Things are actually good for New Orleans Pelicans but there are obvious areas for them to improve

Things are actually good for New Orleans Pelicans but there are obvious areas for them to improve

We’re almost at the allstar break so let’s take stock of the New Orleans Pelicans where do they Excel where do they need to improve over the final stretch of the regular season it’s a post Marty grow a Wednesday episode of lock on Pelicans let’s Go you are locked on Pelicans your daily New Orleans Pelicans podcast part of the locked on podcast Network your team every day welcome to another edition of locked on Pelicans the daily podcast covering your favorite team the New Orleans Pelicans at NBA part of the locked on podcast Network your team every day

Available wherever you get your podcast and available on YouTube I’m your host Pelicans Insider credential member of the media Jake Madison at Nola Jake on Twitter here with y’all on the this Wednesday day after Marty gr day here I hope you had a fun carnival season ate a

Lot of king cake and are recovering today but it’s Valentine’s Day and the Pelicans play it’s a game day for your New Orleans Pelicans here in the Crescent City they take on the Washington Wizards they’re likely to win that game so we’re not going to focus on

That one too much and instead I want to take stock of kind of where this team is right now is this a good team a bad team are they reaching their ceiling are they not what are they great at where do they need to improve and how that’s going to

Influence this off season and actually the rest of what we see this year here so we’re going to break it all down in today’s episode of Locked on pelicans and of course thank you for making locked on Pelicans your first listen today and every day we are here

Monday through Friday the number one Pelicans podcast breaking down everything you want to know about this Pelicans team so let’s dive into it here becomeing every day listen Monday through Friday that’s the other thing I needed to say here so let’s get into some of this here I want to start with

This this is something I’ve been saying because you know if you are part of like Pelicans twist Twitter Pelican social media you know in the different areas here you can see a lot of kind of Hysteria after losses and I and I don’t think that’s like the majority of people

So I’m not calling people out I’m not trying to make this a thing it’s just sometimes I think there’s some overreactions there and so I want to kind of speak to that a little bit because look this team is good you know I even see it on the YouTube comments

And things like that after losses even after that win over struggle of a win right struggle of a win over Memphis but even then it’s a win that’s the important thing right this team is still good right now at 32 and 22 when I’m recording this that’s 10 wins over 500

You know they’re on Pace for 48 49 wins this season it’s actually like 48.6 so let’s go 48 49 win Pace this year if you look at it in terms of 48 wins that’s only happened three times in franchise history there have only been three seasons with 48 or more wins in the

History of like New Orleans basketball that’s saying something here now they might not reach that pace they could even get ahead of it right they’re winning about 59 60% of their games right now so this is very possible that they can kind of keep moving forward and

Kind of being a top four season let’s call it in franchise history that’s before you get into the playoff to see maybe what damage they could do there think about that for a moment right when you’re looking at in the context of just this franchise which is not only what we

Want to do we want to look at it in the context of the league as a whole right now this is a really good season that doesn’t mean you should be just only satisfied with that doesn’t mean that if you know they they get bounced out or

Swept in the first round you just go okay whatever it was a top four year no that’s not true but this team is doing something in their winning games and I don’t want that to be forgotten here you know they have the 13th best offense the seventh best defense and for the most

Part when this is maybe the most incredible thing and is leading to this right they’ve been healthy for the most part this season they’re doing some some load management with Zion Williamson with Brandon Ingram and it’s worked you know CJ missed a number of games with a punctured collapse long whatever you’re

Calling it and now Dyson Daniels is out injured but overall and Trey Murphy wasn’t healthy to start the year overall this team has been healthy and it’s leading to some really good things for the team when you look at it they actually have the ninth best um net

Rating so one of the things we look at if you’re if you’re new to the show you know I use some of the advanced statistics analytics whatever you want to call them net rating is one that I like I like offensive rating and defensive rating versus points scored

And points allowed because if you play with a faster Pace right if you get pace is essentially the the measurement of the number of offensive possessions you get per game more offensive possessions means more chances to score likely meaning that you’re going to have if you’re at least decent a higher points

Per game than a team with a slower play Pace fewer possessions fewer chances to score but that doesn’t mean that that slower off offense is worse right and if you look at an NBA game teams share the same Pace if you get an offensive possession your opponent gets an

Offensive possession so net rating is just your offensive rating minus your defensive rating right that’s what that number is the number to really truly be considered a title Contender is six six or better positive six or better and that kind of puts you in the running with that the Pelicans right now have

The ninth best uh net rating at uh positive 3.8 that’s pretty good overall they’re not necessarily in Championship contention but they’re not horrifically far from that either and way I want you to think about this is does this team look great to you right like does this team scream like they’re playing their

Best basketball and this is who they are you know you look at some teams in the league and I think when you look at that you’re like yeah that’s exactly who they are Minnesota 37 and 16 right they’re 21 games above 500 is exactly that team

