The recent tidal wave of trade rumors involving Zion Williamson and the Pelicans is a great example of how nothing can sometimes portray everything going on with an organization.
The rumors started flying a week ago when The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported on the Pelicans’ interest in moving up in this year’s draft to acquire G League Ignite prospect Scoot Henderson. With the Pelicans owning the 14th pick, a move up to the top-3 would almost certainly require New Orleans to include one of its two young stars — Williamson or Brandon Ingram — to get a deal done.
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From there, speculation about Williamson’s future with the Pelicans has run rampant. There have been new reports from different sources daily about the likelihood of Zion being on the move and the level of interest New Orleans would have in making such a deal.
Ultimately, Zion getting traded before Thursday’s draft is fairly unlikely, multiple league sources tell The Athletic. Each was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss potential trades.
The Pelicans have been enamored with Henderson for quite a while. They were able to see plenty of him while reviewing tape of his former G League Ignite teammate Dyson Daniels, who New Orleans took with the No. 8 pick in last year’s draft. But to this point, the Pelicans have yet to even include Williamson in any formal offers made to the teams holding top-3 picks, league sources tell The Athletic. There have been varying reports about how much interest Charlotte or Portland would even have in shipping off the No. 2 or No. 3 picks in a potential Williamson trade.
Ingram being included in any trades before Thursday’s draft seems even less likely, considering the catastrophic effect it would have on a locker room full of young players who have praised his leadership in recent years. Head coach Willie Green has been even more effusive in his praise of Ingram over the past two seasons.
“Every night, he’s putting us on his shoulders,” Green said of Ingram in April. “I firmly believe, and the rest of us believe, B.I. is one of the best players in the NBA.”
It was telling that Ingram attended Game 5 of the NBA Finals last week in Denver with Green and Pelicans wing Herb Jones. Considering Game 5 was the same day as Charania’s initial Pelicans/Scoot Henderson report, it was a clear indication of how much the team is still invested in Ingram. Williamson’s absence made it much easier to envision him as the more likely trade candidate in any attempt to move up on this year’s draft.
Pelicans head coach Willie Green and his guests, Brandon Ingram and Herb Jones!#NBACelebRow pic.twitter.com/DQVuW90vJ1
— NBA (@NBA) June 13, 2023
Still, even if Williamson isn’t moved before Thursday night, that is far from the end of this story. It’s only the beginning, as behind-the-scenes tensions between Williamson and the Pelicans have intensified over the past few months.
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The biggest question surrounding all this hysteria shouldn’t be how likely the Pelicans are to trade Zion. It should be why the discussion has been allowed to linger as long as it has.
It’s almost unfathomable to think a 22-year-old with Zion’s talent, who’s on the first year of a five-year maximum contract extension, could possibly have his name thrown around in trade discussions. The last time we saw Williamson on the court, he was playing the best basketball of his career as the Pelicans soared to the top of the Western Conference in December. During that month, he played 12 games and averaged 29.8 points, 7.5 rebounds and 5.1 assists while shooting 61.3 percent. Those are beyond video-game numbers. He had the Pelicans looking like true contenders in the West, despite Ingram’s absence through all those games.
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Yet, the discussion of Willamson potentially getting moved this offseason has persisted for weeks.
As a point of comparison, fellow 2019 draft class member Ja Morant has turned into somewhat of a toxic figure in NBA circles due to his off-court transgressions over the past six months, which have earned him multiple suspensions. However, if his name started getting tossed around in trade rumors, the Grizzlies would quickly squash the idea before it gained any momentum. Despite many of his transgressions, there’s no questioning how much reverence and fierce loyalty Morant has earned from his peers within the Grizzlies organization.
The Pelicans have not been as proactive in their pushback to these Zion rumors. Does this mean they’re ready to get rid of him? Not necessarily. But the difference reveals how Williamson hasn’t reached the same point as Morant with his franchise quite yet.
Much of the reason for that concerns how rarely Zion is even on the court. If Morant, who was drafted right behind Zion in 2019, ends up serving his 25-game suspension to start next season and Williamson makes it through his first 25 games unscathed, Morant will still be ahead of Williamson in regular-season appearances by more than 100 games. Then there’s Morant’s 19 postseason games through his first four seasons, compared to Williamson’s zero. While Williamson was playing at an MVP-level once he found his rhythm last season, he missed the final 45 games of the regular season due to a nagging hamstring issue. It brought his total to 194 games missed through the first four seasons of his career.
