EXPLOSIVE Comeback? Dejounte Murray’s Rehab Progress & Pelicans’ Playoff Hopes

EXPLOSIVE Comeback? Dejounte Murray’s Rehab Progress & Pelicans’ Playoff Hopes

Dejante Murray looks great on Instagram as he rehabs his Achilles, but social media isn’t the NBA. Here’s what his roadback could mean for New Orleans and what it’ll look like. It’s today’s episode of Locked On Pelicans. Let’s go. You are Locked On Pelicans, your daily New Orleans Pelicans podcast, part of the Locked On Network. your team every day. Welcome to another edition of Locked On Pelicans, the daily podcast covering your favorite team, the New Orleans Pelicans and NBA, part of the Locked On podcast network. Your team every day, available wherever you get your podcast and available on YouTube. I’m your host, Pelicans Insider, credential member of the media, Jake Madison, Nola Jake on Twitter. here with y’all on this. We’re on Wednesday now here and we are going to take a deep dive on Dejonte Murray. What his return could mean for New Orleans, what his return to play is going to look like, where he is in his rehab. He’s posted some really good things on social media, but that’s not exactly real life. Then we’re going to give you an update on TJ Saint, the Birmingham Squadron head coach leaving. What are the Pelicans going to do? So, let’s get into it in today’s episode of Locked On Pelicans. Today’s episode of Locked On Pelicans is brought to you by FanDuel. Football season is around the corner, so visit the FanDuel app today and start planning your futures bets now. And of course, thank you for making Locked On Pelicans your first listen today and every day. We are here Monday through Friday, the number one Pelicans podcast covering everything you want to know about this Pelicans team. So, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and join over 11,000 Pelicans fans on YouTube as well. And become an everyday. That means you listen Monday through Friday to the Locked On Pelicans podcast. And if you’re an everyday, let me know in the comments down below. And don’t forget, you can watch Locked On Pelicans every single weekday on the GF Coast Sports and Entertainment Network at 10:30 a.m. You can also catch a rerun of Locked On Pelican, same show. So, it’s going to be right up there in there for you at 5:30 p.m. every single weekday starting this week. So, I absolutely love you. double the locked on Pelicans and locked on Saints and locked on SEC and locked on LSU over at the Gulf Coast Sports and Entertainment Network. Those final two shows are only one day uh one time a day. So, let’s get into Dejonte Murray and his return from the Achilles injuries. Look, he suffered this injury back on it was January 31 in the first quarter of that game against the Boston Celtics. In general, an Achilles injury is a 9 to 12 month long injury. When you look at other NBA players that have gone through really similar injuries like this, Kevin Durant was about a 14th month return till he looked like himself. Demarcus Cousins suffered here in New Orleans was a 12-month return. You’ve seen people do it quicker. Wesley Matthews did it in 2015 in seven months. Rudy Gay dealt with this in about nine months. Kobe Bryant about eight months. So you see some players can do it quicker, but when you look at the guys who have come back quicker than a year, their production takes a very significant drop when it comes down to it. And that’s kind of what concerns you about this. This is not an injury that you can rush. Dejante Murray is a guy that heals very quickly. We saw that with his hand injury. We’ve seen it just other times when he’s suffered injuries in his career as well. and everything he’s posting on social media, particularly Instagram, looks absolutely great. You could see he’s bulked up, particularly in the upper body. He is someone who looks like he is putting in the work. He’s already walking. He’s going through the normal usual steps here. And as I said, he looks good. It’s just really as simple as that right now for what you see from him here. So looking at where he is, you know, right now you’re usually in a time frame, right? 9 months from when this injury occurred is November 1. So that’s after the start of the regular season. In that kind of 6 to9month period, which is where we are with this right now, you start to do more basketball related things. It’s less about just introducing strength to the leg, mobility to the leg, to the injured part, and doing things like light cutting drills. You’re doing some sprinting. You’re doing some dribbling, shooting, and you’re really monitoring it to make sure there’s no swelling, no pain after intensive activity, but it’s not quite basketball related activities yet. You know, this is something an injury that you need to monitor very closely so that you don’t ramp it up too quickly and risk a reagravation or another injury to another body part. This is very much connected to the cal and so on with that. So, he’s still not really kind of in what you would call almost like a controlled practice environment and doing contact related drills. Now, there’s still time before the season starts. It’s just August right now. We’re still about 2 months or so away, a little you about two and a half months before the regular season starts. But when you look at this injury basically suffered on at this point February 1st, let’s call it to make the numbers kind of easy here. you know you are a little over six months away but this is a period of when you do that gradual reintroduction of things that takes about three months or so just to make sure that you don’t rush back from this injury whatsoever you know if 9 months is when you really start to do more basketball