Patience, shooting, big time trades! Lessons the New Orleans Pelicans should learn from the Celtics

Patience, shooting, big time trades! Lessons the New Orleans Pelicans should learn from the Celtics

patience shooting big trades those are the three biggest lessons the Pelicans should learn from the Boston Celtics winning the NBA title but there’s a trap with those lessons that the Pelicans absolutely need to avoid and it involves Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram I’ll explain in the Wednesday episode of Locked 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 everyday welcome to another edition of locked on Pelicans the daily podcast covering your favorite team the New Orleans Pelicans in 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 NOA Jake on Twitter here with you on this Wednesday the Boston south they’re enjoying their NBA championship and there’s three big lessons to learn but with the first one there’s a trap that you’ve got to be careful not to fall into that involves Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram and I’ll explain what that is coming up here in just a second today’s episode of lock on Pelicans is brought to you by FanDuel make every moment more right now new customers get $200 in bonus Bets with any winning $5 bet that’s $200 in bonus Bets with any winning $5 bet visit fanduel.com locked on to get started and of course thank you for making lock on Pelicans your first listen today and every day we’re here Monday through Friday the number one Pelicans podcast covering everything you want to know about this Pelicans team so please subscribe wherever you get your podcast join over 10,000 Pelicans fans on YouTube as well and becoming every day that means you listen Monday through Friday it’s deep in the offseason we haven’t taken a break at all we won’t through the draft through free agency maybe even not at all this offseason I’m enjoying doing the show so we might just keep it going 5 days a week which means I’ll have a lot of time for your questions and turning those into shows too so let me know in the comments down below what you want to hear I’ve seen a lot of people ask about Carlo movich EJ Liddell we’ll give you updates on them a little bit more in the future but let’s start with the Boston Celtics and the first lesson that I think you could learn from this team and that’s patience it took basically eight years for this Boston Celtics team to win this title the past couple of years there have been a lot of calls for the Celtics to break up Jason Tatum Jaylen brown but they stuck with it believed in their vision and now they’re NBA champions the parallel here is obvious right for the Pelicans keeping Zion Williamson and brand Ingram don’t trade one of them away but there and there’s something to be said for that when you look at recent breakthrough teams the Nuggets you know they stuck with it despite things not being working or just having a lot of adversity Malone the head coach of the nuggets was on the hot seat he missed playoffs the first three years there you know you put the right role players around your your core guys and look at what happens put the right role players around Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram and see what happens you know this team has dealt with injuries they’re seemingly improving in that regard if they can be healthy what could Zion and Ingram look like in the postseason there’s something to be said for just sticking with it complete you know trying to complete your vision and David Griffin did hinted some of that this off season his end of season media availability you know he said as a Duo while the three big guys Zion Ingram and CJ McCullum didn’t do well together when two of them were on the court they were doing quite well so you need to get those right role players to just kind of maximize everybody but I want you to think about the flip side of the patience lesson to be learned because there’s a trap with this the flip side of it is look at the Celtics they made multiple Conference Finals they made it to the NBA finals and lost that was a team that was showing far more promise than a team like the New Orleans Pelicans have with two playoff wins in the past four years to their name or three years whatever it is basically no team success here you know and for all those teams that broke through like the Celtics like the Nuggets how many teams didn’t go back you know to the early 2000s the Kings and the Lakers the Lakers winning titles playing the kings in the playoffs the conference championships and the Kings trying to break through and they never did and because they then kept trying to compete and compete and compete instead of moving on from some of their guys they went through a long rebuild until last season they hadn’t made the playoffs since before the iPhone existed think about that one here look at the Indiana Pacers they never got past the Miami Heat with Paul George with Roy Hibbert when he was really good and some of the other really good players that they had there look at Houston never getting past the Golden State Warriors and they had to go through 3 four five years of real bad team building to just get back to kind of being respectable again and they got a little bit lucky with some of the trades the lesson here is you don’t always break through you can hope for that but there’s no guarantee that just by sticking with Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram that it’s going to work you know Tatum and brown are two guys who shoot the threes you know they complement each other really well they’re both two-way players guys that you look at and go okay if we surround them with high level you know role players which you want to do on every team that maybe does something they defend so we can be an elite defensive team which the Celtics have been for a while they’re good offensive players that shoot the three and drive the ball so you can build a team identity around a lot of that you know do Zion and bi actually fit do they coexist in the way that you want patience can be a good thing yes and I think the Pelicans have aired on the side of patience there have been calls to trade Zion calls to trade Brandon Ingram and they’ve explored all of that prior to this off season and decided against it and again David Griffin talked about this at his end of season media