As if having a superstar talent sidelined that often wasn’t difficult enough, frustrations within the Pelicans’ organization have only increased over time due to the belief that Williamson hasn’t always put himself in the best position to stay in shape and/or recover from injuries when they occur. In April, Pelicans EVP of basketball operations David Griffin even said he thinks Williamson can do more to avoid some of his injury issues in the future.
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“I think there is a lot he can do better. And he would, I think, tell you that. I think we need to do a better job examining the whole situation top to bottom a little bit better,” Griffin said when asked about Williamson’s injuries. “I think putting him in the best position to succeed is important. And I think his participation is a big part of that.”
Since he entered the league, Williamson and the team have been engaged in an almost constant back-and-forth over his playing weight and physical shape, especially when he’s out due to injury. The disconnect between Williamson and the organization is rooted in much more than the injuries themselves. There’s often been tension over his rehabilitation process and how the team has handled getting him back on the court in a timely fashion.
Much of that tension is centered around the frayed relationship between Williamson’s camp and Aaron Nelson, who has been in charge of the medical/training staff during Zion’s first four seasons. In a shakeup first reported by NOLA.com, Nelson is no longer expected to lead the Pelicans’ medical/training staff this upcoming season. While recovering from his hamstring issues this past season, Williamson voiced a desire to work with other medical staffers on the team rather than Nelson, league sources told The Athletic. (They were granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of Williamson’ injury recovery.)
It’s a move Griffin seemed reluctant to make at the end of the season when he said, “What I don’t want is the narrative about our team is, ‘Oh my God, they have to fix the medical situation.’ No, we have to fix a lot of stuff. We have to do a whole bunch of things better. That’s just a part of it.”
But the issues between Williamson and Nelson date to Williamson’s rookie season, when he returned from a torn meniscus that cost him the first three months of the 2019-20 season. Once Williamson was finally cleared to play, the team put him under a strict minutes restriction based on quick “bursts” that limited his ability to play for long stretches. Williamson even admitted publicly how much the minutes restrictions bothered him in August 2020.
“It’s very tough, to be honest,” he said then. “Because as soon as I start to break that sweat, I look over and that horn is for me and I have to come out the game. Also, when I do catch the flow of the game, that horn goes off and it’s for me.”
The friction between Nelson and Williamson’s camp persisted from then and has only worsened since. Those close to the Pelicans star forward certainly embraced the news of changes being made within the Pels’ medical/training staff. However, multiple league sources told The Athletic that Williamson wasn’t the only Pelicans player to welcome a shakeup in that department, either.
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Will Nelson moving to a different role solve some of the injury issues that have plagued New Orleans the past few seasons? Most likely not. But it is an indication that New Orleans is starting to acknowledge some of the things that have gone wrong behind the scenes.
Other Pelicans staff shakeups this offseason have also been connected to Williamson’s status. As Charania first reported last week, the Pelicans parted ways with assistant Teresa Weatherspoon after her three seasons in New Orleans. The news was somewhat shocking considering Weatherspoon was most known as a mentor and confidant of Williamson. She was one of the few people within the organization who had success reaching Zion on a deeper level over the years.
“I have somebody special in my corner. She really does care about me,” Williamson said of Weatherspoon in October 2022. “The feeling is mutual. That’s my big sister. … We have a special bond.”
While it was expected for the Pelicans to move some things around with the coaching staff after adding former Charlotte Hornets coach James Borrego this offseason, parting ways with Weatherspoon caused shockwaves inside and outside the building. At the very least, the Pelicans had to know Williamson and people close to him wouldn’t be thrilled about this kind of move. Knowing how vital her mentorship has been to Williamson, they either had to have a Plan B in place or they didn’t feel one was needed. Again, when teams do things like this without a proper explanation, they open the door for speculation and innuendo.
While the relationship between Williamson and the Pelicans has been rocky of late, the Pelicans have made overtures in an attempt to improve it. Williamson and Griffin met last week at team headquarters to discuss the offseason, and Griffin brought Williamson over to meet with Pelicans governor Gayle Benson. The meeting was mostly positive, according to a league source not authorized to discuss it publicly. Benson congratulated Williamson on the recent news that he’s expecting to have a baby with his girlfriend in the near future. Benson also offered to have a more direct line of communication with Williamson in the future if he felt that was necessary, according to that source.
Perhaps the Pels need all the help they can get to cool down some of the tension that led to this point. Either way, the speculation about his future will continue until those problems are resolved. While things seemed to cool down considerably between the two sides when the team was winning in December, the lack of trust between the two sides only seems to get worse with each new rumor.
Even if Williamson, as expected, remains with the Pelicans beyond this week, there’s a lot of work to be done to establish just how solid his standing – and future – is with the team.
(Top photo: Jasen Vinlove / USA Today)
