Pelicans approach offseason with little resources

The NBA season has come and passed and the top 16 teams in the league will now proceed to the always-exciting spectacle that is the playoffs.

Will the Heat three-peat? Will the Pacers dethrone the champs and begin a reign of their own? Out West, can Chris Paul and the Clippers establish themselves as an elite championship contender? Or are the aging Spurs still the cream of the crop among teams West of the Mississippi River?

We’ll find out all of these answers in the next two-plus months as basketball takes the spotlight and becomes the sport garnering most of the headlines in national sports.

But while all of this occurs, the New Orleans Pelicans will sit at home.

They will do so without a championship roster, without the salary cap money to build one this summer and several questions concerning whether the pieces in place fit into the franchise’s long-term plans.

Of course, the team does employ Anthony Davis – a legitimate Top 10 player, if not Top 5 player in today’s NBA circles. But with little-to-no adequately priced help around Davis, the team has a lot of questions as they aim to rise from the doldrums and ascend to the playoff picture.

Let us start with the elephant in the room – Eric Gordon.

The Pelicans’ shooting guard is being paid to play like a high-end, top-flight NBA starter. But statistically, Gordon is everything but dominant. He was actually woefully overpaid for the entirety of the past season.

In 2013-14, Gordon averaged 15.4 points per game and shot just 43 percent from the field. Those numbers, my friends, rank Gordon outside of the Top 50 in the NBA in scoring.

Of course, there is more to basketball than scoring, so one would maybe assume that Gordon earned his inflated, $58 million contract by being a defensive ace or a distributer.

He is neither. Gordon was analytically one of the Pels worst perimeter defenders. His 3.3 assists per game are also far below where they could be.

It’s easy to blame Gordon for being overpaid, because he is. But his struggles are no fault to his own. When I watch the Pels play, I see a guy who is just physically nowhere near where he used to be on the basketball floor. Since signing his fat contract, Gordon’s knees have continued to crumble to the state where they are now downright bulky. He is scheduled to undergo another operation on his knees this week after ending his season injured – again. This leads me to believe that it will only continue to go downhill from here.

Luckily for Pelicans’ fans, Gordon is only on the books for two more seasons.

Gordon is the easy target because of his price tag. But he’s not the only sore spot within New Orleans’ roster.

What about Tyreke Evans? Was he worth the $44 million price tag the team signed him to last offseason? Or would the team have been better suited saving its cash and using it to get a player at a different position?

I feel better about Evans than I do about Gordon, but I think they are struggle to make one another better. That’s a hard dilemma to have with a pair of players eating up that much of the salary cap.

Likewise, what about Jrue Holiday? Sure, he’s a nice player – a good, solid NBA starter. But was he worth two first round draft picks and cap space?

Let us play pretend for a moment that the Pelicans had kept their pick in 2013 (6th overall) and used it to pick Michael Carter-Williams or Trey Burke (two players on the board during their pick).

Wouldn’t the team be better off with a rookie, a top-flight pick in 2014 and freedom from Holiday’s $41 million deal – money that could be used to restock the team’s roster? Holiday is a solid player, but he’s not a Top 10 NBA point guard. He’s just not. If he were, the 76ers would not have given him up so easily.

Then there’s the dilemma about coach Monty Williams. In my opinion, Williams is a decent coach, probably somewhere around the Top 15-20 in the league. But when names like George Karl, Stan Van Gundy, Lionel Hollins and Avery Johnson are on the shelf, one has to wonder whether it’s time to make a change.

Williams has always coached depleted talent. That is a fact. But his rotations are mind boggling at times. And his defensive-first personality just doesn’t fit a roster that is suited to play a fast-paced tempo.

Of course, the counter to my argument are injuries. Admittedly, the Pelicans were not 100 percent for the entire 2013-14 season. No team in the entire league had more nicks and bruises than New Orleans throughout the year.

But even if at 100 percent health, would New Orleans have been 15-16 games above .500 to make the playoffs? If so, would they have been good enough to challenge Oklahoma City or the Spurs?

My answers to those questions are probably not and definitely not.

And that’d be just fine if New Orleans had a plethora of salary cap space to tweak its roster for the better.

But barring trades or unforeseen circumstances, the Pels don’t have that space and are going to have to roll with the players that they have.

To me, that’s an equation that equals the team being out of the title hunt for a long, long time.