Pelicans’ Eric Gordon out 4-6 weeks with fractured ring finger
He’d missed 115 games through three injury-plagued seasons in the Big Easy, but midway through last season, shooting guard Eric Gordon finally settled into something approaching a consistent groove. After eschewing surgery for the torn labrum in his left shoulder last season and instead rehabilitating the injury for six weeks, he suited up for the New Orleans Pelicans’ final 49 regular-season games; he finished the season second in the NBA in 3-point shooting percentage in helping the Pelicans to their first playoff berth since 2011, and averaged 18.5 points per game in New Orleans’ first-round postseason sweep at the hands of the eventual champion Golden State Warriors.
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This season, as injuries once again persistently wrecked a Pelicans club that many expected to rise from the bottom of the Western Conference playoff bracket toward its upper echelon, the oft-injured shooting guard became a surprising constant, appearing in each of New Orleans’ first 41 games to provide long-range shooting and some supplemental scoring punch for a team short on healthy bodies, embroiled in turmoil and fading from the playoff race. And now, just as the Pelicans seemed like they might have a chance to put together a bit of a run, Gordon has once again been bitten by the injury bug, suffering a fractured ring finger on his right hand that will keep him sidelined for four to six weeks after undergoing surgery on Wednesday morning.
The Pelicans said Wednesday that he suffered the injury during the third quarter of their 114-99 win over the visiting Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday. The 27-year-old Gordon instantly reached for his right hand after Timberwolves forward Nemanja Bjelica swiped in for a steal as Gordon attempted to drive to the basket with just over a minute and a half left in the third quarter:
Gordon favored his hand on the next two trips up and down the floor before exiting the game for good at the 1:07 mark of the third. He finished with 11 points on 4-for-9 shooting with three assists, one rebound and one steal in 25 minutes of playing time, and hit a pair of big 3-pointers — one to give New Orleans its first lead of the night at 65-64, and another shortly thereafter to put the Pelicans back on top for good at 70-69 — that helped turn what had begun as a dispiriting start to a homestand into a much-needed victory.
A four-to-six-week timetable would put Gordon on the shelf through at least the All-Star break, meaning he’d miss somewhere between 12 and 18 games. Even if his recovery tends toward the long side, he’d likely be back on the court by early March and available for the final month and a half of the regular season, during which Anthony Davis and company will hope to be making a push for one of the West’s final playoff spots. But after a wretched start to the season has the Pelicans at 14-27, four games behind the eighth-seeded Utah Jazz, simply getting to the point where they can make that push figured to be problematic enough for even a (relatively) full-strength version of New Orleans; in that context, as Graham McQueen wrote at Pelicans blog Bourbon Street Shots, “[Gordon’s] injury could be worse, but the timing couldn’t be.”
Not only have the Pelicans been decimated by injuries — Davis, Tyreke Evans, Jrue Holiday, Omer Asik, Alexis Ajinca, Norris Cole and Luke Babbitt have all missed time, and swingman Quincy Pondexter didn’t suit up at all before being ruled out for the season after left knee surgery — but they’ve also played one of the NBA’s toughest slates thus far, according to multiple strength of schedule metrics. Tuesday’s win over Minnesota kicked off a seven-game homestand and a stretch that will see New Orleans play 15 of its next 22 games at Smoothie King Center, with 12 of those home affairs coming against teams with sub-.500 road records. If the Pelicans — who, quiet as it’s kept, have gone from one of the league’s very worst defenses to roughly average over the past 20 games and top-10-caliber over the last 10 — are going to make a run to get themselves in playoff position, it needs to come now … and now, it’ll have to come without their leading 3-point shooter, a key secondary ball-handler and playmaker, and a player in whose minutes they’ve been about six points per 100 possessions better this season than when he’s been off the floor.
We’ll leave it to one of Gordon’s backcourt partners to offer a three-word summation of his injury and the predicament in which the Pelicans just seem to keep finding themselves. From Scott Kushner of the New Orleans Advocate:
“Obviously, it sucks,” point guard Jrue Holiday said. “It seems like every year someone is getting hurt with like a pretty big injury. Our team is going to have to step up and fight through adversity again.” […]
“It’s not something you can control,” forward Ryan Anderson said. “It happens. It’s tough. Obviously we’re really going to miss a guy like Eric out. It means guys are going to have to step up once again. Obviously prayers are with him, and I hope he makes a speedy recovery.”
The already difficult task of leapfrogging the Utah Jazz, Portland Trail Blazers, Sacramento Kings and Denver Nuggets to snare the eighth seed will become even more daunting without Gordon to space the floor; for what it’s worth, 538’s postseason prediction model pegs New Orleans’ playoff odds at just 18 percent. That’s especially true because Gordon’s injury takes off the table the possibility of the Pelicans playing their five best players together on the court at the same time … not that first-year head coach Alvin Gentry’s necessarily seemed too keen on doing that anyway, as noted by NBA.com’s John Schuhmann:
Holiday, Gordon, Evans, Anderson and Davis have all been available in 17 games this season. And in those 17 games, that group of five players has been on the floor together for less than 33 minutes.
In those (less than) 33 minutes together, that unit has outscored its opponents by a score of 99-56, with an effective field goal percentage of 61 percent. […]
Even with his team near the bottom of the Western Conference standings, Gentry never took much of a chance on what is clearly his most talented lineup. Holiday, Gordon, Evans, Anderson and Davis have played more than five minutes together in just two games.
And now, for the foreseeable future, he won’t be able to take that chance, meaning that even with some potential solutions available — namely, reinserting Holiday into the starting lineup, increasing the roles of the likes of Cole and Alonzo Gee, and perhaps even dusting off veteran point guard Toney Douglas — the Pelicans could find themselves lacking the necessary fuel to rise out of the hole they dug for themselves at the start of the season.
“[Eric] is a big key to our team with shooting the 3-ball and driving and things,” Evans said Tuesday, according to John Reid of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “It’s part of the league and guys like Cole and Jrue got to be ready. I believe they will be. We’re all competitive and we want to help each other out. I think we’ll be ready.”
If they’re not, the snakebitten Pelicans could be closer to disassembly and rebuilding than to trying for a second straight postseason by the time Gordon’s able to get back on the court.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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