New Orleans Pelicans Continue Road Trip Against Milwaukee Bucks

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Published: March 12, 2016

The New Orleans Pelicans (24-40) visit the Milwaukee Bucks (27-38) tonight in another clash of survivors. The Bucks last played Wednesday, but the Pelicans lost to Memphis last night in overtime, so if rest matters, it matters more tonight. The game is a 6:30 pm CT (UTC -6) and is on Fox Sports New Orleans and the Pelicans Radio Network, 99.5 FM locally.

This one will be interesting, but not because of the normal reasons. The Pelicans are without Evans, Gordon, Pondexter, Ajinca, Dejean-Jones, Cole, and will have Holiday under some limitation tonight, while the Bucks are without Carter-Williams, Novak, Vasquez, Mayo, and Henson. This leaves the Bucks with Antetokounmpo, Parker, Monroe, and Middleton with which to attack the Pelicans with Bayless at point (remember him?). The Pelicans will be starting Asik, Davis, Babbitt, Cunningham, and Douglas likely, per Sallerson. They’ll have some time with Holiday, but this is not going to be pretty in a game where Gentry emphasized both ball movement and limiting turnovers. I was thinking he’d go about 20m if the game is “as expected,” less if it’s a disaster, and maybe closer to 30m if it’s a close one. This would keep the aggregate minutes across the two days close to his recent average or a little below.

What is interesting about this to me is that the Bucks have Kidd as their coach and some nice young talent. Yet, they are injured, perhaps not as critically as the Pelicans, but still injured significantly. They even waived Copeland to sign Novak who played just 3 games before needing surgery, so the number of parallels is not few. Still, there are some important differences between the two teams that were dealing with relocation crises in the past several years, with New Orleans’ resolved prior to that of the Bucks, whose Arena is expected to break ground this summer. The Bucks have some vets and niiiiice draft picks, while the Pelicans have Davis and other people’s draft picks, though a little older.

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, and not much is, but it’ll be interesting to ponder these two possible pasts and two possible paths meeting here tonight in more than one way.

See you after the game here and on the site twitter in between.

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