The New Orleans Pelicans have existed for 24 seasons now. (They were the Hornets for the first 11 years and they spent two seasons splitting time between New Orleans and Oklahoma City.) There have been some highlights in that run. Nine playoff appearances, with two series wins. The 2017-18 team pulled off a memorable upset over the Portland Trail Blazers.
Unfortunately, there have been some rough years in there. In 2004-05, New Orleans went 18-64. Only also truly terrible seasons from the Atlanta Hawks and Charlotte Bobcats kept them from being the worst team in the NBA.
The Pelicans have won more than 50 games once. They’ve been .500 or better nine times. Last season was the second-worst year in franchise history. This season isn’t shaping up to be any better.
New Orleans is 0-6 at the time of this writing and they’ve lost three of their last four games by more than 30 points. The worst part? They’ve been mostly healthy. So, this can’t even be blamed on injuries.
Quite simply: The Pelicans are awful and look like one of the worst teams in the NBA this season.
Adding to that ignominy: The Pelicans don’t have a first-round pick in the 2026 NBA Draft.
As recently as mid-June, the Pelicans had two picks in the first-round of the 2026 NBA Draft. They also had the seventh overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft. Despite coming off the second-worst season in franchise history, things were looking somewhat bright in New Orleans.
So, where did it all go wrong? Some will say that started with a trade made in the midst of the 2025 NBA Finals, and that was plenty bad, but things went sideways for the Pelicans long before then. Let’s look back at how we got here. Then, we can look at how New Orleans can move forward.
Despite being tied for the NBA’s seventh-worst record heading into the 2019 NBA Draft Lottery, the Pelicans vaulted to the first overall pick. This was followed by brand-new New Orleans front office executive David Griffin agreeing to trade Anthony Davis to the Los Angeles Lakers for a haul that included:
- Brandon Ingram
- Lonzo Ball
- Josh Hart
- the 2019 fourth overall pick
- 2022 Lakers first-round pick
- 2023 first-round swap rights with the Lakers
- 2024 Lakers first-round pick (deferred to a 2025 first-round pick).
In a series of related moves at the 2019 draft, the Pelicans selected Zion Williamson first overall, as was expected. New Orleans then traded the fourth overall pick in a deal that netted Jaxson Hayes, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, a protected 2019 Cleveland Cavaliers first-round pick and some second-round picks. (One of those second-round picks would later become Herbert Jones, which is a major win!)
In an effort to fast-track their post-Davis rebuild around Williamson, the Pelicans traded two second-round picks for Derrick Favors. The team then signed JJ Redick in free agency.
The resulting outcome for the 2019 opening night roster was:
- Derrick Favors
- Brandon Ingram
- JJ Redick
- Jrue Holiday
- Lonzo Ball
Josh Hart and Nickeil Alexander-Walker saw time off the bench. Jaxson Hayes was a DNP-CD, while Zion Williamson wouldn’t debut until late-January after tearing a meniscus in the preseason.
The Pelicans lost that night in overtime, which started a string of seven losses in their first eight games. The team finished the COVID-shortened season at 30-42.
Things haven’t gone a whole lot better since.
From that 2019 Draft and the haul from the Davis trade, New Orleans still has Williamson and Herb Jones. Everyone else has left town or been traded. The 2022 Lakers pick turned into Dyson Daniels. The 2023 swap rights never turned into anything, because Los Angeles was one-game better than New Orleans that season. The 2024 pick was deferred to 2025, and ultimately traded to the Atlanta Hawks in a deal that included Daniels.
So, what happened to everyone from that fast-track reset summer of 2019?
- Brandon Ingram played six injury-impacted seasons for the Pelicans before being traded to the Toronto Raptors at the 2025 trade deadline.
- Lonzo Ball played two injury-impacted seasons for the Pelicans before a sign-and-trade sent him to the Chicago Bulls in 2021.
- Josh Hart made it two-and-a-half seasons before he was traded to the Portland Trail Blazers at the 2022 trade deadline.
