-
Andrew LopezESPN
NEW ORLEANS — For the first two months of the season, the New Orleans Pelicans seemed to have little direction.
A season that started with hopes of postseason play seemed to get dashed early when Zion Williamson went down with a knee injury that has kept him out the entire year. Early on, injuries piled up and rotations were a bit all over the place.
By game No. 20, the Pelicans hadn’t had a player appear in every game. In game no. 28, the Pelicans fell to 6-22 in an overtime heart-breaker to the Brooklyn Nets in what was a franchise-high 13th consecutive loss.
Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry and his coaching staff changed some of the team’s defensive schemes. Since then? The Pelicans have won five of six games and won their fourth consecutive game on Sunday night with a come-from-behind 127-112 victory over the short-handed Houston Rockets.
In the last six games, New Orleans has the league’s third-best defensive rating and some of that can be attributed to having center Derrick Favors back to full strength. The Pelicans also started dropping their bigs in pick-and-roll situations and have started forcing teams into tougher shots.
“We were just overly aggressive, I think, at the start, and it gave guards in this league who are really good players an opportunity to get downhill against our defense,” Gentry said on Sunday night.
“Everybody makes adjustments over the course of the season and it’s something that we felt like it may work better for us, and we also got Fave back too. Having him back and having him involved where he can play 25 or 28 minutes has been a world of a difference for us.”
Favors missed five games with back spasms and then missed another seven games after the death of his mother Deandra just before Thanksgiving. He returned to the lineup on Dec. 13 and had his minutes restriction dropped by the team on Dec. 20. Since the restriction was dropped, Favors is averaging 10.4 points and 13.6 rebounds per game and he finished with 12 points and 16 rebounds against the Rockets.
While Favors has been a factor defensively for the Pelicans, a healthy Lonzo Ball has been critical for the pace of play Gentry wants to play at.
Ball has had some of his best overall games with New Orleans in the last five games finishing with one of the best performances of his career against Houston. Ball finished with 27 points — just two off his career high — while hitting a career-best seven 3-pointers. He also chipped in 10 rebounds for just his second career 25-point, 10-rebound game and finished the night off with eight assists and two steals.
In the last five games, Ball is 16-of-34 from deep and ranks second on the team in made threes and three-point percentage (47.1) over that span.
“I’m just getting my legs back,” said Ball, who wasn’t cleared until September from an ankle injury that ended his 2018-19 season with the Lakers. “I’ve been out for pretty much nine months before I got here, so I’m just trying to do what I can do to help my team out, and the defense is picking up as well.”
Gentry, who said before the season he wanted to play at the fastest pace in the league, praised Ball for picking the pace up back to where the team wanted it.
“He managed to push it and create open shots,” Gentry said. “I think he’s been playing well for us. He played exceptionally well tonight. He’s put in a lot of work on his three-point shooting: before practice, after practice, he’s spent a lot of time doing that, and you saw the results tonight.”
Another key part to the Pelicans’ quasi turnaround has been Gentry shortening and tightening up his rotations. New Orleans has tried to settle in on solid eight or nine-man rotation in the second half of games.
He’s also started to lean more on the Pelicans’ veterans — like Favors and E’Twaun Moore — over rookies Jaxson Hayes and Nickeil Alexander-Walker opting to give the younger players less minutes.
In Moore’s case, it’s been paying off but perhaps none more so than against the Rockets on Sunday when he finished with a season-high 25 points and hit five three-pointers. Moore, who has 12 coaches’ decision-DNPs on the year, played a big part in erasing a nine-point deficit in the fourth quarter as the Pelicans outscored the Rockets, 41-19, in the final frame.
“I’ve been through a lot harder,” Moore said. “That’s easy for me to keep focus and stay mentally strong, keep working on my game. One thing I say is ‘If you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready’ so I just keep going forward. That’s all it is.”
The Pelicans have caught some breaks in the last two weeks or so. They played Minnesota without Karl-Anthony Towns on Dec. 18, caught Portland on Damian Lillard’s worst-career shooting night from deep on Dec. 23 and have wins over Indiana and Houston in the last two nights while each team was playing on a back-to-back.
Houston was even without James Harden, Russell Westbrook and Clint Capela on Sunday.
But none of that means much to Gentry.
“We don’t have a pretty good guy either, and we haven’t had him for the whole year,” Gentry joked about not having Williamson. “You’re going to always miss guys. You can’t judge anything on anything other than how you play and how you approach the game. We could use that for the last 30 games. But I think the guy we’re going to get back is pretty good.
“Not having Harden, Westbrook and Capela out there is a factor but we can’t worry about that. We have to control what we can control and that’s how we play with the five guys we have on the floor.”