u/kingralek

I had no clue that Alexis is now a coach with the Wiz.

Sold out in hours. Frame, forks and seat post look great. Rest of the parts seem like dog shit.

Snippets from Will Guillory. I've emphasized certain portions of note:

When Jamahl Mosley and Joe Dumars sat down for their first interview, as the head of basketball operations for the New Orleans Pelicans, Dumars didn’t waste any time asking the question many people wondered during the final days of Mosley’s tenure as Orlando Magic coach.

“I was like, ‘What the hell happened?’” Dumars said jokingly. “Right out of the gate.”

While Orlando’s epic collapse in the Eastern Conference playoffs after grabbing a 3-1 lead over the top-seeded Detroit Pistons led to Mosley’s firing earlier this month, Dumars wanted to focus his attention on Game 6 of that first-round series. That game will probably go down as Mosley’s lowest Magic moment.

In that loss, Orlando scored just 19 points in the second half and became the first team in the play-by-play era to blow a 24-point lead at home in a closeout game. Dumars and Mosley went into painstaking detail about everything in that second half, from Mosley’s timeouts to the adjustments he made as things unraveled and even his interactions in the huddle.

That loss in Game 6 was a great encapsulation of what went right and wrong during Mosley’s five years in Orlando. The defensive mindset his teams embraced often allowed them to overachieve, even when they dealt with bad injury luck. But Mosley’s detractors often complained about his team’s lack of offensive innovation or its ability to find solutions when things got stagnant.

Mosley is bringing over four assistants he worked with in Orlando. Bret Brielmaier will be his offensive coordinator, Dale Osbourne his defensive coordinator. Randy Gregory will serve as head of player development, while God Shammgod will play a hybrid role as a player development coach and a voice Mosley trusts on in-game adjustments. Pressure will fall on those guys, particularly Brielmaier, to show some growth from their Orlando days.

But there will also be pressure on the Pelicans’ players to fully commit to Mosley’s hard-nosed style, an effort to show they’re willing to go above and beyond to move past all the losing they’ve done the past two seasons.

Zion Williamson and Trey Murphy III are obviously immensely talented on the offensive end. But are they willing to set the tone with their defense on a nightly basis?

“You can score in this league all you want. You’ve got to get some stops at some point,” Dumars said. “It’s something (Mosley) and I talked a lot about throughout this process. It’s not like we’re going to forget about offense … but you also have to defend. That was a huge selling point for me.”

While there are some legitimate gripes about Mosley’s sluggish Orlando offenses, there’s no denying that he turned the Magic into an elite defensive team. Though they dropped to 13th in defensive rating this season, they ranked second and third the previous two seasons. They were widely considered one of the most physical teams in the league and bullied opponents who weren’t ready to match their physicality.

The bigger question facing this roster isn’t about how quickly it will buy into Mosley. It’s more about whether the current players are capable of defending at that level. New Orleans’ four most important assets — Williamson, Murphy, Jeremiah Fears and Derik Queen — haven’t necessarily prioritized defense.

Williamson has shown flashes of being an impactful defender, but his effort and focus on that end have been unpredictable at best. Murphy was much better in certain areas last season, but he’s never been more than an average defender. Although Queen and Fears went through the typical rookie growing pains, some of their physical limitations suggest they may have trouble defending larger players.

Per Cleaning The Glass, when Williamson, Murphy, Fears and Queen were on the court together last season, the Pelicans posted a horrid 124.2 defensive rating. That’s nearly three points higher than the Washington Wizards’ league-worst 121.5 defensive rating.

The combination that matters most will be Williamson and Queen in the frontcourt. The Pelicans tried starting them together for a stretch last season, but the defense was so bad — a 122.8 defensive rating, per Cleaning The Glass — that the coaching staff had no choice but to separate them.

Dumars and the front office are committed to keeping Williamson in New Orleans for the foreseeable future, and Queen certainly isn’t going anywhere after everything the Pels invested to get him in last year’s draft.

Some will say it’s Mosley’s job to get these guys to defend at a higher level. But it falls on Queen and Williamson to show a greater level of pride in their defense and the example they set for everyone else on the team. The Pelicans aren’t going anywhere until the best players on the roster evolve and take their defense more seriously.

Mosley’s Magic teams were often at their worst when star Paolo Banchero was playing heavy doses of isolation ball. The danger for New Orleans is falling into the same offensive traps Orlando did — predictable half-court possessions in which one star initiates while everyone else stands around and watches.

Mosley has to show he can put Williamson in positions to succeed while also doing the same for Murphy, Fears, Queen and others. And that may require trying some different things. Maybe even showing a different side of himself.

“I’m a big-time fan of read-and-react (offense). … It’s finding windows, finding slots and knowing who you’re playing with,” Mosley said. “It doesn’t always have to be pick-and-roll heavy. Guys need to be able to move off the ball, creating for each other. The drive-and-kick game, I love. … Because we have versatility, a lot of the parts are interchangeable.

“But there’s also that definition of what you need to do when that ball is in your hands.”

Some fans fear that Mosley’s approach and mentality will be more of the same after Willie Green failed to diversify what the Pels did on offense the past few seasons. Those within the organization reject that notion.

Mosley was hired to change the Pelicans’ culture, but culture change only matters if the franchise’s most important figures are willing to change with it. Mosley has to show he’s just as committed to making the necessary changes to help this organization get back to the playoffs.

What type of situation do you think he’s entering with the Pelicans?
With me having built a relationship with Joe Dumars over the years and seeing Troy and having an opportunity to coach some of the players Troy drafted here in Detroit, the (Pelicans) organization is headed in the right direction. You look at the talent level on that team now. It’s a team that went through similar injuries (to Orlando) last year. They are talented. With Jamahl’s fit there with his personality and ability to coach and organize and build an environment, I feel like that organization has a chance to take a step this year.

Yesterday, the New Orleans Pelicans announced they’ve hired Jamahl Mosley as their next coach. You may remember that the Magic fired Mosley after they lost to the Pistons in the first round. The Pelicans, who fired Willie Green 12 games into the season, have been reportedly interested in Mosley since November.

Mosley fits the defense-first mentality that New Orleans lead executive Joe Dumars prefers. In Mosley’s five seasons in Orlando, the Magic finished 17th, 16th, second, second and 11th in defensive rating. Twice under Green, the Pelicans finished in the top seven in defensive rating, but they’ve been in the bottom half of the league in six of the last eight seasons. Dumars needs to bring in more defensive help, but Mosley can usually extract that out of players.

The remaining questions for the Pelicans under Mosley are:

• What’s going to happen with Zion Williamson? He has two years left on his deal.
• Will the Pelicans trade Trey Murphy III to bring in a haul of players and/or assets?
• How much of this roster even fits into what the Pelicans want to build?
• Do rookies Derik Queen and Jeremiah Fears play enough defense to fit what Mosley wants?
• Are the Pelicans going to retool into a quick turnaround, or do they have the patience to build for the long term?
• When are the Pelicans going to get better uniforms?
• Is Mosley going to have an assistant coach to handle his biggest blind spot, which is a good offensive system?

I don’t know what should happen with Zion at this point (he’s extension eligible!), but I love the idea of Murphy being a main guy for them. I think he could be a second guy on a very good team. It feels like Dumars has a lot of reshaping of his roster to do. Reminder, he won’t have a first-round pick to use this year to help do it.

They were only releasing 4 Dave’s Pick’s and a box set a year, which came out to about 10 shows. Based on this pace, they’ll knock out 100 in a year. How does that bode for future releases? Seems like they will eventually run out.