Zion Williamson Just Saved His NBA Career…

Zion Williamson Just Saved His NBA Career…

If you follow the NBA for a couple years, you know that every offseason, a couple of things happen. Every single year, we get Ben Simmons making jump shots in a workout video and then he never actually takes jumpers in an actual game. We get some random center that’s working on their perimeter game and hitting pull-up jumpers and making threes and they never actually do any of that in a game. And then we get some crazy headline about how someone is in the best shape of their life. And this offseason, we actually got two. We got Skinny Luca earlier in the offseason and now we have Zion Williamson who showed up to Pelicans media day looking like a completely different person and I am almost never the guy that is like wow this is crazy me I I’m like a 6’4 like 220 like I’m in no position whatsoever to be telling a professional athlete how they got in such good shape and you know as I’m wiping Cheeto dust off my chest talking about how great it is that they got in shape but for Zion specifically this is actually a massive deal. And I’m going to be honest, it’s working on me. Like, I am getting pulled back in on what Zion could be, what the Pelicans could be. Literally, just based off of media day. I don’t know what that says about me as like a basketball analyst or whatever you want to call me, but I’m all of a sudden very excited to see what Zion is going to look like and going to be for the Pelicans this year. And by the way, this is as someone that I I just did a season preview for every single team in the entire league. And I had the Pelicans 14th in the Western Conference because everybody gets hurt every single season. And I just assumed Zion was going to be a part of that. And they added Jordan Pool, which I thought was weird. And they added some rookies, but I didn’t actually think they were going to be all that good this year. But Zion being healthy and being in shape and being locked in, as has been the case for the last couple of years for the Pelicans changes everything. It is a absolutely massive deal because two years ago, Zion played 70 games and the Pelicans went 49 and 33. Unfortunately, he got hurt right before the playoffs. Didn’t play in the playoffs. He’s actually never played in a playoff game in his entire career. And then obviously we know that in his second season in the league, he played like 60some games, shot 60some percent from the floor, 27 points per game, looked like an allNBA caliber player. So, we know that when Zion is healthy, when he plays 60 plus games, he’s either one of the 20 best players in the entire league and or the Pelicans are a pretty good team, a 45 plus win team, and to be more exact, a 49 win team just two years ago. And for a team that I’m really not expecting much from, or at least wasn’t expecting much from until I saw how Tiny Zion was at Media Day, this is a massive, massive deal. And it’s especially big for the Pelicans now because this is really the turning point season for their franchise because they’ve gone through, you know, coaches, they’ve gone through front office people, but the thing that you’ve been kind of holding on to if you’re a Pelicans fan over the last couple years is the future, right? Just a couple of years ago, they had one of the brightest futures in the entire league. Brandon Ingram, they had Lonzo Ball a couple years ago, they had Zion and obviously injuries and stuff to taken away from that over the years, but you still had these future picks and these future assets and these young players to hold on to. That stuff is gone. Like they have, I believe, one more Milwaukee pick as a result of the Drew Holiday trade from years back and that’s it. Like the the days of them having a stockpile of future picks, that stuff is gone. Like the roster that they have is the roster they’re going to have. Not to mention the fact that they owe their first round pick to Atlanta next year because they moved up in the draft to end up selecting Derek Queen after selecting uh Jeremiah Fears a couple of picks earlier. So, this is as consequential of a season as the Pelicans have had in years, which makes it that much bigger of a deal that Zion is healthy. And this actually goes back a little bit to last season because the Pelicans, like many teams, post all-star break last year, really did tank the rest of their season. And there were reports that Zion could have played, could have been healthy, could have actually helped them. And they decided, no, we got to shut him down. We got to make sure we get the best pick possible. And that was the point at which Zion really started to take all this stuff seriously. It wasn’t just like over the summer he decided to start eating better, working out. It really goes back to when they shut him down last year and he looks completely ready to go. Now, we’ve gone through this cycle a bunch of times with Zion. There’s a reason that I mentioned the Ben Simmons workout videos and the random, you know, Andre Drummond, Tassan Whiteside shooting pull-up threes thing in the intro is because those things happen pretty much every offseason and then there’s never any follow-through. And that’s been the theme of Zion’s career as well. Now, we’ve never seen him in this good of a shape, but we’ve always this good of a shape. That’s what I’m going to tell myself next time I’m feeling bad about myself. You’re a shape. We’ve never seen him in this good of shape before, but we’ve we’ve had excitement before, right, about