Joe Dumars’ 40-year NBA journey has taken him from the Bad Boys to a bad team.
It will be up to Dumars to transform that bad team into a good one and erase all of the misery left behind from the second-worst season in New Orleans Pelicans’ history.
Less than 24 hours after the Pelicans fired David Griffin as their executive vice president of basketball operations, they found his replacement.
Dumars, a Natchitoches native and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer after a standout career with the Detroit Pistons, has been handed the keys to the Pelicans, first reported by ESPN and confirmed by The Times-Picayune.
The suddenness of the hire indicates team owner Gayle Benson and the rest of the team brass already had their guy picked out. Ideally, you would have liked to see the team go through a thorough search to fill the position. Or at least pretend to.
Instead, the Pelicans chose a person they were familiar with before Griffin even had cleaned out his office. Dumars, 61, has been linked to this role with the organization in years past, and now he gets his chance to try to do in New Orleans what he once did in Detroit as both a player and an executive.
He played guard on the Pistons teams in the late 80s and early 90s that won two NBA championships. After he retired, he took over as the director of basketball operations for the Pistons in 2000 and helped build a team that won the NBA title in the 2003-04 season. He was named executive of the year the season before that.
He stayed with the Pistons through 2014 and took a job in the Sacramento Kings front office five years later. In 2022, he was named executive vice president and head of basketball operations for the NBA.
Now Dumars, whose jersey hangs in the rafters at McNeese State, returns to Louisiana to try to get the Pelicans pointed in the right direction after a disastrous 21-61 season.
Pelicans coach Willie Green, a Detroit native, grew up a fan of those Bad Boy Pistons teams that featured Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, Dennis Rodman and Dumars.
Soon over the next few days, we’ll see whether Dumars is a fan of Green.
The first big decision Dumars will make is deciding whether Green remains the coach. The two of them never have worked together. Green just completed his fourth season with the Pelicans, and he increased his win total in each of his first three seasons, including last year when the Pels won the second-most games (49) in franchise history.
This season, the Pelicans hit rock bottom. They lost 17 games by 20 points or more, including a 49-point thumping (the worst in franchise history) to the Miami Heat in the next-to-last game of the season.
"I didn’t do great," Green said after the regular-season finale. "I have to take full ownership of where we are right now as a team. I’ll go back and reflect. I was beating myself up every game trying to figure out how to get us competing and playing at the highest level that we can play.
"We failed. I failed.”
As a result, Griffin was fired by Benson. The next key decisions fall on the shoulders of Dumars.
Will Dumars put the Pelicans’ woes this season on Green and make a coaching change?
Or does he run it back with Green, who was dealt about as bad of a hand as a coach possibly could get this season. The injury bug started biting the team at training camp in Nashville, Tennesse, and never let up. The best five players (Zion Williamson, CJ McCollum, Dejounte Murray, Trey Murphy and Herb Jones) missed a total of 220 games. That doesn’t include Brandon Ingram, who played just 18 games before Griffin traded him to the Toronto Raptors.
My guess is Green gets another year to finish out his contract.
Dumars’ second major decision will be what to do with Williamson, who just completed his sixth season. Williamson played in just 30 games this season, a big reason for the Pelicans' woes. When Williamson plays, the Pelicans have a chance against most teams in the league. When he doesn’t, they don’t.
Does Dumars take a chance on getting the version of Williamson that played in 70 games a year ago? Or does he trade away the guy who Griffin tried, unsuccessfully, to build the team around for the past six years?
My guess here is the Pelicans move in a different direction.
But only Dumars really knows.
We’ll hear more about his plans when he speaks to the media in the next handful of days to lay out his vision.
Nobody knows how well Dumars will do.
Time, something Benson didn’t waste in hiring Dumars, will tell.