They don’t have another gear to get to to get even better they’re good now don’t get me wrong but they can’t necessarily improve right you look at Sacramento at 30 and 22 do they really have room to improve I don’t think so some other teams might Golden State’s

Getting better Lakers getting better a little bit but not necessarily you also have Dallas who’s improving Phoenix who’s improving but some of these other teams don’t the Lakers don’t they are who they are I shouldn’t have said that they so I think when you look at that it

Gives you optimism that this team can improve that they can get better right and we’ll talk about ways they can do that in the next segment here with some of the areas that I think that are holding them back and we’re going to look at the starters in the next bit

Here because I really want to kind of dive into some of that because they haven’t been great and if you figure the starters out which maybe you can do maybe you can’t this team has so much more potential again they’re winning games at like a 59% rate what if that

Jumps to like 65% something like that that pushes you into 50 win territory if this team just figures a couple of things out if not necessarily when you’re seeing growth from herb Jones right CJ McCullum has been amazing this year with everything that he’s done and the consistency that he’s had for this

Team so this team is good they’re not amazing they’re not a title contender in my opinion they have a lot of room to grow still it’s just a matter of will they hit that point or not we’re going to find out over these final after this

Game it’ll be 27 games left to go post All-Star break assuming they win this one against the uh Washington Wizards tonight and they should because that team is bad so coming up next again let’s keep that in mind that this team is good let’s look at the starters

Because their numbers are odd odd to say the least we have a large enough sample size to kind of Judge this so I’ll tell you what the starters net rating is it’s not what you think that’s coming up here next in today’s episode of Locked on Pelicans right now though I’m EXC

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Locked on sports today now available on the free fire uh Fire TV channels app all right let’s look at the starters as I said this team is good but I don’t think they’re reaching their full potential do you think they are let me know in the comments down below let’s

Look at the starters one of the stat sites I use is called cleaning theeg glass.com costs like 50 bucks a year it’s great if you like NBA statistics and diving into things here it’s one of the better statistics websites out there right now one of the things they do is

They’ll look at lineups for you and they can analyze the net rating for those they can quantify a lot of the different stats and put them into like quartiles so you can sorry percentiles so you can kind of compare them to similar lineups around the league and it gives you an

Idea of of everything here so that’s what I think is important when it comes to all of this so let’s look at the starting lineup of CJ McCollum Brandon Ingram herb Jones Zion Williamson Jonas valent chunis that is your starters they have played the most possessions by far

For the New Orleans Pelicans at 730 the team has played a sh four less than 5,000 possessions total $ 4996 all right their net rating is us 2.2 so they’re getting outscored by 2.2 points per 100 possessions when they’re out there on the court together that is

Not a good number here here’s how your starters are supposed to work for you right your starters are supposed to be your best starting five the guys that work the best together that goes out and builds you builds you a lead if you’re a good team and then what you hope is when

Your subs come in when you go through a rotation right you don’t normally just run full lineup changes where it’s five Subs all out there on the court they’re kind of threaded in it’s called a rotation for a reason with guys rotating in and out and not just full on

Wholesale line changes like in hockey do they even still do that in hockey I don’t actually know so you don’t see that really right but you want your starters to build that lead and then when Subs start coming in to just maintain it if they cannot lose a lead

And they have a kind of Net Zero you’re happy with that so your starters not doing that and other lineups needing to be the ones that are doing the work for you is really concerning overall with this team so let’s look at the offense here and so the Pelicans starters are scoring

118.5 points per possession that is slightly better than what they’re doing as a team which is 17.8 so a little bit up there s better that like kind of weirdly puts them still at 13th best in the league if you compare it to all teams now if you were to look at other

Team starters they would lag and probably be way behind all of this right because we’re comparing just this starting five number to A team’s total number when that’s probably being dragged down by subs and other guys and so keep that in mind right that this starting lineup is You could argue maybe

One of the worst ones in the league in terms of net rating doesn’t mean Talent it’s just it’s kind of weird right you know the defense is what’s really struggled here they give up a 120.7 defensive rating the team has a 13.8 defensive rating that would put the

Pelicans with the 25th worse so you’re getting a bottom five territory defensive rating that’s the Wizards that’s the Pistons and other in and Charlotte real bad teams here that’s not working and that’s why at the trade deadline you saw them really looking to maybe move on from meonis funes they

Just feel that defensively they can’t do what they want with him out there on the court even though he’s in some very good defensive lineups to be perfectly honest with you so they they look at that and just go okay we’ve got to make a change

We’ve got to mix up the starting lineup you know maybe it’s get rid of Jonas valentus maybe it’s just put Larry Nance Jr in there and see what happens and look that lineup with Larry Nance Jr with the other four starters instead of yonis Val chunis has a net rating of 4.6