related things that’s after the season starts now given that Murray comes back from injuries quicker you know from what we’ve seen and seems to be making really really Good progress here. And look, that dude is got the right type of mentality, the right type of intensity to attack a rehab program in the correct way. There’s no concerns that he is going to do everything he can to be back out on the court, but he’s still a couple months away at this point from doing more basketball related things, right? He’s not doing fullcourt drills right now. you’re not working on kind of change of motion, rapid change of motion right now, which we’ll talk more about that in the next segment when we talk about like what his return to play on the court will be when he is playing. But he’s not working on like slide drills, defensive things like that. Nor is he going to be doing five on five yet, which is what the Pelicans are going to make him do a bunch of before he returns to play. Right? That’s kind of what you’re what you’re looking at. There’s likely still some, and I’ve talked to some doctors about this, if you can’t tell, some their words, biomechanical deficiencies in some of his movements and things like that, jumping, landing, which can lead to other injuries here. So, he is still got a way to go, I think, when it comes to all of this, but he will really be able to kind of position himself well to get back and do all of that here. So, he will get there eventually, but it’s still going to be a little bit of, hey, you’ve got to work on some of kind of these more basic things when it comes to all of this. And when you look at some of the other players, Kevin Durant, Demarcus Cousins, you tend to see a big drop off in production, too, the quicker it takes, right? Kevin Durant took longer and he’s more of an outlier than anything where basically all of his numbers are identical to what they were post injury. That’s what we’re going to hope is going to be the case for DeJonte Murray, but he’s got to make sure he’s taking the time when it comes to it here because, you know, his skill set, I think, translates better to post Achilles injury than some others do. And that is something I’m slightly worried about when it comes to Murray. But he’s going to go through that more controlled practice and contact. And then it’s kind of the full ramp up to competition. And that’s what I want to look at next coming up here next in today’s episode of Locked On Pelicans. Because when he does come back, even when he if he comes back early, right? Say this isn’t 12 months and he’s not until February or say he comes back in January, something like that, you know, it’s not just going to be he’s good to go. And it’s as simple as that. Once you get back to playing, you really do see a dip of about 20% in production, but for Murray, I think it’s going to be a little bit more different to quantify. And I want to look at what his role is going to be. Let’s talk about what we expect the minutes to be and when maybe he’ll be like a full go. And at that point, is the Pelican season gonna basically be over? Hopefully not. Let’s talk about that. That’s coming up here next in today’s episode of Locked On Pelicans. Today’s episode of Locked on Pelicans is brought to you by FanDuel. August 26th is officially FanDuel Futures Day. It’s a brand new holiday for football fans who live for bold predictions and pre-season hunches. For just 24 hours, FanDuel is giving you deals on NFL season predictions. So whether you’re calling your MVP, eyeing a longot division winner, or getting ready to crown your Super Bowl championship before week one even kicks off, this is your moment here. Look, I liked what we saw from Tyler Shook. I’m taking the over on the Saints win total. I I don’t know. Maybe you can also parlay your decision into division winners, dark horses, other things like that. 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Find Lockdown NBA on YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcast, part of the Lockdown Podcast Network, your team every day. So, we just kind of went over, you know, a little bit of where Murray is in his rehab. He should be looking good right now. It’s nothing, you know, I don’t say it’s nothing hard. It’s definitely hard. And he seems to be attacking it all in the correct way. And frankly, he just looks on schedule to me, which I’ll take. Knowing the injury history here in New Orleans, I will take him being on schedule when it comes to it. Truthfully, that is not a bad thing for me to kind of see from him or say. But what’s it going to look like when he gets back and plays and looking at his first like couple weeks back, first handful of games back when he is back to playing, right? It is somewhere going to be between November 1 and February 1st, right? Like that’s likely where this is going to land. I tend to think it’s going to be more on the conservative side knowing how the Pelicans medical staff has operated in the past, but that was also under David Griffin. We’re now under in the Joe Dumar’s era where he does seem to be empowering the players maybe a little bit more so than David Griffin did. So maybe that means Murray, if he feels good to go, is going to come back on the earlier side of things. But in general, they’ve tended to play these type of injuries and just safer, more conservative when it comes to guys coming back from injuries to just not risk another long-term injury. But once he comes back, it’s not like he’s just going to be back to normal, right? This is someone who is going to be on a minutes restriction probably for a little bit in my opinion, I think. Right? This is something that, you know, might take six plus weeks for him to get