The NBA schedule release usually gives fans a few clean little storylines to circle on the calendar. For the Pelicans, it landed more like a gut check.
Last season, the spotlight was on Brandon Ingram and CJ McCollum coming back to New Orleans. This time around, the marquee return is Kevon Looney on December 31, 2026. That alone says plenty about how strange the Pelicans’ offseason has been after a 26-win season.
A team that finished with 47 total wins across two years would normally spend the summer making major changes. Instead, the Pelicans chose to reshape the staff rather than the roster. Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver made that call, and the result is a roster that looks far too familiar for a team that badly needed a reset.
A coaching change was clearly part of the equation, and Jamahl Mosley should be an upgrade from Willie Green and James Borrego. But coaching is only one piece of a 21-win, 26-win mess. Treating it like the main fix creates a lot of pressure and a lot of expectations that may not match reality.
The bigger issue is that the front office didn’t move the pieces fans expected it to move. Zion Williamson wasn’t really a candidate to be dealt after a healthy and consistent season, and Dumars has backed him since arriving in New Orleans.
But what about Herb Jones, Saddiq Bey, or Trey Murphy III? The Pelicans never appeared interested in shaking up the wing group, even though that core hasn’t delivered anything meaningful.
The same goes for the center rotation of Yves Missi and Karlo Matkovic, which got no help.
So instead of talking about a Trey Murphy III return game or a Herb Jones return game, the biggest date on the schedule is Looney’s return, and the other notable one is Mosley going back to Orlando on February 2, 2027. Looney appeared in 26 games last season and was never a steady rotation piece. Mosley’s return, meanwhile, feels more significant for the Magic than for New Orleans.
That’s the bizarre part. After everything this fan base has already lived through, those are the headline changes.
Around the league, teams that missed the play-in tournament usually spent the offseason reworking something meaningful. The Pelicans did not. They brought back 14 of 15 players from last year and still have the same spacing problems and frontcourt issues they carried into the season before.
Now it’s on Dumars and Weaver to deliver. They’ve built a situation where anything short of competitive, winning basketball won’t be enough. If that doesn’t happen, their run in New Orleans could end up being the shortest front-office stay in team history.
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