availability saying we’ve aired on the side of continuity before what has that gotten us I think we finally got to see the team this year and it just wasn’t what we hoped even kind of at their best and that’s why he said it’s not a summer for complacency the Boston Celtics truly truly believed in Jason Tatum and Jaylen Brown These are guys that were making all NBA teams regularly Allstar games regularly that is not the case for Zion Williamson and not the case for Brandon Ingram either so when you look at it like that you don’t want to take the wrong lesson away from this one patience can be important I agree with that but is that the lesson to actually be learned here or is the lesson this team isn’t good enough and this pairing isn’t good enough in a hyper competitive Western Conference so let me phrase this again do Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram complement each other or is the lack of shooting three-point shooting from one both of them a big problem let’s let that question linger because shooting is the next lesson to be learned I’ve got some numbers for you some stats for you and I broke out the calculator to do some math on point differential let’s look at that because shooting is massively important and it’s a big reason why the Boston Celtics won this NBA title let’s look at that coming up here next in today’s episode of Locked on Pelicans right now though I’m excited to tell you about the Nola star Barts right down the street from the Smoothie King Center for all your pre and postgame Libations if you want to go watch the NBA draft you can do it there too because they got 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please subscribe wherever you get your podcast join over 10,000 Pelicans fans on YouTube as well want to make sense of the black and gold the Saints the locked on Saints podcast hosted by Ross Jackson is going to break down everything you want to know this offseason dere Carr may be going to be good I’m coming around on this a little bit go make locked on Saints part of the lock on podcast Network your team every day your second listen today so let’s keep talking about Lessons Learned From the NBA finals and the Boston Celtics the Champions they were the best team by far all season long basically wire to wire dominated the playoffs you can you can talk about maybe somewhat of an easy Road for them I don’t really care about that they were dominant all season long they were dominant in the postseason they are a deserving Champion there’s nothing to take away from them when it comes to any of this so we just looked at patience and patience also don’t fall into that trap just for the sake of patience because you saw the Celtics do it I don’t know if that actually applies to the New Orleans Pelicans here one thing that definitely does apply and it probably applies to everybody is threep point shooting and something that the Celtics did an absolute ton of this season the Boston and Celtics were the best three-point shooting team in the league pretty much by far they were number one in attempts per game 42.5 they shot the ball extremely well they were second in terms of three-point percentage at 38.8% 39% on 42.1 attempts per game by comparison the Pelicans who were a good three-point shooting team 38.3% 0.06 off right or0 6 off from the Boston Celtics number but they took just 32.6 uh three-point attempts per game basically 10 less than the Boston Celtics that was good for 24th in the league so the Pelicans despite how it feels were a good team last season but they didn’t shoot the three enough and it hurt them you know the Boston Celtics took more three-pointers than any NBA champion in history think about that when you factor in the Golden State Warriors 47.1% of their shots came from three point Point range in the regular season that’s a pretty incredible number to look at when you’re when you’re trying to kind of plan your team out and what you’re going to live and die by but they were a good three-point shooting team and now that they’ve won the title that’s a way that you can win now the Pelicans aren’t ever going to really hit that number partially because they play five out basically Five Guys on the perimeter that can all bomb threes with Zion Williamson you’re never going to get that Zion is a lead at The Rim he’s not a good three-point shooter you don’t want him being a three-point shooter you want him doing what he’s best at add in a little bit of a a mid-range game and we’ll be okay here but I want to look at the Pelicans in terms of three-point differential and how this hurt him the lesson here is take more threes invest in Shooters play your Shooters like Jordan Hawkins as well now this isn’t a direct comparison everyone on the Celtics could basically defend Hawkins is not a good Defender yet but you need more shooting the Pelicans were 28th in terms of threo attempt differential basically that is to say teams over the 82 game regular season averaged 6.1 more attempts from three than the Pelicans did that’s not makes that’s not percentage or anything like that it’s just pure three-point attempts teams took six more three-point attempts per game than the New Orleans Pelicans when you look at the opponent three-point percentage the pels did a very good job actually of defending the three-point line they’ve done that for a couple of Seasons now they were second best 35% is what opponent shot from three this year the problem was they took more attempts than you would have liked 38.7 again compared to 32.6 6.1 if you take that 6.1 attempts per game multiply it by the 35% from three you get an average of 6.386 s points per game Let’s round it up 6.4 points per game off of those three point attempts it’s essentially a one:1 ratio here so that is teams outscoring the Pelicans from three by a little by around six and a half points per game the Pelicans averaged a point differential of 4.4 points per game more than their opponent this season is actually in the top 10 of the league that was a very good number if you add in being outshot from three to that though so take the four .4 points per game more than their opponent add in the 3.5 right you basically when you get all the exact math it’s 10.78 so 10.8 points per game is what you could do if you just made them an even three-point shooting team with their opponent with how good they were at scoring in the paint