back to 90% of what he was doing before in terms of minutes. For the first handful of games, let’s call it five or fewer, he’s playing 10 to 15 minutes per game. He’s not going to be playing backto backs whatsoever. Basically what you’re trying to do here is test the Achilles in real game speed while you’re trying to manage fatigue and swelling with it to prevent and you know any sort of other injury from happening. Weeks, you know, the next couple of weeks for him then are slowly increasing this assuming he’s responding well to being out there on the court, right? You ramp him up to 18 to 23 minutes, let’s say. You know, you’re not going to give him heavy minutes on consecutive nights. He’s not even going to really be playing backto backs at this point in time. And that’s probably what it’s going to be looking at, you know, and if you’re playing a weaker team, maybe you can play him a few extra minutes here and there. You know, after that, you’re looking at him getting from about 24 to about 30 minutes or so per game. And that’s where he’s probably going to be for the majority of the season. Look, if he comes back on the later end of this, and it takes 6 weeks then for him to kind of get back. So, let’s say he returns on February 1st, right? You know, let’s put it 6 weeks from there. That puts you about mid-March. You’ve got another month of the season for him to kind of be fully ready to go, 100% of what he was before. You know, at that point, is there any, you know, you’re going to play him those kind of minutes because you want him to get those reps and really recover, but you can start to see that he’s not going to maybe have the most impactful, you know, impactful impact. Wow, I’m good at my job. um on on the season when it comes to all of this because of that. But the other thing beyond just like the limited minutes as you kind of ramp him up to being able to play 30 plus minutes, which is going to be like six plus weeks out when that sort of thing, right? And you can’t have big sudden minute spikes. It’s a gradual ramp up for all of that with a lot of, you know, data behind it. They use force plates, which is something that kind of all NBA teams are using. It’s in vogue right now really to be able to kind of check the fatigue on the leg. And if that comes back even a little bit different then yeah by the way those force plates you’ll see the trainers and the players kind of jumping on this thing with four posts on it. It’s usually on the baseline before games. It kind of tracks like what’s your baseline number when you jump and does that change when you jump off of it now? And if that number is lower means oh this player’s fatigued. That can impact the minutes that you give to somebody in a game. when it comes to things like that, you know, if you look at the kind of like history of guys and their minutes ramp up, Klay Thompson when he went through this, his injury was longer because then he had the ACL like right after all of that. You know, it took him six weeks to get back to 32 minutes per game. He started at under 20 minutes per Kevin Durant played at around 25 minutes and no backtobacks for nearly two months when he returned from this sort of injury. You know, using an example of a guy who returned too quickly, Wesley Matthews just jump back in playing 30 plus minutes per game and looked terrible with that. It probably wasn’t worth it for the production that you get from him. So, it’s a slow and mo, you know, moderate ramp up when it comes to it. The other thing to think about is his role in these games and what they’re going to ask him to do. And that’s where we kind of start to measure impact beyond just the minutes that he’s going to be playing, right? you know, if he’s playing 10 to 15 minutes, he’s going to have a role with the reserves. You’re kind of looking at him more just to kind of be the leader of a second unit and almost just like control the pace of the game. You’re not going to be looking at him to have aggressive drives to the basket, something that he is known for doing. He’s going to be more of a spot up three kind of player. Maybe mid-range pull-ups and but not like aggressively driving to the basket, jumping with full force and worrying about landing or contact in those sorts of things. You know, that’s kind of what you’re looking at there. As he starts to open it up a little bit more, maybe you get some more pick and roll and things like that. But this is not someone who’s going to be the primary ball handler necessarily when he’s out there just because they’re worried about physical limitations to him when it comes down to all of that. And I think again, you can see him close some games, you know, have a little slight bump in minutes if it’s a kind of a more favorable matchup and maybe he’s not being pushed as hard by a defender or something along those lines. You know, we’ll do a show about this team wanting to run in transition. Do you worry about him being able to run in transition and all of that? And I think there’s definitely something to that. The area that I think it could impact him the most and this team the most is on the defensive side of the ball. You know, he’s been known as a good defender though. I think that reputation is changing just a little bit here in New Orleans given everything because um you know given his time in Atlanta. But you know they need another point of attack defender. You’ve got Herb Jones. you kind of want him smothering wings. You need someone to defend the point of attack. And New Orleans doesn’t exactly have that. And while I’ve done a show on why their defense is going to be better than you think next year, and it actually has to do with their offense, and I’m probably