The Pelicans spent the summer mostly standing still, and that silence says plenty about where the franchise is right now.
After a 49-33 season in 2023/24 ended in a play-in playoff berth, New Orleans crashed hard last year. Injuries wrecked the 2024/25 campaign, and the Pelicans limped to a 21-61 finish - fourth-worst in the NBA.
That collapse cost former head of basketball operations David Griffin his job in April 2025. The next day, owner Gayle Benson agreed to bring in longtime former Pistons executive Joe Dumars to run the basketball operations department, and Dumars was formally hired two days after Griffin was dismissed.
The early read on the new regime has been pretty clear: there hasn’t been much regime-defining movement. Reports in the fall suggested Dumars was taking a hands-off approach to his lucrative new role, with new general manager Troy Weaver - Dumars’ first major hire - believed to be the driving force behind last summer’s trades. Even so, Benson and Dumars are the ones ultimately responsible for signing off on those decisions, and those moves drew plenty of scrutiny.
The first one sent CJ McCollum, Kelly Olynyk and a 2027 second-round pick to Washington for Jordan Poole, Saddiq Bey and the second-rounder that became Micah Peavy. It’s been a mixed return so far.
Poole’s first year in New Orleans fell short of expectations after a modest bounce-back season with the Wizards in 2024/25. Bey, meanwhile, outperformed his modest contract after returning from a torn ACL and missed all of 2024/25, and Peavy flashed some promise as a rookie.
The bigger swing came later, when New Orleans packaged last year’s No. 23 pick, Asa Newell, and an unprotected 2026 first-rounder - the more favorable of the Pelicans’ own pick or the Bucks’ - to move up to No. 13 and take Derik Queen. Queen had a promising rookie year, but the price tag made the deal an easy target.
That pick had a 90% chance of landing in the top eight and a 40% chance of becoming a top-four selection, and it ended up at No. 8.
Atlanta used it on former Houston guard Kingston Flemings.
That trade may take years to fully grade out, but the real backlash came from the process itself: New Orleans sent out the most favorable of two unprotected picks in a 2026 draft class that was widely viewed as loaded.
The front office did make a few more additions around the edges last season, bringing in Kevon Looney on a two-year, $16MM deal with a team option and DeAndre Jordan on a minimum salary. Together they played only 33 games in 2025/26, but they gave a young group some veteran presence.
Even with better health and a slightly different look, the results didn’t move much. The Pelicans finished 26-56 in 2025/26, good for the third-worst win percentage in franchise history at .317 and tied for the seventh-worst mark in the league.
At his end-of-season press conference, Dumars kept coming back to one theme: toughness. He wasn’t talking about one position or one skill set so much as the overall identity he wanted from the roster.
“ I would add more toughness to this team,” he said. “ We have to be able to compete every night.
We cannot get banged around, pushed around. We have to be physical and compete every night.
There were some nights we did it, but too many nights we didn’t compete at a high enough level for me. You can’t get past that in this league.
We have talent. But if you think you’re just going to roll talent out on an NBA court and that’s all you need to do to win, that’s not going to happen.”
He also made clear he doesn’t think New Orleans is miles away from being good. The problem is that the 2026/27 roster looks a lot like the one that just won 26 games.
That’s why this offseason has felt so quiet. Jordan was re-signed to a two-year, minimum-salary contract that raised eyebrows around the league, especially since the 38-year-old center appeared in only 12 games last season and hadn’t signed a deal longer than one year in several seasons. The Pelicans also added Kobe Bufkin, Christian Koloko and Caleb Houstan on non-guaranteed training camp deals, and Trendon Watford on a partially guaranteed minimum-salary contract.
There is one notable complication hanging over the books: New Orleans reached a two-year, $16MM agreement with Bennedict Mathurin, but that deal still hasn’t been finalized because of luxury tax and apron concerns, as Luke Adams detailed on Saturday in a Front Office story.
Jordan Hawkins has also come up in trade chatter and seems unlikely to be on the opening night roster. But he wasn’t playing a major role anyway in his three seasons with New Orleans, so moving him would be more about clearing salary to make room for Mathurin.
Dumars addressed the lack of activity last month, and his explanation was simple: the Pelicans were talking, but nothing moved the needle enough.
“ When you’re presented with deals that you can do, you’ve got to make a determination if this is going to make you better and add what you need,” Dumars said. “ The lack of moves being made right now is not from a lack of effort or us deciding we didn’t want to do anything.
We’ve engaged with a lot of teams this offseason. But there was just no big deal that I felt was going to make us better for us to pull the trigger on.”
New Orleans also made a coaching change after a rough start last season, firing Willie Green and promoting James Borrego to interim head coach. The team didn’t stick with that route, either, hiring defensive-minded Jamahl Mosley after Orlando let him go.
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