Herb Jones enters next season with more riding on it than anyone else in New Orleans.
The Pelicans are rolling almost everything back after a 26-win season. Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver brought back 14 of the 15 players from last year’s roster, made no free agent signings, swung no big trades and added no first-round draft picks.
The only real change is on the sideline, where Jamahl Mosley is in as the franchise’s next head coach. For Jones, that kind of continuity is a chance to reset after a rough 2025-26 campaign and show the Pelicans they were right to extend him last summer.
That extension suddenly looks a lot more complicated than it did two years ago.
Jones has now posted two straight seasons of regression, and that’s a dangerous trend for any player, especially one in his prime. At 27, he should be climbing, not sliding. Instead, he’s coming off a season in which he shot 38.3 percent from the field and 30.9 percent from three, averaged below 10 points per game and appeared in 56 games.
A couple of seasons ago, Jones looked like one of the league’s rising defensive stars. He made All-Defensive first team, hit 40 percent of his threes and finished top five in Defensive Player of the Year voting.
That version of Jones was a difference-maker on both ends. The version New Orleans got last season was not.
Health has been a major part of the story. Jones has dealt with a lot of injury issues over the last two seasons, and while that explains some of the decline, it also raises the stakes.
His game depends on physicality, toughness and using his body to its fullest on defense. If the health problems keep stacking up, the downside only grows.
Mosley’s arrival gives Jones at least one clear advantage. The new coach comes in with a defensive reputation and a history of empowering players on that end of the floor.
For a player with Jones’ defensive tools, that matters. It gives him a real path back toward the form he showed in 2023-24.
What Mosley can’t fix, though, is the shooting.
Jones was at his best when he could lock down elite scorers and still punish defenses from deep. That combination made him one of the most valuable role players in the league.
Lately, he’s lost both pieces of that formula. The shoulder problems likely played a part in the drop-off from 2023-24 to the last two seasons, but if the shot doesn’t come back, the contract becomes a much bigger issue.
Dumars extended Jones at nearly $23 million annually. If the outside touch stays broken, that deal starts to look a lot less like a reward and a lot more like a problem. Even with his defensive value intact, Jones can turn into a negative on offense fast without that three-ball.
So next season isn’t just another year for Herb Jones. It’s the season that may decide whether he remains part of New Orleans’ future or heads toward a disappointing end with the Pelicans.
In Other News...
Pelicans Enter Camp With One Roster Tension Still Hanging Over Them
Training camp is close enough now that the Pelicans roster picture is starting to take shape, and the latest move only sharpened the edges of it. New Orleans sits at 17 confirmed players after adding Kobe Bufkin on a training camp contract, with one standard roster opening and one two-way slot still on the board as the team sorts through how it wants the group to look when camp opens.
The balance on the roster is already clear enough, with six guards, five wings and six bigs in the mix, but there are still a few places where the front office could choose to keep working. New Orleans has been weighing trades and additions to shore up certain positions, and the lingering question is whether the final moves come on the wing, in the frontcourt or somewhere else entirely before camp competition really begins. [Read more 🡒]
Pelicans Just Gave A Summer League Standout A Real Chance
Kobe Bufkins summer with New Orleans has turned into something more than a tryout. After joining the Pelicans for Las Vegas Summer League, the free agent guard has now earned a chance to stick around in camp, giving the team a closer look at a player who has already bounced through a few NBA stops since Atlanta drafted him in 2023.
For the Pelicans, the appeal is obvious: Bufkin brings a fresh guard option into a roster picture that still has openings to sort out, including a two-way spot. He has NBA experience with the Lakers and has also spent time with Brooklyn and South Bay, so this is not a pure flyer on an unknown name. It is a chance for New Orleans to see whether a strong summer can carry over when the real competition starts. [Read more 🡒]
One Pelicans Trio Worked While Another Exposed The Same Old Problem
One useful snapshot from last seasons Pelicans numbers came from a trio that actually fit together: Saddiq Bey, Herb Jones and Zion Williamson posted the teams best three-man net rating, a sign that New Orleans can still find workable combinations around its best pieces when the spacing and defensive activity line up. For a roster that is expected to look largely the same next season, that matters, because the margin for error will again come down to which groups can survive long enough to matter.
The bigger question is whether the new coaching staff can sort through the same puzzle more quickly than the last one did. New Orleans has enough talent to believe the right blends are in there, but the challenge is figuring out which lineups can lift Williamson instead of crowding him, and which ones create the kind of problems the Pelicans spent too much of last season trying to solve. [Read more 🡒]