The NBA's most interesting teams: Can Zion Williamson take Pelicans to another level?

As the start of the 2022-23 NBA season grows nearer, I’m taking a closer look at some of the most interesting teams in the NBA (to me, if not necessarily to anyone else). After starting out in Denver, our trip continues to New Orleans, where one of the league’s brightest young lights is ready to reintroduce himself.

After they snagged C.J. McCollum at the 2022 trade deadline, the New Orleans Pelicans’ most frequently used lineup featured the former Trail Blazer at the point, top scorer Brandon Ingram and lockdown rookie Herb Jones on the wing, and bruising center Jonas Valanciunas with spring-heeled mystery box Jaxson Hayes up front. The alignment worked well: New Orleans torched defenses to the tune of 123.5 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions in that lineup’s minutes, according to Cleaning the Glass — head and shoulders above the league’s best offenses.

Small-sample-size warnings will always come attached to a unit that didn’t crack 150 total minutes. The way the lineup was put together made sense, though: McCollum and Ingram operating in the pick-and-roll and drilling midrange jumpers; Valanciunas setting rock-solid screens and attacking the offensive glass; Jones slicing through open cutting lanes to the rim; Hayes providing vertical spacing off screens and finishing like an elite roll man. The ecosystem that McCollum’s arrival allowed head coach Willie Green to create helped propel a New Orleans team that opened the season 3-16 all the way to the playoffs.

This season, the Pelicans will swap a different hyper-athletic power forward into that ecosystem. With all due respect to Hayes, the new guy’s a pretty big freaking upgrade.

When last we saw Zion Williamson healthy, it looked a hell of a lot like somebody created The Juggernaut in NBA 2K and spent all their VC on upgrading his ball-handling package. The No. 1 pick in the 2019 NBA draft became the first player to average at least 25 points per game while shooting 60 percent from the field since Charles Barkley did it in 1990. He scored more than 20 a night just in the paint — the first time somebody had done that since prime Shaq.

Only seven other players have ever scored as much and as efficiently in a season as Zion did in 2020-21. Six of them have won MVPs: Barkley, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic. The seventh, Adrian Dantley, is in the Hall of Fame.

Zion was 20, doing that — on a team that, outside of Ingram and sometimes Lonzo Ball, lacked shot creators and 3-point shooters, and while playing, by some accounts, well above his listed weight. (Which, if we’re being honest, probably didn’t help the burgeoning foot issues that would wind up costing him the entirety of the 2021-22 season.) He returns to a better team in a better situation, reportedly in better shape and a better headspace, with an opportunity to get right back to dropping jaws all across the basketball-watching world.

Amid the excitement, there are causes for concern. How will the Pelicans find an offensive rhythm when Williamson, who used 28.3 percent of New Orleans’ offensive possessions in 2020-21, shares the floor with Ingram and McCollum, both of whom posted usage rates north of 30 percent last season? One possible answer: Jack up the pace. Without Zion last season, the Pelicans finished 20th in average length of offensive possession, according to Inpredictable; with him healthy two seasons ago, they ranked seventh. The more possessions you have, the more ball-handling and shooting opportunities there are to go around — and the more damage your top three playmakers can do to opposing defenses.

And they are going to do damage. This year’s Pelicans might not exactly be Splash Brothers Southeast, but the presence of McCollum, Ingram, second-year swingman Trey Murphy III (who shot 38.2 percent from deep as a rookie, 44.3 percent after the trade deadline, and just under 50 percent in NOLA’s Round 1 loss to the Suns), reserve guard Devonte’ Graham, and occasional stretch-5 Valanciunas (just ask the Clippers how he gets down) should provide Zion more space to operate on the interior. And Zion, in turn, should get his teammates the kind of looks that make shooters salivate.

Just look at how much attention Williamson drew on this second-quarter drive in his preseason debut against the Bulls — four defenders encircling him, leaving McCollum, a career 39.6 percent long-range marksman, open in the corner:

If you’re looking for a way to bolster a long-range attack that ranked just 28th in the NBA last season in 3-pointers per game and 27th in team 3-point accuracy, leaning on a perpetual mismatch who demands extra help and can spoon-feed teammates Pop-a-Shot-caliber looks seems like a decent start.

The bigger questions lie on the defensive end — Zion improving his attention to help responsibly and using his explosiveness to be a menacing weak-side rim protector would be a huge help — and, as ever, whether an athlete whose very dimensions flout the laws of physics can get and stay healthy. So far, so good, evidently: After a year of rehab following foot surgery and months of offseason workouts that reportedly have him “much closer to his college weight of 285 pounds than the estimated 300-plus he carried through the 2020–’21 season,” Williamson is back on the court and, as new teammate Larry Nance Jr. told reporters during training camp, “He looks like the same wrecking ball we all know and love.”

Well, defenders might not love it all that much:

That version of Zion — the one who gets into the paint at will, finishes damn near everything, and devours the offensive glass when he doesn’t; the one who’s too quick for burly bigs, and too physical for everyone else — could elevate the Pelicans’ offensive ceiling from middle of the pack to middle of the top 10. Especially if, after all that time away, he’s coming back with even more in his bag than he had when he left.

“I’m gonna show the world things that I’ve had in my arsenal that I didn’t show before,” Williamson recently told Howard Beck of Sports Illustrated.

The Pelicans have staked an awful lot on the notion that adding that arsenal to a team that had the same point differential as the Warriors when Ingram and McCollum shared the court will vault the franchise to a level of contention that it hasn’t reached in 15 years. This summer, despite the checkered injury history that’s seen him miss far more games (141) than he’s actually played (85) in his three pro seasons, they gave Williamson the richest possible extension of his contract: a five-year “designated rookie” deal that will pay him at least $193 million. If Zion meets the criteria for the “Derrick Rose Rule” escalator clause — winning MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, or a spot on one of the three All-NBA teams this season — that number soars to more than $231 million.

The deal comes with caveats: a prior injury clause and conditions for games played, plus weight- and body fat-based incentives aimed at keeping Williamson committed to his conditioning. But it also represents a mammoth commitment to a roster rebuilt largely in Zion’s absence, but with his presence in mind. With Williamson, McCollum and Nance all newly extended, Ingram in the third season of the five-year re-up he signed in 2020, and recent draftees like Jones, Murphy, folk hero Jose Alvarado and 2022 lottery pick Dyson Daniels all under team control for the foreseeable future, New Orleans has its core locked in place — and plenty of options to explore.

Green can lean into brontosaurus ball, dispatching combinations of Valanciunas, Zion, Hayes and Willy Hernangomez to pulverize opponents on the offensive boards. Against pull-up-shooting guards who can target Valanciunas in drop coverage, the coach can flip the script, inserting the more mobile Nance and maybe even toying with small-ball looks — say, Nance up front, Ingram, Jones and Murphy or Naji Marshall on the wings, and Zion at the point — that A) can switch everything and B) ain’t actually all that small.

The Pelicans have possibilities now; that’s what the return of a talent of this magnitude brings. That, and a weight — the expectation for an organization to elevate, the pressure for a franchise to perform. For his part, though, Zion doesn’t see it that way.

“The thing is, I’ve never felt the pressure on the court,” Zion told Tres Dean of GQ this summer. “I love basketball, man. I don’t feel pressure when I’m doing what I love, you know?”

Pressure probably doesn’t feel as acute when you’re the one inflicting it, and some 17 months since his last NBA voyage, Zion Williamson’s about to get back to doing that. A man who can fly is doing what he loves again; with a little luck, he and New Orleans might finally get to have that dance.