Well we lost to the Jazz. It was a close loss, but the way we played in the second half was pretty disgraceful on both ends of the ball. Lonzo, Favors, and Ingram all shot worse than 35% from the floor, Ingram and Lonzo (who are both at least decent shooters now) shot a combined 2/12 from 3, and nobody outside of Lonzo and Jrue played any consistent defense. Zion was an effective scorer and had a few nice passes but was a none-factor on the glass and despite a handful of decent defensive possessions here and there, was largely a defensive liability. We should have won, we lost. MOVING ON.
Back in action with another #PelicansGameday!
— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) August 1, 2020
🏀: vs LA
⌚️: 5:00 pm CT
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Today we play the Clippers. The Clippers are missing Montrezl Harrell and Lou Williams, which should be a big deal: those two combine to make probably the most effective offensive bench duo of the last decade and the fact that neither of them are there should be an opportunity for us to take advantage of a team that will have an inconsistent offensive flow.
Whatever each of us thinks of it, and this is not the place for debate anymore, we now know that Zion will not play heavy minutes. It seems reasonable to assume that he will play slightly more than he did last game, but not much more: I'm expecting a rise from 15 to 20 minutes, something like that. So while we may not like it, at least this time we are going into the game knowing that this is the case, and we should temper our expectations thusly.
Hopefully we can pick up a win tonight. We don't need to catch up to Memphis but we do need to out-win Portland, and they won their first game; we can't fall to 0-2 when they're 1-0. That's a recipe for real disaster and time is running out for us to pick up wins. It has to be now. If we lose tonight we would basically need to go 6-0 to even have a chance, barring a weird Portland disaster.
Let's go and get it done. Make up for the Jazz game.