So it’s better than with JV significantly smaller sample size than that but the offense is actually worse it’s the defense that’s significantly better keep that in mind so there isn’t really a perfect solution here right you’ve got to score points but with Larry out there though that group

Struggles so so what do you do right you’re past the trade deadline you can’t move on from yonas Valen chunis here at least not right now we’ll revisit that in the third segment here so what do you do you know at this point I don’t know

If the idea is start n over valent Unis they were experimenting with that in the second half of games third quarters that didn’t really work you know there’s been talk of her herb Jones maybe getting bumped out of the starting lineup for Trey Murphy but when you look at herb

Jones in his three-point percentage right now and compare it to that of Trey Murphy who’s in a heck of a slump it doesn’t really work and Trey’s defense has been bad this season where herb Jones has just been freaking awesome as he often is Herb Jones is shooting

41.1% from three after the last game now Trey Murphy is down to 35. um sorry 36.8% Zion Williamson is a shoot is shooting a higher three-point percentage than Trey Murphy tre’s doing it on almost seven attempts per game herb by the way is only taking 3.6 so it’s about

Double the volume there that’s worth keeping in mind too but her with the way he’s shooting the three you got to keep him in there the answer to this question this problem that they have I think and has been for a while is not yonas Val

Chunis I got a text message from someone the other day that was like what would you do to fix the starting lineup and I was like I don’t know and this was maybe uh so this was I I’ve gotten two one was a couple of weeks ago and I was like

Okay maybe you you just start Trey instead of her you got to try and do something to try and make your starters more effective then I got asked this question the other day and instead of saying the same thing of well put Trey in for her because I don’t think that’s

The answer right now I don’t think really anyone would think that’s the answer right now it’s run a different style of basketball right that I think has been part of the problem is the offense and we talked about this in yesterday’s show if you’re an everyday or has just not looked cohesive right

Like they have not looked particular great and in sync they’re getting it done with kind of like pure talent right bran Ingram is a score Zion Williamson is a score Jonas Val chunis can be a Bruiser down low and CJ’s having one of the best years of his career in my

Opinion but when you look at this right in terms of three pointers less than a third of all of their shot attempts with that starters is coming from three it’s 31.3% that’s lower than the Pelican average which is already low and in the bottom quartile of the league they’re

Not taking enough threes when you look at three-point rate as a team which is basically percentage of field goal attempts from three point range as a team it’s 36.5% that’s 25th worst in the league like that’s not a good number here right you need that number to go up you need

That to space the court for Zion Williamson so what you’re forcing this team to do is not take the most efficient shots they take a lot of shots from mid-range and that’s really not what you want they also get a lot of shots at The Rim which is good if you

Refin the shot selection this team would look I think entirely different one of the things we’ve talked about here is you hear the saying that like good defense leads to easy offense you get a steal you get out in transition you run that’s really high efficient offense but the reverse can be

True right if you make a shot your defense gets back and gets set and can be better prepared to defend and this team has been very good good overall at doing that you know when they get into the half court this is a team that can

Defend pretty well they force a lot of turnovers they are eighth best at forcing turnovers in the league right they get a lot of steals they get a lot of blocks they can get out and run and do all of those things you know they’re

One of the top teams when it comes to deflections and things like that so when you see that you really want this team to kind of I’m trying to find where’s the the play context for their half court defense here CLE glass is amazing y’all you know so if you make your shots

You can get back and get set and I think that would significantly improve this team and what they’re capable of doing right they don’t have an amazing field goal percentage so they’re missing shots and teams are able to get out and run against them and that’s been I think a

Problem for them so if you can get them into better situations not allow as much transition offense against them and that’s happening against them here where teams are gaining about four points per possession in transition against that starting uh group when you can get them

Into the half court they can be I think a little bit better and a little bit more effective and do some of the work you need and that’s just simply done by getting better offense right that’s where you want to see more Point Zion and running the ball through him which

They say and then they never do for a variety of reasons we want to see Brandon Ingram shoot more threes took six the other night that’s good had that game where he he blew it out of the building and was just draining threes and going crazy and then he’s he took

Two four combin the next two games and it was a struggle offensively for this team they need to get better about making the offense more cohesive and figuring it out I don’t think the answer is simply just take a guy out of the starting lineup put someone else in I

Don’t even think it’s as simple as take Jonas Valen chunis out put Jered Allen in right that’s a Band-Aid yeah that would make your defense better I don’t doubt that but if you’re offense still isn’t functioning like it should yet Jared Allen helps but he doesn’t fix the

Problem right that’s treating the the the symptom not like the root cause of everything and that’s what you need to be doing and that I do believe still is the offense that’s where I think this team has a lot of room to grow this defense no matter what has been proven to be