like, oh, what could he be? What could this mean for the Pelicans future? And this is uh completely game-changing for for what they could be. And more to the point of that, I think that this this can’t be a negative, right, for New Orleans because even if Zion isn’t, you know, a 27 point per game score, even if they don’t win 45 games, if he’s just good, if he’s like an even borderline all-star all-star caliber guy this year, that means they can do something with him. Like they can decide at the trade deadline or at the or during next off season to to trade him. Like he could be the piece that they move and then they get some of these future picks that they’ve needed. they can build around Trey Murphy and Herb Jones and the rookies that they’ve just drafted. The thing that’s been the problem with Zion isn’t just that he’s been hurt. Isn’t just that he hasn’t been available or in shape or whatever questions you have about him. It’s that the Pelicans can’t move forward as a franchise. They can’t have any kind of direction because they don’t know what’s happening with Zion. They don’t know what they can get for him in a trade. They know that any anything that they would have traded him for last year would have been significantly less than what he would be worth if he was ever going to be healthy. And so if he can just play 65 games, maybe make an all-star team, maybe they can win 40, 45 games, that puts them in a position to have a direction, whether that direction is Zion’s turned a corner and we’re going to keep him, or that direction is let’s trade him and let’s move on, because there is a lot of talent on this roster. When I had them at 14th in the West in my season preview video, it didn’t have a whole lot to do with the overall talent on the roster. They’ve got two rookies that a lot of people seem to really like. Say what you want about the Jordan Pool trade for T.J. McCollum, which was just weird at the time, but from a talent perspective, Jordan Pool is going to give them a nice scoring punch to Dante Murray when he comes back from injury is going to be pretty good for them. Herb Jones, obviously, Zion, Trey Murphy, who I think is one of the most underrated players in the entire league. There is a lot of talent on this roster. The problem always was injuries, and that has been a problem in New Orleans, not just with Zion, but for years. And if for whatever reason they have figured that out and Zion is in shape and he has a healthy season, the Pelicans can really change the landscape of at least the back half of the Western Conference. I’m not trying to tell you they’re going to be a contender or anything, but they can at least be in the mix. And even in a tough Western Conference, they could be a play-in team if Zion really is going to be good and healthy this season. Now, ultimately in a couple of months, we could look back on this and be like, “Wow, we got fooled again.” you know, like that. Why did we ever consider the possibility that Zion was actually going to be healthy and that he was going to be in shape? That’s that’s absolutely a possibility. And I think to me, the more interesting, you know, aspect of this is what if Zion is on, you know, the Nets in a year? What if he’s on the Hawks in a year or one of these other teams around the league that wants to kind of make a maybe a buy low move, a high ceiling move where Zion plays 65 games, he looks good, but the Pelicans are like, “Okay, we want off this roller coaster.” That to me is the more interesting aspect of this. Less so than like the Pelicans really mattering at the top of the Western Conference or Zion averaging 30 a game or this is clearly the turning point of his career. Less so that and more so what it looks like in terms of of him becoming an asset for the Pelicans and what that can mean for their future. And even though I think my instinct here is to be pessimistic, there is a a bit of a historical precedent for guys figuring it out in like year five and year six in the NBA. And once they do that, they become really good players. Like not every single good player in the league was good in year two and then they were awesome from there on. Some guys just take a while, especially guys in Zion situation where I think we all know he didn’t really want to go to New Orleans. It’s maybe not the best basketball situation. It’s potentially I I don’t want to be too harsh, but it’s potentially the worst organization in the entire league. I think if you were power ranking like where you would want to go as a first overall pick, regardless of situation, just organizationally, the Pelicans are probably the last place you would want to go. And so maybe it takes a little bit of time to fully overcome that. And maybe that’s what we’re seeing now from Zion this off season. I can’t wait to see what happens. I can’t wait to see him play. I’d love to see him in person this year. They only come I’m in the like Orlandoish area, so they only come and play the Magic once a year cuz they’re in the Western Conference. But if I get a chance to, that would be super fun. I just I I can’t wait to see this is just not a headline I anticipated. I expected Zion to show up, look like he does, get hurt again, and it just not really be a thing. Now it is and it is one of the things that we have to keep an eye on the rest of when the season starts and then the rest of the

Zion Williamson showed up to New Orleans Pelicans media day 2025 looking like a completely different person.

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