Newsletter Subscribe
Enter your email address below and subscribe to our newsletter
The Pelicans Broke How I Understand Pro Basketball
Share your love
It’s unlikely that you spend much time thinking about the New Orleans Pelicans. However, as a New Orleans resident for whom ball is life, I am rather fixated on them. This team is far stranger than you may have previously understood. They suck in a singular way, and I’ve convinced myself to love them for it. No one else is doing it quite like this.
Any attention that was paid to the Pelicans by the broader NBA community last season was a result of one of the strangest trades in NBA history. This, you probably are familiar with: During the 2025 NBA draft, freshly installed Pelicans executives Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver traded an unprotected 2026 first-round pick in order to move up 10 slots and take Derik Queen at No. 13. The Pels could have picked Queen at No. 7, which would have aligned with the organization’s internal valuation of him, but instead they decided to give up an extremely valuable future pick for a smiley, versatile big man who absolutely cannot play defense. The pick they gave up almost became a top-three selection for the Indiana Pacers in a consensus three-player draft in 2026, but thanks to some ping-pong balls, it instead became the eighth pick and remained with the Atlanta Hawks. So who’s laughing now?
The Weaver-Dumars partnership is a particularly thrilling thread of this team’s current construction. Dumars—who last held an operations job for an NBA franchise in 2020, when he performed several jobs for the Sacramento Kings—worked at the NBA’s league office in Secaucus until the Pelicans hired him in 2025. In Detroit, where he last held a GM role, he flamed out spectacularly. Weaver also previously held the GM job in Detroit, and while he and Dumars never worked together, they arrived together in New Orleans as a kind of package deal. As GM of the Pistons from 2020-24, Weaver built rosters that compiled a 74-244 record. On his Hollinger & Duncan podcast, John Hollinger has called Weaver a “subcontractor” in the Pels’ GM job, effectively just being the right arm of Dumars.