- Derrick Favors lasted one non-descript season with the Pelicans.
- JJ Redick played in New Orleans for a season-and-a-half before he was traded to the Dallas Mavericks at the 2021 trade deadline.
Ingram stayed with the Pelicans the longest, but things never really got better than his first season, when he was named an All-Star. Everyone else was gone after a couple of seasons.
It’s safe to say that the fast-track approach to the post-Davis rebuild didn’t work. But that didn’t stop the Pelicans from trying to right the ship with a roster built around Williamson.
We’re not going to go over everything the New Orleans Pelicans did after drafting Zion Williamson. Chaining together transactions is often an exercise in futility, because the NBA trade landscape is like sand in an hour glass. Every time it’s flipped, the sands fall a slightly different way.
But we are going to look at the next big trade, because it was a recognition that the team wasn’t ready to win. But it was another example of not making the most of trading away a valuable veteran player.
After moving Anthony Davis in a deal that led to the Los Angeles Lakers winning the 2020 NBA Finals, the Pelicans again influenced the title chase. New Orleans traded Jrue Holiday to the Milwaukee Bucks, who ended up winning the 2021 NBA Finals with Holiday playing a huge role.
In that deal, New Orleans again got a haul. In a complicated four-team trade, the Pelicans came away with:
- Steven Adams
- Eric Bledsoe
- 2024 first-round pick swap rights
- 2025 Bucks first-round pick
- 2026 first-round pick swap rights
- 2027 Bucks first-round pick
Let’s recap again!
- Steven Adams and Eric Bledsoe played one season for the Pelicans before being traded to the Memphis Grizzlies.
- The 2024 first-round swap rights turned into Yves Missi.
- The 2025 Bucks first-round pick was traded to the Portland Trail Blazers along with Josh Hart, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker for C.J. McCollum at the 2022 trade deadline
- The 2026 first-round swap rights were traded, without protections, to the Atlanta Hawks at the 2025 NBA Draft
- The 2027 Bucks first-round pick was traded as a least-favorable of Milwaukee and New Orleans to the Atlanta Hawks in a deal for Dejounte Murray.
Yeah…this one didn’t really work out either. Maybe Yves Missi will end up being a long-term starter or more. That would salvage things some. Adams, Bledsoe and McCollum never really had any sort of major impact for the Pelicans that mattered before they were all traded.
And that leaves us with those two Bucks picks. Spoiler: It’s not great.
Perhaps feeling pressure to try one more time to put a winner around Zion Williams, New Orleans Pelicans front office leader David Griffin went the trade route one last time. Griffin went to the Atlanta Hawks and came away with Dejounte Murray. This time, New Orleans was the one sending things out. That package included:
- Dyson Daniels
- 2025 Lakers first-round pick
- 2027 Bucks first-round pick as a least favorable of Milwaukee and New Orleans
- Salary fillers in the form of E.J. Liddell, Larry Nance Jr. and Cody Zeller
Ouch.
Daniels has blossomed into one of the NBA’s best perimeter defenders (Imagine having him AND Herb Jones?). The Lakers pick ultimately became Drake Powell. And, on the plus side, the Pelicans get the best pick in 2027.
But Murray, who was just starting a four-year, $123 million extension, has played a grand total of 31 games for the Pelicans so far. It’s no one’s fault that Murray tore his Achilles’ last season, but it’s another trade that hasn’t gone in the Pelicans favor.
Murray is now 29 years old, coming off a major injury and the Pelicans drafted his would-be replacement at the 2025 NBA Draft.
We’re almost to the 2025 NBA Draft, but we’ve got one more big trade to cover first.
The Dejounte Murray was one of the final big moves David Griffin made. His last actual trade for the franchise was sending Brandon Ingram to the Toronto Raptors in a deal that brought back:
- Bruce Brown Jr.
- Kelly Olynyk
- 2026 Pacers first-round pick
- 2031 Raptors second-round pick
Ok…this isn’t bad! The Pelicans weren’t re-signing or extending Ingram. There had been too many injury-marred years for that to happen, especially with Zion Williamson and his own injury issues still on the books. Brown and Olynyk were expiring salaries, so nothing lost there either.