Good get the offense going that defense I promise you will get even better but the starters have been clunky around that I think run it through Zan have have brain and Ingram be more of a spot up three point shooter is going to open things up for this team and that’s thus

Going to make the defense better and that’s when I think you’ll start to see this team reach some of their full potential but that doesn’t mean this team’s done even if they do all of that so let’s talk about how this relates to the how the remainder of the this season

Is going to relate to the offseason that’s coming up here next in today’s episode of Locked on Pelicans right now though I’m excited to tell you about eBay Motors I actually really love this one passion drive and patience what brings home the winning trophy is also what keeps your ride or

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Well and let me know if you want to support the channel comment down below we got a couple of days off so I need your questions what do you hear what do you want to hear covered on the show this coming week I’ve got us planned out

Through the end of the week here we’ll of course recap the game tomorrow Friday I want to look at the burning questions going forward for this team what are the three biggest questions we have and we’re going to look at that in Friday’s show that we want to see over the course

Of the remainder of the regular season so we’ve talked about where this this team is is good this team’s good I I mean that like they truly are not amazing but good the starters could get better there’s room to grow there I don’t think just swapping out a guy is going to

Completely fix things so now what right like now what well I think when you look at this team you know this is your opportunity to really identify you’re you’re in a unique opportunity here you know you’re in an unique opportunity where it seems almost like assuredly this team would make the play

We would think right that’s that’s counting our chickens before they’re hatched here certainly but it right now this team is fifth they’re again good they’re six and four in the past 10 games they’re likely going to bump that up to like seven and three when you win

This one over the um Washington Wizards hopefully this team’s been healthy you know it would be tough for them to kind of fall out in terms of the standings and everything here like they’re in a very good spot about a four game cushion over the plane tournament that’s

Actually a lot of games over 27 or so games of the what’s going to remain in the regular season here so they’re in a unique opportunity to be good knowing that you can make some noise do some damage do a couple of things here but likely aren’t going to be a true title

Contender but again what is holding this team back they feel it’s the center position okay I don’t know if it is necessarily I think there’s other things holding them back but when you get into the playoffs in a playoff series you’ll certainly be able to really figure that

Out right like they’re in a unique position where they can go into the postseason and we can see if they’re going to be doing a good job or not it’s re you know really a simple as that we’re going to be able to kind of discover if this is a team that the

Center position is holding them back or is it the cohesiveness between Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson or is it they need a point guard to run the offense more so I don’t think it’s that that’s my personal opinion you may disagree let me know in the comments down below so I

Think by getting into the postseason even if you get bounced out you’ll at least have the data to know the right move to make at that point as I’ve said before I don’t think trading away right now Jonas valunas would have made this team better you get into a playoff

Series and realize like no you’re going you’re going to lose because of him cool at least you know that then I think that’s likely to happen but we don’t know for sure at least then you kind of get answers to some of these questions here and then you make better and more

Informed decisions off of that in the off season when there’s far more moves available to be made this team has ducked the luxury tax they don’t need to worry about that this year which means if they want big if they can kind of push forward right like if this team

Doesn’t reach its full potential this year right if we end the season being like the offense still look clunky and just like never figured it out you have to make changes you have to maybe make dramatic changes then what those might be who knows but then at least you know

You need to do something because you finally had a healthy season and you saw how this team did in the playoffs maybe Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson crush it in the postseason together that then changes your off your offseason game plan and what you want to

Do maybe one of them struggles that then changes what you want to do this off seon right like those are the type of things that I think we’re going to be looking at here with this team so I’m glad they didn’t really make any move at all at the trade deadline and instead

Are going forward and Gathering data on this team to make the best most informed decision that they possibly can if that means they need to break up Zion and Brandon Ingram at least we’ll finally know instead of just having years of like what could have been now you got to the postseason it

Didn’t work we can safely make that determination now that’s I think what we’re going to get a lot of clarity if you will at the end of this season and I think when you look for years in the future that’s a really important thing here let me know what you think in the

Comments Down Below on YouTube YouTube or on Twitter at Nola Jak and let me know the questions you want to hear answered on lockdown Pelicans in the coming week all right go recover from Marty gr day I think we all need that a little bit looking forward to the game

Tonight happy Valentine’s Day if you’re going to be with your loved ones and instead doing that totally get it my loved ones is all of you and Pelicans basketball so I’ll be there in the Smoothie King Center for the game tonight all right that’s going to do it

For this episode of Locked on Pelicans as always I’m your host Jake Madison Nola Jake on Twitter be back with y’all tomorrow to recap the game

The New Orleans Pelicans are almost at the All-Star Break so let’s take a moment and take stock of where the Pels are at. Jake Madison thinks this team is good with some obvious areas to improve upon. And how do they get the starters to work around Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram? Plus, how will the rest of the regular season impact the offseason for New Orleans?

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