Zion Is Disrupting The NBA

The New Orleans Pelicans are the best team in the West right now and Zion is leading the charge.

If you’ve been following the standings in the NBA, you’ve probably noticed that the New Orleans Pelicans are at the top of the Western Conference.

They’ve been giving their opponents work and have beaten some of the best teams in the league.

For instance, they beat the Phoenix Suns twice over the weekend. They also dominated the Golden State Warriors, the defending champs, by 45 points earlier this season (albeit, the Warriors’ stars did take a rest day).

But how are they so good?

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Last season, we started to see improvements with the team when they traded for Portland Trailblazers’ vet C.J. McCollum, who led that unit to their first playoffs sans Zion Williamson.

And we had a feeling that they would continue to get better because, ya know, Williamson was making a return.

But for them to be this good? I don’t think many people expected it.

So, again, how are they so good?

How The Pelicans Improved

Well, the first thing is that the majority of the players had an entire training camp together and the coaches had an entire off-season to make adjustments to their playbook.

The second thing is that Zion came back way, way better than expected.

He missed an entire season to deal with a foot injury and he barely spent any time working on his basketball skills (well, not as much as he would have had he played in 2021-22). 

But he came back with more skills and body control, which his teammates have noticed.

Speaking to reporters during pre-season, Brandon Ingram praised his teammate’s improved defence and said that Zion is more willing to get after it on the defensive end.

Via Slam:

“You know what I’ve seen differently, especially on ball, is his defensive awareness,” Ingram told ESPN before the Pelicans’ preseason game versus the Miami Heat. “It looks like he has it in the back of his mind to have the effort on that end. That’s going to be something big for our team – We know we can score the basketball. But if everybody is defending and setting examples for everybody to go out there and defend, then that’s going to be much more difficult to beat us.”

Through 21 games, he is currently averaging a career-best of 1.2 steals a game and grabbing 7.2 rebounds a game. In addition to that, he’s still outputting phenomenal numbers on the offensive end. He’s averaging 25 points on 61 percent shooting.

Oh, and his court vision is better as well. He’s currently averaging a career-best 4.2 assists per game.

A lot of this improvement, according to McCollum, has to do with Zion’s comfort on the court.

Via The Score:

“He’s done the work, obviously. You can see he’s starting to be more comfortable. I think the last seven or eight games he’s looked like Zion, right? An MVP-caliber player."

Zanos is playing great basketball right now and is leading the charge in his team’s success. But can they keep it up? And will this great play continue in the postseason?

Zion insists that they will.

“We're No. 1 in the West right now," Williamson said. “I know, to a lot of people, it's not a big deal because it's early in the season. But for us to kind of have that ranking right now, that's big and we want to not only hold onto it, but build on it.”

Final Thoughts

I also think that they can keep it up.

The reason is that they’ve been winning a bunch of these games without Ingram, who missed a handful of games early in the season due to concussion protocols and has missed the last seven games due to a toe injury.

Zion has also missed some games, too.

So, once all the stars get healthy, this team will be way better than what they are now. 

And that’s going to be scary for the teams that will face them (just look at how much disruption they did in the playoffs last season).

However, I don’t think the Pelicans are a championship team yet (conference and league).

I think they’re still too young and lack playoff experience. They need to get a few more rounds under their belt -like what the Oklahoma City Thunder had to do back in the early 2010s- before they can make it to the Finals.

It will take a bit of time and a lot of patience, but Zion, Ingram, and the Pelicans will get a championship parade in the near future.

But that’s just my opinion. Do you think this Pelicans’ team will win a title in the next 5-8 years?

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