head coach, and has never reached the NBA Finals. A lot of the blame for his sub-.500 record with both the Pelicans and for his career can be put on incompetent front offices, but some responsibility does need to lay at Gentry’s feet as well.

Despite loud proclamations of “What If!” among Pelicans fans regarding DeMarcus Cousins’ season-ending injury in 2017-18, the truth remains that the team played better once he went down. This season, the roster was considerably talented, albeit uneven.

Anthony Davis, Jrue Holiday, Julius Randle, Nikola Mirotic and E’Twaun Moore are not bad as your five most important guys. Now Mirotic is in Milwaukee and Davis is packed and ready to go.

This season began to unravel when Elfrid Payton, the team’s opening night starting point guard, got hurt in late October. It feels utterly absurd that a team that had Anthony Davis could be so dramatically impacted by the loss of Elfrid Payton.

Working with the top-heavy roster he had, Gentry largely rode Holiday and Davis into the ground in the first half. Holiday and Davis are both top-6 in the entire NBA in minutes per game, and although the team falls apart without them, Gentry has stuck to his old school roots as the majority of the league has taken a more cautious approach to player rest.

Gentry’s minutes distribution has never been pretty, as in 2017-18 Davis, Cousins and Holiday were all top-12 in minutes per game.

When Cousins tore his Achilles’ tendon, Gentry caught little flak for the injury (perhaps Cousins’s Achilles’ could have blown out at any time, but playing more than 36 minutes a night sure made it more likely to happen sooner to a seven-footer).

Some might argue that Gentry’s rotations have been out of necessity to avoid putting in a bench full of players barely sticking around the league. On the contrary, though, he has seemed stubbornly attached to his idea of rotations, trotting out Tim Frazier for 15+ minutes per game as the backup point guard and even trying to make Wesley Johnson stick in the rotation.

His game management has never been top-notch either, as he rarely deviates from his set rotations. Davis and Holiday are not staggered much when both are fully healthy, leaving bench units to get their heads smashed in game after game.

All the while these crazy swings happen, corresponding largely with Davis and Holiday’s substitution patterns, Gentry is not one to call a timeout to try and shift momentum and draw up a crafty play. The Pelicans have watched innumerable leads shrink and even disappear as Gentry merely waits for the right time to put one of his stars back into the game.

Since Gentry and associate head coach and defensive coordinator Darren Erman arrived in New Orleans in 2015, the defense has been an issue as well. Despite having elite defenders like Davis and Holiday on the roster for that entire span, the team has only finished in the top-10 in defensive efficiency once (2016-17) and is currently 23rd in the league.