Hello everybody and welcome to this, a long awaited new episode of The New Orleans Pelicans Are Playing Meaningful Basketball Tonight!
It's been a long and rough journey, hopefully all of us have made it through as unscathed as possible, and now the NBA has returned; tonight the Pelicans play their first real game inside the Bubble, and because of the fact that it is the first of 8 final seeding games, I have added a new 0-0 counter to the thread titles. This, along with the full season total in brackets, will be updated after each game as normal.
Finally: #PelicansGameday!
— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) July 30, 2020
vs Utah
⌚️: 5:30 pm CT
: @FOXSportsNOLA / @NBAonTNT
: @ESPNRadioNOLA
: Pelicans App#WontBowDown | @SmoothieKing pic.twitter.com/Fg5tObPQYe
Tonight we take on the Utah Jazz, which are in some ways the guys who started this whole thing; Gobert testing positive almost immediately after purposefully touching all the microphones and then potentially infecting Donovan Mitchell is what shut down the NBA in the first place.
I won't go into all the statistics really because we've played the Jazz in some memorable games this year and frankly it's been so long and we're in such different conditions that it's not really a 1 to 1 comparison from before the shutdown to now. That said, we did play the Jazz quite well in our encounters so far this season, and we didn't have Zion in either of those (Zion decimated Gobert in pre-season, though). Will Zion be enough to take us over the top and put us 1-0 in the bubble?
Speaking of Zion, he is still listed as a game time decision, however he was seen warming up with the team at shootaround so with any luck that game time decision is just a precaution and he will in fact be playing tonight. It would really suck if he wasn't, that's for sure.
So, let's hope Zion is back, let's hope for a win, and let's enter the bubble with a pop!