Do the New Orleans Pelicans Need to Treat Their Superstar Like the 76ers Do?

In a recent interview, the Philadelphia 76ers superstar center said he may never play back-to-backs again. Should the New Orleans Pelicans take the same route with their superstar forward?

Sam Navarro-Imagn Images

The New Orleans Pelicans are no strangers to key members of their roster missing extended periods of time due to injury.

In fact, Trey Murphy III is currently dealing with a right hamstring injury that will at least keep him out of action through the preseason and the first game of the regular season after missing 25 of last year's games.

However, missing 25 of 82 games is nothing compared to the amount of time that superstar forward Zion Williamson has missed since the Pelicans selected him as their number-one overall pick in the 2019 NBA Draft.

New Orleans has played 390 games since drafting Williamson over five years ago, and the forward has played in only 184 of those.

It has been a struggle to keep Williamson healthy and on the court, to say the least, but another team's superstar big man may have a solution for the problem.

In a recent interview with ESPN's Tim Bontemps, Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid stated, "If I had to guess, I would probably never play back-to-backs the rest of my career."

With that being said, should that be an avenue that the Pelicans take with Williamson going forward to try and help keep him healthy?

Let's look at the upcoming season for example.

New Orleans has 14 back-to-backs scheduled for the upcoming year, and they are, for the most part, evenly spread out across the campaign.

Having Zion play in just one of the two back-to-back games for those 14 sets, lowers his games played for the year to 68, two shy of his 2023-24 total.

Williamson did play in seven back-to-backs last year, so we can look at this on a statistical level, too.

In those games, Williamson scored 22.2 points, with 5.6 rebounds, and 4.3 assists on 31.6 minutes per game.

Basketball Reference has four splits for rest available: zero days (back-to-backs), one day, two days, and three-plus days.

Out of the four, Zion's points, rebounds, and assists all ranked lower than two of the other three splits.

The big man also saw his shooting deteriorate on back-to-backs, connecting on only 52.5 percent of his attempts, the lowest rate among all four splits, while his offensive rating also dropped to 109 despite not being lower than 117 in the other three splits.

Not playing both games in a back-to-back would be beneficial to Zion's health on a long-term basis, but what would the team do with the superstar unavailable?

With no "true" center this year, not having Zion in the lineup could prove detrimental as he provides the lion's share of the roster's strength every time he sets foot on the court.

No Zion would mean that the rest of the roster would need to be healthy, specifically Murphy, or Daniel Theis would have to start, and he is much better suited for a role off the bench.

While it is an interesting concept to consider, this year may not be the right time to implement that strategy.

Should the Pelicans acquire a "true" starting center ahead of the 2025-26 season, it could become more of a possibility.

For now, the team will have to find other ways to work load management into Zion Williamson's routine.