Being that they were eliminated in the play-in tournament by the Oklahoma City Thunder, the New Orleans Pelicans technically did not make the 2023 NBA Playoffs. But that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t learn a major lesson from it.
One of the central themes of the 2023 NBA Playoffs has been that if you are not primarily on the ball, or if you are not a center who can operate in dribble handoffs and pick-and-roll (a la Bam Adebayo and Anthony Davis), and you can’t shoot, you will be played off the floor.
We saw it in the first round in the Cleveland Cavaliers series against the New York Knicks.