Recently-retired L.A. Clippers TV broadcaster Ralph Lawler coined the axiom “Lawler’s Law,” which dictates that in an NBA game, the team that first reaches 100 points usually wins. The 2019-20 New Orleans Pelicans hope to popularize something one might call “Somak’s Score.”
At a mid-July press conference, Pelicans Executive Vice President of Basketball Operations David Griffin noted that the team’s analytics director, Somak Sarkar, “likes to say that our games are going to be the first team to 95 (points wins), and we’d like that to be the case.”
For a score in the upper 90s to translate to likely success for New Orleans, however, the Pelicans will need to greatly improve their defensive performance compared to last season, when they finished 22nd among 30 teams in efficiency (allowing 112.