The New Orleans Pelicans exist in an uncomfortable situation… and that discomfort isn’t even an immediate reference to all the injuries which have afflicted the organization this past season.
No, the discomfort most centrally in evidence in the Big Easy is the gnawing sense that no one in the organization knows how to solve problems. There’s no clear path forward, no light in the midst of the darkness which engulfed this franchise over the past several months.
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Many Americans have just finished watching the excellent series, American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson. ESPN has its 30 for 30 on O.J. coming up in the not-too-distant future. This has been the year for O.J. trial reenactments and reminiscences, and for anyone who remembers that theater of events, one thought was fairly pervasive at the time of the verdict:
Did anyone grow or become a larger, more impressive person in the whole saga? In many ways, Robert Kardashian — who realized, deep within himself, that his longtime friend almost certainly committed those two murders — might have been one of the few people who changed in a valuable way.
For the most part, the circus of the O.J. trial unearthed a pervasive sense of helplessness about American life and justice: African-Americans were still going to be disadvantaged in the courts… unless they had O.J. Simpson’s money and celebrity, trappings of a “white” and corporate culture, to come to the rescue.
From the freeway chase to the verdict, the O.J. story didn’t offer much of anything in the way of hope, illumination, edification, a general sense that “the way things worked in America” was healthy or — at the very least — easily able to be mended in ways which would serve the nation’s citizenry.
A lot of time had been wasted with no hopeful way forward.
The O.J. Trial and the New Orleans Pelicans of the 2016 NBA offseason really are one and the same.
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First and foremost, it’s impossible to render a firm and definitive verdict on first-year head coach Alvin Gentry — not with the absurd number of significant and prolonged injuries which have affected this team. Start with Anthony Davis. Continue with Tyreke Evans and Eric Gordon. Thumb through the rest of the roster, and no core rotation player has fully escaped an injury which has cost the Pelicans several games — now well over 300, which is a rarity in NBA history. The Pelicans will finish the regular season with nearly 40 different starting lineups. No other team in the league comes close.
From that black hole of uninterrupted pain, no coach can be fully assessed. Coaches (managers in baseball) are only as good as their players. More precisely, they’re only as good as the number of options they have in managing starters and reserves in the combinations each game and situation require. New Orleans has had very little freedom in which to maneuver, so this season simply hasn’t been able to shed much light on what’s possible for every part of this project under Gentry.
Yet, with that being the case, it seems one person is already souring on Gentry: the man who hired him.
It’s hardly a secret in the league at this point: Dell Demps has harbored regrets about hiring Alvin Gentry. He enters the offseason distrusting the man he tabbed to replace Monty Williams, despite the avalanche of injuries which has turned the Pelicans into the equivalent of Egypt in Old Testament times.
The problem, of course, with all this is that when the general manager conveys doubts about the head coach he just hired, the GM is conveying doubts about his own job performance as well. It might be a reach to say that Demps’s paralysis at the trade deadline — when he refused to ship Ryan Anderson to Toronto and generally trim costs in order to set up an offseason restructuring process — was chiefly the product of self-doubt. One can be fair and say that in the face of injuries and unintended chaos, Demps should not have been expected to act at the deadline.
That having been said, Demps has to get off his dime in the offseason on multiple fronts. First, he has to arrive at what I might call a “mindset decision” on Gentry. If he’s going to spend the 2016-2017 season dropping hints of his displeasure at Gentry’s job performance, Demps should spare the organization that distraction and fire Gentry right after Game 82 goes in the books. Otherwise, Demps has to work to mend his relationship with Gentry. He has to put his views and feelings in a place the rest of the organization can respect. That’s the “mindset decision” Demps must make.
What hurts the Pelicans here — no, it’s not a player injury — is that a cluttered ownership-and-management situation (Tom Benson, owner of the NFL’s Saints, is also the owner of the Pels) paints a portrait of distraction and indecisiveness. Mickey Loomis, the Saints’ central decision maker, is also prominently involved in the Pelicans’ organizational structure.
That is one heck of a mess at a time when the organization needs clarity — for the sake of the way the team is operated, sure, but also to command the respect and trust of prospective free agents, who would like to play with Anthony Davis but can see how dysfunctional the Pelicans have become.
New Orleans is an empty place with no real winners. This is the O.J. Simpson trial of the NBA as the 2016 season comes to a close.
