The New Orleans Pelicans are 0-6 to start the season. Of those six losses, three have been by at least 30 points. No team in NBA history has accumulated three 30-point losses this early in a season.
The Pelicans rank 27th in offensive rating and 29th in defensive rating. They are playing "an unserious brand of basketball," longtime Pelicans reporter Will Guillory decreed Sunday evening. The players "seem to have given up on" head coach Willie Green, per Rod Walker at NOLA.com, who wondered if the coach's time was up. Green, the coach since 2021 and a holdover from a previous front-office regime, nevertheless kept his job during the offseason, which would have been the most natural time to replace him.
Even if Green is replaced, that hiring process will be handled by head of basketball operations Joe Dumars and his general manager Troy Weaver, who in their brief tenure in New Orleans have already startled peer executives with their incompetence, most notoriously with their moves on the night of the 2025 draft. On that date, the Pelicans traded their own unprotected 2026 first-round pick to the Atlanta Hawks, merely for the right to move up from No. 23 to No. 13.
In a memorable autopsy of draft night, under the section header "The League Does Not Respect Pelicans’ Decision Makers," Pelicans reporter Shamit Dua shared this anecdote:
When one Pelicans executive made the call to Atlanta, the Hawks couldn’t believe what was actually being offered. Atlanta asked for clarification multiple times to confirm the unprotected pick was indeed part of the deal. It got to the point where Hawks General Manager, Onsi Saleh, called Joe Dumars directly to confirm for himself.
Last week, the team started 37-year-old DeAndre Jordan at center, in a game during the 2025-26 NBA season. Despite the previous sentence, it is a season that the Pelicans do not intend to tank, because, again, the team threw away its pick for the upcoming draft, which looks full of potentially franchise-saving talents like Cam Boozer, AJ Dybantsa, and Darryn Peterson. The Pelicans gave up on a chance at those players for the right to draft Derik Queen, who by all current appearances is a dubious fit alongside franchise centerpiece Zion Williamson, given that neither player is celebrated for conditioning, defense, or shooting.
The scariest detail of all: Williamson is healthy after years of stops and starts, and he is just ... fine. He no longer looks like an offense unto himself. The longstanding hypothetical about what the team might finally look like with an uninjured Zion has been answered, and the answer, through six games, is uninspiring.
There is no salvation waiting in street clothes. Though the team is winless, it is overall quite healthy. Dejounte Murray is out rehabbing an Achilles injury, but in any case, he is not good. Recently he's been arguing at length on Instagram about how the mother of his child should inform him when she goes to clubs. She should not be "in clubs unannounced," according to Murray.
Hey, on the bright side, rookie point guard Jeremiah Fears looks sort of fun. Now the Pelicans just have to figure out everything else.
