As I have stated<\/a>, Joe Dumars is in charge of basketball operations decisions, and as one of the best basketball minds in the business, I trust him to make the right decisions for our franchise,\u201d Benson said. \u201cI have tremendous admiration and respect for Willie Green, and I truly appreciate all he has done for our organization over the last few years. This is a tough business and these are difficult decisions. My expectation is to be a winning team that competes for championships, and I remain steadfast in our commitment to building a championship-caliber organization for our players, partners, and above all, our fans.\u201d<\/p>\nGreen had been on the hot seat after a slow start to this season and listless play nightly \u2014 this did not look like a team playing to help its coach keep his job. Rumors had been swirling around the team and the move to fire Green was not a surprise. <\/p>\n
In his four-plus seasons at the helm, Green amassed a 150-190 record, leading the Pelicans to the playoffs twice (both times they fell in the first round). Green had to deal with a roster built around Zion Williamson, who was constantly in and out of the lineup due to injuries \u2014 he is currently out, recovering from a strained hamstring for the fourth consecutive season \u2014 and had plenty of other players suffer key injuries as well (such as Brandon Ingram). However, there was other talent on this roster that never seemed to be maximized, and this season seemed stuck in the mud. <\/p>\n
A coaching change alone isn\u2019t going to right the ship in New Orleans \u2014 yes, it\u2019s been poorly coached, but it\u2019s also been poorly managed. This is a team that traded away Dyson Daniels \u2014 who went to Atlanta and won Most Improved Player while being named to an All-Defensive Team \u2014 and two first-round picks for Dejonte Murray. That\u2019s not even getting into Dumars\u2019 move to trade the rights to the Pelicans\u2019 first-round pick next June (which looks like a high pick in a deep draft at the top) to move up and get Derik Queen (who has played well for New Orleans and might need to be moved into the starting five, but that price was steep). Dumars was hired last offseason just days David Griffin was fired with no search for a replacement \u2014 Benson had a good relationship with Dumars going back, she hired her buddy, the person she knew, even though we\u2019re more than two decades from him winning a title as the head of the Pistons, and more than a decade since he had run a team at all.<\/p>\n
That said, it was time for a coaching change in New Orleans. We\u2019ll see what Borrego can do as a coach to juice this roster (he should get Zion back soon, which will help). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It felt like foreshadowing that, as part of the team\u2019s flashy pregame introductions before home games this season,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-286684","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}