and in other ways they don’t get out shot from three basically every game add even that up those teams are even from three so the pelons more or less get up to League average with that that’s a differential per game of 10.8 over an 82 Game season that would have been second best in the League this year and it’s actually close to the Celtics number which was dominant this season of a bit over 11 per game how many more wins does that add to the Pelicans 49 win total this year how many wins does that give you how many times did they struggle to score or did they have a big lead built up that eventually got Whitted away what if instead of it being a 20-point lead it was a 25-point lead or a 30 point lead so you can withstand that storm that tends to happen in those games you blow teams out you step off the gas a little bit other teams get back in it but you have that big lead and it’s okay so the final score is a little bit closer but not necessarily representative of the game as a whole how many more wins would the Pelicans have had if they shot more threes their stated number that they wanted to get to this season was 40 they said that publicly we want to take 403s per game I don’t think you should just put an arbitrary number on it like that but that’s what they said internally that number was 35 they wanted 35 attempts per game actually 32.6 was their number this comes down to Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram everyone else shot threes on this team for the most part when they played other than valent junis right you just can’t throw a lineup out there of three players Zion Ingram and Valen chunis that don’t take threes when you look at say those three guys who’s more like likely to change who could change and not hurt your offense you put Zion on the perimeter have him launch threes yeah you get that number up but that’s not a good process you want the right people taking the threes it’s Brandon Ingram that has been the biggest issue we’ve had with him and why he’s potentially on the trade market right this is a guy who’s seen his three-point attempts go down from 6.2 to 3.8 this season they need more three-point shooting it’s as simple as that you can keep the these two players Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram if Ingram is willing to change his shot profile you can it’ll be fine I would support it we’ll talk about that more this week but if he’s not going to it doesn’t work it’s not the same as just having patience with Jaylen Brown and Jason Tatum you need guys that are going to complement each other and right now Zion Williamson and Ingram haven’t proven it and that kind of leaves Ingram fair or not fair as the odd man out now I think you can keep them again we’ll talk about that more later in the week here but that’s got to change to his credit I think you’re seing some self-awareness from Ingram and his end of season media availability but they wanted him to shoot more threes this year and he didn’t and if he’s just not going to change that this pairing you can have all the patience you want you’re not going to make a Conference Finals you’re not going to make an NBA Finals you’re not going to win a title we just saw it from the Boston Celtics your shot selection needs to be smart that’s how you run away with the league they did they were really good it makes it easier to defend as well threep Point shooting outscored from three by over six points per game can you get that down to zero even we’re not asking for positive there just neutral that’s a really big deal for New Orleans that’s going to make it easier for Zion to score that’s going to put more pressure on opponent’s defenses that’s how you end up with an elite offense which then if you’re a longtime listener or really just even started this season offense and defense are interconnected as I have said for a very long time score get back get set force a turnover get out and run that’s what this team likes to do making your three-point shots taking those as opposed to mid-range shots that aren’t as good will go a long way towards doing that it’s it I I don’t want to say it’s that simple and it’s not a direct comparison of just shoot more threes there’s more to it than just that but when we’re looking at the Boston Celtics they took more three-pointers than any champion in NBA history that says something almost 50% of their shots were from three and they won won it running away dominating teams something to be said for that so coming up next big time trads chrisp zingis was the key for the one of the keys one of the keys for the Boston Celtics one could he be available and could the Pelicans go and get him actually but it also speaks to being aggressive and making tough decisions and that’s something that maybe the Pelicans need to look at that’s coming up here next in today’s episode of Locked on Pelicans today’s episode of lock on Pelicans is brought to you by FanDuel summertime means baseball now that the NBA finals are done too and more and you can bet it all on fuel right now new customers get $200 in bonus Bets with any winning $5 bet it’s 200 bucks you can use to bet on everything you want you want to get it on the draft in which player is going to go number one overall do you want 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on there to bring you the biggest stories without all the yelling lockdown supports today brings you can’t miss analysis opinions and news streaming 24/7 on YouTube with a free Amazon Fire TV channels app part of the lockd on podcast Network your team every day and of course becom an every day or a lock down Pelicans that means you listen Monday through Friday so one of the other things that won the Celtics the title is they were not complacent David Griffin said this is not a summer of complacency for the Pelicans either you know this offseason they went out and added Drew holiday trading future first round picks for him they made a significant trade to bring in christs porzingis in something that was really surprising they sent out Marcus Smart the guy who kind of built their culture right like he was the culture Setter former Defensive Player of the Year a homegrown drafted talent that was at times the heart and soul of that Celtics team but they knew they needed a big man who could shoot that was reliable and very unique and so they sent out a beloved player that was