going to do a show like that again soon. You know, you could really use Murray to be just that defender, that guy that is kind of messing up the point of attack, forcing steals, just really disrupting an opponent’s offense. I don’t see that being the case for him when he comes back. You know, we talked about right now he’s probably not doing quick change of direction movements and things. This is someone that’s not going to necessarily be ready to do that in a game to begin with. And I don’t know for sure, maybe Murray’s rehabbing so well that he can kind of do all of this. But when you look at him in terms of defensive stuff, you’re going to put him off ball just to make his life easier and limit that kind of lateral side to side movement that you’d be worried could impact his Achilles or, you know, the the kinetic chain that it’s on in some capacity here. You’re not going to see him going, you know, with with any sort of pressing defense, right, or working on trapping players. It’s going to be kind of not hiding him per se, but not using him as that kind of full aggressive defender that he can definitely be. And I think that’s something that’s going to hurt this team. You’re not going to have him guarding elite point guards because you worry what that would be, you know, what that might do to him when it comes to that sort of thing. And frankly, that is the smart thing to do, the correct thing to do. So, I’m hopeful that, you know, we’ll see him be at full strength eventually here in New Orleans, but it’s going to be towards the end of the year. And at that point, the Pelicans might be out of playoff contention or hopefully not. And then he can make an impact later and maybe into the playoffs here, I think. But when you really think about what his role is going to be when he’s back playing, it is going to be limited because they’re trying to bring him back gradually from, you know, this injury, which is of course very significant and the type of thing that it could impact his career. But all of that said, look, Murray can be a special player at times, and we’ve seen the ability to have, you know, an incredible healing factor and come back from injuries quicker. And you know, if he were to be at full strength, given that maybe the team doesn’t want to rely on Jeremiah Fears just yet, having your point guard back who can also press the point of attack on the defensive side of the ball is something that’s going to be massively important for him. What do you think? What do you think his return will be? Do you think he comes back on the earlier side, the later side? Let me know in the comments down below. So, coming up next, we got some coaching changes and things like that that’s coming up here next in today’s episode of Lockdown Pel, the Birmingham Squadron. it’s going to mean for the bench next season for the New Orleans Pelicans as well as Birmingham. Let’s break that down and I’ll tell you the news coming up next in today’s episode of Locked On Pelicans. And thank you for making Locked On Pelicans your first listen today and every day. We are here Monday through Friday, the number one Pelicans podcast covering everything you want to know about this Pelicans team. So, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and join over 11,000 Pelicans fans on YouTube as well and become an everydayer. That means you listen Monday through Friday to the Locked On Pelicans podcast. And if you’re an everydayer, let me know in the comments down below. So, please subscribe, comment on YouTube as well. And don’t forget, you can watch us on the GF Coast Sports and Entertainment Network every single weekday at 10:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. And for your second listen, it’s Locked on Saints. Ross Jackson doing a review looking at everything when it came to the first preseason game for the Saints and the black and gold. Make locked on Saints your second listen today. Part of the Lockdown Podcast Network, your team every day. Speaking of Saints, TJ Saint, the head coach of the Birmingham squadron, is leaving the team to go join Mike Brown and his staff with the New York Knicks. This is actually not surprising, per se. You know, it’s a G-League coach that wasn’t on an NBA bench, but him making the jump to the Knicks rather than making the jump to the Pelicans, I do think is a little bit disappointing. TJ Sane, if you look at his career in Birmingham, look, it’s not particularly great when it comes to win loss record or anything like that, but at the same point, it’s a it’s a G-League team. I don’t know if you can read too much into that because you’re so dependent on the players that get sent there. You know, his time as head coach with the squadron from 2022 on in 66 games is 26 and 40. It’s an under 40 winning percentage. But here’s the thing. TJ Saint wouldn’t be a head coach at the NBA level. Isn’t a head coach at the NBA level, right? This is someone who is thought of as a really, really effective uh offensive coach here. And I do think this is a loss for New Orleans because this is someone who’s making a leap to really go run the offense for the New York Knicks. What do the Pelicans need help with? They need help with the offense and TJ Saint is leaving them. This is someone who’s thought of very highly around the league from everyone that I have talked to. And if you go back to the Birmingham squadron in the 2324 season, you know, when they had kind of the best record under TJ Saint, they had the top G-League offense. This is clearly somebody who could have some value to New Orleans and this bench as they really try and look to remake the offense. I think that’s going to be, you know, an area of importance for him this year, especially