The real get here was the 2026 Indiana Pacers first-round pick…until it wasn’t. Let’s go there now.
Following last season, the Pelicans let David Griffin go. They brought in Joe Dumars to lead the front office. Dumars hired Troy Weaver as his second-in-command. They pretty quickly made their trade by linking up with the Indiana Pacers. While the Pacers were in the middle of the NBA Finals, and before Tyrese Haliburton was injured, the Pelicans traded Indiana their 2026 pick back in exchange for the Pacers 2025 pick.
Sigh.
Let’s say you thought at the time that the Pacers were set up for a multi-year run, there still wasn’t much upside here. Even if you thought that in 2026, the Pacers would be sending you the 30th overall pick, you traded for the 23rd pick in the 2025 NBA Draft. That’s not a big enough jump in value to offset the potential that the Pacers unknown 2026 first-round pick had at the time.
And, of course, the Pacers are off to a rough start in what looks like a Haliburton-less 2025-26 season.
And, even if you could excuse this low-upside move with a “Who could have known?” shrug, it gets worse.
At the 2025 NBA Draft, the Pelicans took that 23rd overall pick and combined it with the best of their own pick or the Milwaukee Bucks in the 2026 pick to trade up in the draft to select Derik Queen with the 13th overall pick.
Big, long, exasperated sigh.
Now, to be very fair, this space is a big fan of Derik Queen. But that’s in a vacuum. On this Pelicans roster next to Zion Williamson? That’s not a good fit. Queen’s best traits are his ball-skills, scoring and playmaking. He’s not an impactful defender nor a dominant rebounder. If Queen’s a five, you need a rim-protecting, rebounding four next to him. If Queen’s a four, then you need those same things at the five.
There isn’t a world where Queen and Williamson are a great fit together. That makes trading up for Queen an iffy proposition all on its own.
But to give up the best of your own or Milwaukee’s pick makes this an Defcon 1 level of emergency. (And yes, 1 is when things are most dire on the Defcon scale.) And New Orleans doesn’t even get the worst of the two picks! That one goes to Milwaukee. A complete, unmitigated disaster.
It’s only been two weeks, but the Pelicans have been awful this season. Again, they’ve lost three of their six games by more than 30 points. Only the existence of the fully rebuilding Brooklyn Nets and only slightly-less rebuilding Washington Wizards may keep New Orleans from being the worst team in the NBA. Even then, who knows how the 2026 NBA Lottery may play out? You don’t have to be the worst team to get the first pick. Just being near the top of the lottery odds will have you in the mix.
Let’s pause to recap what has happened here since mid-June.
The Pelicans traded away the Pacers 2026 first-round pick. Then they traded the rights to their own first-round pick.
Two weeks into the season, the Pelicans pick projects to be second overall, with the Pacers pick at fourth overall, pre-Lottery.
Even if you say “Well, the Pelicans have no reason to tank, so they’ll win some games” and “The Pacers won’t be this bad all year”, how good do you think those teams will be? The Pelicans are in a deep Western Conference where wins will be very hard to come by. The Pacers injury list is getting longer by the day. They might see this gap year as the best chance to add a big-time talent next to Haliburton for years to come.
That’s where you counter with “Well, if the Pacers didn’t have their pick, they would have no reason to tank”, and that’s fair. But you also have no idea what the Pacers would have been, or will be, this season. Maybe the injuries become too much to overcome. It wasn’t worth getting the 23rd pick in the draft, especially with what followed.
The bottom line: The Pelicans could have had two top-five picks pre-Lottery and now they have none. That’s horrendous asset management, no matter how you try to spin it.
By now you should have the sense that things are a mess in New Orleans. We didn’t even mention the curious trade of C.J. McCollum’s expiring contract for Jordan Poole. Or signing Kevon Looney using a large enough chunk of the Non-Taxpayer MLE to hard-cap themselves at the first apron. Or keeping Jaden Springer out of the preseason, then waiving him merely a couple of days later. Or picking up Jordan Hawkins 2026-27 rookie scale fourth year team option for $7 million when he’s far down in the rotation pecking order.
