Each NBA team’s most devastating injury in franchise history
Most devastating injury in New Orleans Pelicans history: Anyone that has played for them and gotten hurt
The New Orleans Pelicans have watched a lot of players succumb to injury over the last few seasons. In fact, the team lost more player games to injury than any other team in 2017-18 — which includes DeMarcus Cousins’ Achilles tear — and ranked no lower than third in the two seasons prior.
The 2018-19 season has been no different, as New Orleans has seen the likes of Julius Randle, Elfrid Payton and Nikola Mirotic (before they traded him) all missed signigicant time due to an assortment of maladies. So are the Pelicans just unlucky? This Tom Haberstroh piece for NBC Sports may have revealed a deeper issue.
"This pattern isn’t a total anomaly if you ask rival team executives, who have long chided the Pelicans’ medical team for being run by “football guys” instead of those who have experience in the NBA. Fair or not, the Pelicans are fighting against a league-wide perception. “The organization only cares about the Saints,” one league exec told NBC Sports"
And then there’s this.
"The medical staff is also filled with football résumés. The Pelicans’ head trainer, Jon Ishop, was hired in 2010 after eight seasons with the Houston Texans. When Ishop left to go to the Pistons in 2016, Demps said “an organizational decision” was made to replace Ishop with Duane Brooks, who had been an assistant trainer with the Saints before being brought over to the NBA side (This summer, the Pelicans decided to part ways with Brooks after his contract expired, sources tell NBC Sports.). In August 2017, the Saints made national headlines after firing two orthopedists following a misdiagnosis of cornerback Delvin Breaux’s broken leg as a bone bruise. One of those fired physicians, Dr. Misty Suri, was serving dual roles with the Saints and the Pelicans."
That’s right, this team is so cheap that they think they can get by using the football training and medical staff.
Of course, this most recent example of the Pelicans’ incompetence as an organization won’t stop them from decrying the league’s “bias” against small markets. Either way, the ownership treating the Pelicans as a secondhand franchise, particularly when it comes to player health and injury prevention will cost the Pelicans dearly.
"The football-heavy influence on the training staff is something that has caught the eye of [Anthony] Davis’ longtime trainer, Marcell Scott, a New Orleans native who also works closely with Pelicans forward Jahlil Okafor. “Let the Saints be the Saints,” Scott told NBC Sports. “They get all the recognition [in New Orleans] anyways. As a city, we need basketball guys with basketball guys and football guys with football guys. That’s how you get better as an organization moving forward.”"
Davis’ time with the Pelicans is about done. It could have been avoided if the front office and ownership exhibited even the slightest hint that they could adequately run this team. Can we start taking bets as to when this team will become the Seattle SuperSonics?