Pelicans won't fix issues by firing David Griffin, hiring Joe Dumars

The New Orleans Pelicans made their first firing after a truly disastrous season, axing team president David Griffin on Monday, according to ESPN's Shams Charania. According to Charania, the team sees NBA executive vice president of basketball operations as the heavy front-runner to replace him.

It was a mess of a season in Louisiana from start to finish for the Pels; they opened the season losing 16 of their first 20 games, and finished 21-61, the fourth-worst finish by any team in the NBA this season.

But blaming Griffin does him no justice, and bringing in Dumars won't fix anything, and might make things worse.

The Pelicans' misfortunes this season largely boiled down to one thing: they had what might be the worst injury luck any NBA team has ever had over the course of an entire season. Star shooting guard Dejounte Murray went down in the season opener with a broken hand that kept him out of all but 31 games on the year, CJ McCollum missed almost 30 games, Zion Williamson missed 52 games, and Brandon Ingram played in just 18 games before being traded to the Raptors.

Breakout players like Trey Murphy missed big chunks of the season too, as did role players like Jose Alvarado and Herbert Jones. Essentially the entire rotation of this team missed at least 30 to 40 games this year. The Pels' projected stars, Ingram, Murray, and Williamson, never played together. You can't blame Griffin for that kind of ghastly injury misfortune in a season. New Orleans was the most snake-bitten team in all of basketball, incapable of catching a single, solitary injury break this season.

But, okay, let's say you blame Griffin for signing a cadre of injury-prone stars, and for Williamson's continued, recurring injury problems. How is Dumars going to fix any of what's wrong in New Orleans?

Yes, Dumars built the Pistons' last championship team. And yes, he won Executive of the year wayyy back in 2003. But as that core aged, Dumars floundered. They failed to make the playoffs at all from 2009 until 2016, and by the time he left in 2014, the cupboard was largely bare of talent.

Since then, things haven't improved much in Detroit, and this season is the first time in a long time that there's legitimate hope in the future of the franchise. Much of the last decade-plus of Pistons futility can be chalked up to Dumars and his successor's flailing after their run of glory in the early 2000s.

His brief, inauspicious stint with the Kings was even worse; those three years were marked by continued flailing and struggles in Sacramento, as the team tried and failed to find a consistent identity under Luke Walton. Yes, Dumars wasn't in charge, but he was one of the lead decision makers in the Kings front office during a time of particular futility.

Even if he had run the team brilliantly for the duration of his time in charge, Dumars has been out of the actual team-building business for almost a decade now. Will he still have the juice?

The Pelicans had better hope so, because they're banking a lot of their future on a guy who hasn't exactly proven himself to be capable of building sustained success in the NBA in the last 20-plus years.

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