No one expected the New Orleans Pelicans to struggle this much during the 2015-16 season. As of Thursday night, the squad is 12-26 on the year, which is only five games behind the final playoff spot in the Western Conference but is still really, really bad. For a team that everyone expected to make a leap after last year’s playoff birth, it’s fair to say that the Pelicans are underachieving.
All of this losing is really weighing on the team’s oldest player. Kendrick Perkins told Marc Spears of Yahoo Sports that this wasn’t what he anticipated when he signed a deal with New Orleans in the offseason. According to Perkins, the team has an issue with playing hard on a nightly basis.
“It’s very disappointing. At the end of the day, this is not what I signed up for,” Perkins told Yahoo Sports before Wednesday’s win against the Sacramento Kings. “I signed up after I looked from the outside, coming in to a good young team that has been making strides in the right direction. We got real comfortable. We ain’t got long to make a push.
“At this point in time, we are all just searching to find the right lineups and who is going to come out and compete at a high level every night. That’s been our main problem before anything else. We just come out too many nights and don’t compete at the level we need in order to win. What really is the key to everything is our level of competitiveness.”
If you believe ESPN’s Royce Young, the main reason that Perkins was brought in was to act as a mentor to the team’s young star, Anthony Davis. Like everyone expected, Davis has been great this year, averaging 22.8 points, 10.8 rebounds, and 2.5 blocks per game, so maybe Perkins has to shift his focus away from mentoring Davis and try mentoring everyone else.
(via Yahoo Sports)