The Pelicans could have had their own pick and the Pacers pick in a loaded 2026 NBA Draft and somewhere around $50 million in cap space in the 2026 offseason.
Instead, the Pelicans have no picks in the 2026 NBA Draft and they are well over the cap, and not that far from the luxury tax.
It’s not hyperbole to suggest that the very future of NBA basketball in New Orleans is in the balance. The arena situation is one of the worst in the NBA. The league doesn’t want teams relocating, but they also don’t want teams playing in outdated arenas. Attendance has regularly lagged near the bottom of the NBA. Unless things change here, we’re going to hear chatter about forcing the Pelicans to relocate growing louder.
A big part of the attendance problem is that Pelicans fans haven’t had a whole to cheer for. Anthony Davis was a generational superstar. He asked for a trade. Zion Williamson was supposed to replace Davis as the franchise player and next generational superstar, but he can’t stay on the floor.
The cap sheet is kind of a mess. David Griffin and crew had the foresight to protect themselves when they signed Williamson to his current max deal. But the only way you get any benefit there is by waiving Williamson. As rough as things have gotten, a straight waiver of Williamson seems unlikely over the two years left he has beyond this season.
Dejounte Murray has two years left on his deal after this one. We have no idea what he’ll be when he returns. Jordan Poole has one more year left after this one.
That means that for this season, plus a couple more, there are major salaries sitting on the books. And, not to beat a dead horse, but the team has no draft picks this year.
Now, there is some good news! Trey Murphy III and Herb Jones are on good-value deals. Yves Missi is interesting. Jeremiah Fears and Derick Queen should be good players, despite the investment made to acquire Queen.
If the Pelicans are going to make this work, they have to exercise extreme patience. Yes, this year is going to be bad without any benefit. But it’s really hard to put spilled milk back in the bottle. That milk is gone. Trying to replace it with orange juice in your cereal just makes everything worse.
Take your lumps. Chasing upgrades won’t make this better. And we have no reason to believe that the people making those decisions on trades should have our trust in doing it well.
Next season, you have your own pick. It’s probably going to be another rough year, but you have your own pick. The 2027 Draft doesn’t project to be as good as this year’s, but there are some really interesting prospects looming in that class.
In addition, Poole will shift to an expiring contract next summer. Murray could be on an expiring deal, as he could opt out at the end of next season. And Williamson’s contract remains protected in the team’s favor, which is where we have to look next.
It’s time to move on from Zion Williamson.
Williamson is incredible when he’s healthy, but that’s so rare, that it almost doesn’t matter. He’s also already lost some explosiveness, which suggests his game may not age very well. This is Year 7, and sad as it may be, it looks like it’s never going to happen for Williamson.
Find a trade, if someone wants to take the chance that they can figure out how to keep the talented forward on the floor. If there isn’t a trade to be found, the Pelicans should waive Williamson next offseason.
It’s time to begin the process of cleaning up your cap sheet and resetting the franchise fully. The Pelicans tried. They really did. They traded away All-Stars, got nice returns, but didn’t make it work. When they’ve tried to add talent, it’s gone even worse. But it all orbits around Williamson and the fact that he never got there as a top-tier, doesn’t-matter-who-else-you-have, superstar.
Build around the value deals of Murphy and Jones, and the young group of Fears, Queen and Missi. Heck, start those five together and see what you have. You’re going to be bad and pick-less anyway, might as well be bad and pick-less with a point to it. Give the fans a reason to buy into your young talent. They’ll come if they have a reason to believe again.
Starting over isn’t just what the Pelicans need to do for basketball reasons. It’s what’s necessary to save NBA basketball in New Orleans.
.png){kind=small}
NEWS
© USA Today Sports
© USA Today Sports
© USA Today Sports
© USA Today Sports
© USA Today Sports
© USA Today Sports