This is a familiar phase of the Zion Williamson cycle, and fortunately, it’s the happiest: a healthy, spirited Zion Williamson leads the New Orleans Pelicans to consistent victory. This is preferable to other phases, which include, but are not limited to, “out of shape and subject to sinister speculation”, “injured with no timetable for return”, and “away and communicating with team only by carrier pigeon”. . While we can’t rule out the possibility of re-entering one or all of these phases before the end of the year, the Pelicans forward has been spectacular this month.
In March, Williamson posted an average 23.2 points on 68% true shooting – a comical efficiency characteristic of his previous flashes of All-NBA quality – along with 7.4 rebounds and 4.6 assists. He’s reclaimed the Point-Zion responsibilities that were given and taken away from him at different points during his tenure with the Pelicans, and he handles them wonderfully, initiating half-court offense as CJ McCollum ages into an off-shooter. -bullet accurate. Unsurprisingly, Williamson’s individual success fuels the collective.
The Pelicans are 9-2 this month, largely because they’ve beaten middling teams; Williamson gave up 36 points on 13 of 14 shooting on the exhausted Pistons on Sunday. But they’ve also collected some notable wins, including a March 15 win over the Clippers, who are currently just a half-game ahead of them in fourth place. The Pelicans are once again in the thick of another Western Conference playoff race and, barring disaster, Williamson is expected to play his first-ever playoff games.
The apparent packaging problems that made the peanut gallery so talkative in December seems to have disappeared. Gravity sliders down, dunks again look like an aircraft carrier in the air in a tornadoand Williamson even plays locked perimeter defense on Kawhi Leonard when needed. For all the tempting potential Williamson was a team defender in college, while he routinely jumped passing lanes and drove to the corners to block threes, he was mostly a disaster on that side of the court in the NBA. It would be a coup if he could just become a league-average four-man defender despite his modest 6-foot-6 height and 6-foot-10 wingspan, and that will require the kind of fitness and speed of foot that he seems to have just found.
ESPN NBA office suggests that he rediscovered the physicality of Duke Sion. I won’t go that far – nor can I take Brian Windhorst’s recent report seriously on his podcast, which suggests Williamson has lost 25(!) pounds since December, but he’s clearly heading in the right direction. Perhaps the most reassuring physical indicator of all is Williamson’s 60 games played this season, just one short of his career high for a single campaign. For reference, he played in 29 games over the previous two seasons combined. In December, Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic reported that Williamson’s future salary years were not guaranteed due to his extended absences. He also has millions of dollars in future pay contingent on unusual conditioning standards, requiring the sum of his weight and body fat percentage to fall below 295.
The Pelicans remain a deeply strange team. There’s a lot of individual talent, but also a lot of awkward redundancy between the stars, and it’s sometimes difficult to understand how it all fits together successfully. Williamson’s non-stop assault at the rim would be ideal alongside a floor-spaced center and complementary off-ball star, but instead he has a huge mound of Jonas Valanciunas in the paint and a Brandon Ingram dominating the ball to share the rock. New Orleans gets a lot of use out of its young wings, between Herb Jones’ stubborn defense and the motor, and Trey Murphy has recently restabilized volume shooting from the depths. Despite the quirks in list construction, it works; the Pelicans are sixth in the league in defensive rating and 10th in offensive rating. But they also have the fourth-toughest schedule for the rest of the season, and Ingram just hyperextended his knee Friday, only to be evaluated in two weeks. Since Zion Williamson was drafted in 2019, it has always been largely true that the fate of the Pelicans rests on his shoulders. As he approaches his first-ever playoff series with his co-star in street clothes, that’s especially true right now.
