On March 1, the New Orleans Pelicans took the floor without Zion Williamson. Normally, this wouldn’t be worth highlighting. NBA star misses game isn’t exactly a rare headline these days, and Williamson isn’t exactly known as an ironman.
Except that, leading up to that night, Williamson had played in 35 straight games, a career-best streak. He returned two days later and, despite playing for a Pelicans squad stuck in the Western Conference cellar, hasn’t missed a game since. In a season defined by star players missing games, Williamson — who has played in 59 of the Pelicans’ 76 contests— has, against all odds, become the exception to the rule.
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Which brings us to what could be one of the offseason’s most fascinating subplots.
(Joseph Raines/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
Only nine months ago, the Pelicans made one of the most aggressive — and, well, questionable — moves in recent draft history. It wasn’t just that the team’s new front office, led by longtime executives Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver, decided to send the 23rd pick and an unprotected 2026 first-rounder to the Atlanta Hawks to move up to No. 13. It was that they did so to grab Maryland forward Derik Queen, a talented but no-defense 6-foot-9 big with an iffy shooting stroke. Or, put another way: Dumars and Weaver seemingly staked their jobs on a prospect who, at best, projects as a tricky fit alongside Williamson.
The Pelicans tried playing the pair together earlier this season, but the results were so disastrous — a statistical profile resembling that of the tanking Washington Wizards — that interim head coach James Borrego has essentially mothballed the combination. That the Pelicans, after a 15-41 start, have gone 10-10 since the All-Star break is, in the eyes of some members of the organization, not a coincidence.
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To this point, according to a source close to Williamson, neither Williamson nor anyone in his camp has been given any indication that his time in New Orleans is nearing an end (both Dumars and Weaver declined interview requests). And yet, the awkward fit with Queen, combined with how deeply Dumars and Weaver are now invested in his success — the 2026 pick the Pelicans owe Atlanta as part of the Queen trade currently has a 32% chance of landing in the top four of a draft that scouts say features a loaded class — has many executives around the league assuming that Williamson, who is extension-eligible this offseason, will soon be on the market.
Williamson is aware of the situation.
“New Orleans is home for me. It’s where I want to be,” he said in a recent interview with Yahoo Sports when asked whether he thinks his time with the Pelicans is winding down. “But at the end of the day, if we’re going to be realistic about it, the NBA is a business. I could be traded in the offseason, or I could be traded before [next season’s] trade deadline.”
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“Not that I want that to happen,” he added. “But that’s just the realism of it.”
The question then becomes: Should the prospect of adding Williamson excite other teams?
On the one hand, you have a not-yet-26-year-old former No. 1 pick and two-time All-Star coming off a healthy season in which he ranks among the league’s most efficient isolation scorers. That’s not the profile of a player who typically hits the market.
“He’s on another level in terms of his drives,” New York Knicks head coach Mike Brown said recently. “It takes all five guys being in the right position to try to make it tough on him, and you still may not even be able to make it tough on him. He’s that powerful, athletic, strong.”
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On the other hand, Williamson remains a non-rebounding poor defender who has eclipsed the 30-games-played mark just three times in his seven-year career and whose usage and assist numbers have both dipped this season. Combine that with his injury history and contract — which guarantees him $42.2 million next season and, if he hits certain incentive markers, possibly $45 million the year after — and, in the eyes of some, he becomes too risky a proposition in the NBA’s apron era.
“Right now he’s a borderline All-Star who makes a lot of money,” said a Western Conference executive. “That’s the sort of player a lot of teams are now avoiding.”
Peek beneath the hood, though, and there are reasons to believe Williamson could rediscover his All-NBA form.
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For one, the dip in some of his numbers may simply be a function of how the Pelicans have deployed him this season. “We’ve used Zion in more off-ball actions than he’s ever been a part of before,” Borrego said. “We’ve tried moving him around a bit to make it harder for defenses to load up on him.”
Williamson may be running fewer pick-and-rolls and posting up less frequently, but you can see the upside of Borrego’s decision in other metrics. Williamson is turning the ball over at a career-low rate. His efficiency from the floor is back at his prime-Zion levels. And his drives? “Some of his takes to the rim are unguardable,” was how an executive who recently watched Williamson described him.
None of that would matter, though, if Williamson weren’t able to remain on the floor. And it’s here where opinions once again diverge. Most of the executives and coaches Yahoo Sports spoke to outside of the Pelicans organization remained dubious. Some attribute his health to his incentive-laden contract in which his salary only becomes guaranteed if he plays a certain number of games. Others see the combination of his size and the force with which he plays as a combination destined to break his body. Others simply don’t believe one healthy season erases four injury-riddled ones.
Williamson understands the skepticism. But, he said, “I feel like I’ve shown enough this year to be able to say, like, ‘This is what it’s gonna look like.’ Even when I did have an injury (he strained his hip in early December), I was projected to miss four to six weeks, and instead I was back in two and then went on a long stretch of consecutive games.”
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That, he believes, was no accident. In the offseason, Williamson began working with a new trainer. “Before, I’d get treatment and do basic stuff like table time,” Williamson said. “But now it’s things like hyperbaric chambers and red light chambers.” His teammates say they notice a difference. “He’s taking the management of his body more seriously than ever before,” Trey Murphy said. What Borrego points to, though, is that not only has Williamson played the majority of games this season, but “we haven’t even had to have a single conversation where I have to go and ask him if he’s in. He’s fully bought in.”
Is all that enough to convince another team to take a flyer? Maybe a playoff team stuck in purgatory and in desperate need of a ceiling-raiser. Or maybe a bottom-feeder that strikes out in the lottery and needs something else to sell to its fans. Or maybe, in the end, the Pelicans, who have more insight on Williamson than anyone else, decide that this post All-Star break upswing is real and that it’s worth keeping their best player around.
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“Right now it’s about, just, self-identity,” Williamson said when asked about the Pelicans’ late-season turnaround. “We know what we want to do and how we want to grow going into the offseason and leading into next season.
“I feel like we’re taking a step in the right direction because at the moment we can only control what we can control,” Williamson added. He was referring to the team, but he might as well have been speaking about himself.