shocking at the time and brought in Chris STS porzingis you know I mentioned the five out style of basketball they played when you have a center that can shoot threes and give you Rim protection which porzingis does that was a big part of unlocking them and getting them good so was Drew holiday so was Dereck white and some of the other things that they’ve done too right pton Pritchard just hitting buzzer beaters all the time and those type of things but but porzingis was was a big part of it so was Dereck white so was Drew holiday all guys they traded for within the past two years this Boston Celtics team has never been complacent they’ve been willing to pay the luxury tax they’ve been willing to be aggressive and take gambles to improve their team traded away Marcus Smart huge gamble how does that impact the locker room how does that you know impact your defense all of those things and it was the right gamble it showed that their culture is not just one person that it is is a team thing that they’ve spent time building up culture is not necessarily an identity they it can be but it’s not necessarily in for the Celtics it wasn’t you trade away the defensive player year heart and soul and you don’t miss a beat and you get even better because they looked at this team objectively and realize the areas they needed to improve a lot of people are saying Brad Stevens is the finals MVP former coach turned to being their lead executive and it’s hard to argue with that with what he’s done to build that team that is very very good they’ve also made smart moves in extending their guys giving porzingis an extension Drew holiday an extension Derrick White’s about to probably get an extension too but eventually they will need to blow that team up a little bit this is the results of the new collective bargaining agreement the CBA there’s different levels to it maybe we’ll do a show on this if y’all want where we talk about you know the soft cap the hard cap the luxury tax the first apron the second apron and Boston is going to be pushing the second apron with this was limits their team building ability So eventually they’re going to need to trade some of these guys the clock has started ticking on them the second they won this title they’re about to hand Jason Tatum the biggest contract in NBA history and when you looked at them in games four and five porzingis didn’t play in four five he looked like the worst player on the court for them he was being targeted he’s hurt so there’s part of that but that also then means maybe the Pelicans need to look at some of these options too do you trade away a beloved player I’m not saying who that is I’m not saying they should necessarily to go get the guy that kind of unlocks your team just like the Boston Celtics did shoot porzingis would be perfect on the New Orleans Pelicans I was talking about trading for him last off season here on lockon Pelicans if you’re an everyday he would have been great next to Zion Williamson if you see a player like that go and get him and pay it’ll be worth it even if you have to trade away someone you absolutely love and it’s hard to part from go and be aggressive because that’s how you’re going to win at the in the NBA you have no choice if you fail you fail you’ll eventually have to rebuild no matter what just like the Boston Celtics will I’m not saying trade herb Jones Trey Murphy or any of the other players here but I think at this point you’ve learned no one should be Untouchable for the most part if the right offer comes along not proactively saying trade those people but if a deal comes along and you have the opportunity to trade future first round picks to trade away guys Jordan Hawkins Dyson D whatever it might be go and improve and compete that’s what we want to see here in New Orleans that’s what this team is imp position and kind of built to be able to do the Boston Celtics proved you have to be aggressive yes there is patience around your core guys but don’t have patience everywhere else if things aren’t working have a vision have a plan know what to do Brad Stevens was obsessed with playing Five out basketball they needed a center that could really truly let you do that while giving you defense there’s Al Horford but you know he’s been in the league for 17 years you can see his age on him as he played still good I’m happy he won a title but you could see his just kind of Aging go and get the players that are going to make you better you can keep Ingram you can keep Zion but go and get the center that you need the Cavaliers don’t want to trade Jared Allen make him an offer they can’t refuse does that include Trey Murphy herb Jones maybe but if that’s the player that unlocks things that I don’t think Allen is go and get that player even if it’s tough because that’s how if you want to try and win a title is what you’re going to do you want to be the e seed every year barely avoid the playing tournament every year keep doing what you’re doing you can do that that’s patience you can do that with this team but if you want to win a title if you want to be an upper ealon team you need to be aggressive I’ve been saying for a year or two now it’s time for the Pelicans to go all in they don’t pay the luxury taxs this year trust me you’re going to hear me ripping the team and it would be deserved the offseason is just just now today getting started this is when we start to think about a lot of that and expect to see some movement I think the Ingram situation will take a little bit of a while to get resolved as I talked about um recently unlocked on Pelicans I think on Monday but be aggressive go and improve the team do you agree do you disagree do you want patience do you not want patience let me know in the comments down below and that’s going to do it for this episode of Locked on Pelicans thank you all so much for listening as always I’m your host Jake Madison at Nola Jake on Twitter and I’ll be back with you all tomorrow

The Boston Celtics just won the NBA Title and the New Orleans Pelicans should learn lessons from them regarding Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram. Should the Pels have patience with their two stars? Jake Madison says they shouldn’t fall into a trap with that. Plus, how important is shooting for the Pels, and is someone like Kristaps Porzingis available in a trade?

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