because look, Brandon Ingram isn’t here. Ingram didn’t really want to run the offense that they have wanted to run for the past two years. And given that, you know, he was a starter, one of your your leaders on the team, that kind of derailed a lot of the things that they are try were trying to build and trying to do. So maybe they’re a little bit freed up to try and do more of that this year and have Bergo make his influence felt. But losing a smart young offensive mind is a little bit disappointing. He’s got some pretty good experience whether it was with Butler, the Pistons, the Georgia Bulldogs, and then being an assistant coach with the the G-League team from when they were back in, you know, the Eerie Bayhawks during his tenure here. You know, it it feels a little bit not not extremely, but there’s a little bit of it of like does it feel like people are jumping ship kind of thing of like what is going on in New Orleans? Not saying there is anything going on in New Orleans. That seems to be kind of the impression around national media with this team. I haven’t really heard anything of like people saying like it’s a disaster in here and usually that stuff gets to me truthfully. So that’s I think an encouraging sign of everything. But TJ Saint leaving when maybe you could have found a way to promote him after some, you know, assistant coaching departures here in New Orleans wouldn’t have been the worst thing to do. But he’s taking a job with the New York Knicks. I’m going to be curious to see what they do with the Birmingham Squadron head coach, who that’s going to be. You know, can you use that as a time to really, you know, develop coaches too, not just players? I think that could be a really good thing. But we’ll see what they end up going there. And I think that’ll kind of give us an idea of, you know, the direction this franchise is heading. I I’m going to be very curious if, you know, given Troy Weavers, and we’ve talked about this, outside influence on the team, is it going to be someone with a connection to him? I I truthfully don’t know, but wouldn’t put that past anything at this point in time, would it? Final thing before we wrap up the show today, I’m going to do a Pelicans fan survey and then we’re going to kind of respond to everything here on the show in a week or two once I kind of get this out and it’ll be like a Google doc thing that you can fill out survey and kind of put your put your thoughts in there and we’ll read them and it should be a lot of fun here. I’m really kind of curious. What are the questions though that you think should be asked of the fan survey? you know, is it your, you know, beyond just things of like your faith in the front office, Willie Green, you know, ownership, all of that, you know, where what what do you feel needs to be looked at when it comes to this franchise? This is me truly asking for your opinion on sorts of these sorts of things. Get a couple templates of what these fan surveys can look like, you know, but I’m curious what you think needs to definitely be addressed. Is it something like, do you have faith in Zion Williamson? Would you trade Zion Williamson? yes, no, or on a scale of 1 to 10, I can find, you know, those questions I think can be really useful, very interesting to try and see, you know, kind of where people are like looking at this team and feeling confident in where they’re not. I’m going to be designing this over the next week. We can roll this out a little bit later, you know, before the season starts. But I think it’s going to be a good way for you to kind of get your voices heard here on Locked on Pelicans. And we’ll put the data out there with everything depending on, you know, how it all looks and and how it all comes comes across. We’ll put it out no matter what. It’s not how it looks. It’s, you know, we need a number of surveys in there to give us a large enough sample size to make that data valuable is what I’m trying to say. The other thing I need from you, you can put them in the comments. You can tell me on Twitter, Nola Jake, which is also a great way to do it. Screenshots or whatever. Give me your fake trades. Put your best fake trades in there. We’re going to do some more grade the trades, which I think are a lot of fun to do where I’m going to assign them a grade of like F through A of it’s realistic, it’s not. this is a highway robbery for the Pelicans or you’re you’re crushing the Pelicans in a trade. Put in the fake trades that you want to see happen and we are going to grade the trades good and bad here on Locked On Pelicans. And that’s going to do it for this episode of Locked On Pelicans. As always, I’m your host JakeMadison, Nola Jake on Twitter. This is the Locked On Pelicans podcast, part of the Locked On Podcast Network, your team every day. I appreciate you all so much for listening. I’ll be back with y’all tomorrow. We’re going to have a fun rest of the week here on Locked on Pelican. See y’all next time.

Pelicans star Dejounte Murray’s Achilles recovery: When will he return to the court? Insider analysis reveals potential timeline and impact on New Orleans’ playoff hopes.

Jake Madison breaks down Murray’s rehabilitation progress, comparing it to other NBA players’ recoveries. He explores the expected restrictions upon Murray’s return, including limited minutes and defensive roles. The discussion covers how Murray’s comeback could reshape the Pelicans’ strategy, T.J. Saint’s departure from the Birmingham Squadron, and an upcoming fan survey.

Tune in for expert insights on Murray’s potential return date and how it could affect the Pelicans’ performance in the crucial stretch of the season.

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