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Andrew LopezESPN
Last Saturday after a disappointing loss to the San Antonio Spurs, New Orleans Pelicans forward Zion Williamson told reporters he felt his team was close to what he wanted to be. The Pelicans have just played two tough games with losses to the Milwaukee Bucks and the Spurs, but he thought things could turn around soon.
“I feel like we’m almost there,” Williamson said. “I really feel like we’m almost there. There’s the last few things we need to find out, but we’re almost there.”
Consider Monday night a step in the right direction.
Behind Williamson’s charge in the third quarter, the Pelicans tipped the team with the best record in the league, holding on to defeat the Utah Jazz 129-124.
The Pelicans maintained a 17-point lead early in the fourth quarter, but watch the Jazz reduce it to 1 in the last minute, before holding on to Utah’s last three possessions a few times. Pelicans coach Stan Van Gundy joked that his team did not hold the lead as much as he could build it high enough to where Utah could not return.
The Jazz (27-8) entered the game in the third quarter of the season with a plus-161 points difference, which was 70 points better than any other team. But the Pelicans (15-19) outscored them by 16 in the third quarter on Monday, the worst difference in the third quarter of the season for Utah.
“Tonight we wanted to come out strong in the third,” said Lonzo Ball, point guard, of the Pelicans. “That was one of the focus points of the coaching staff. This game blew Utah people out in that third quarter, so that was one of the focal points. Z led the charge in third place for us.”
Williamson scored 15 of his 26 points in the third quarter as the Pelicans extended their lead.
“My mindset was whatever I could do to get my teammates energy, that’s what I would do,” Williamson said. “In the third quarter, after reading their defense in the first two quarters, I really got a feel for it and I was on the attack.”
The attack on the basket was the Pelicans’ focus during the night. They have finished the past 25 seasons with 74 points in the paint, the most any team has recorded in the paint against the Jazz, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
“It’s crazy that we’re so close to the basket with a defensive player like Rudy Gobert, where he’s on the sidelines every night,” Pelicans forward Brandon Ingram said of the All-Star center in Utah. “But we made it happen.”
The score of so much in the paint meant the Pelicans did not have to rely on 3-point attempts. New Orleans reached 7-for-11 from the three-point mark, and the 11 attempts were the least in a game by any winning team in the past four seasons, according to ESPN Stats & Information. Along with Utah’s 43 deep attempts, the game had the biggest difference between two teams for three-point attempts this season.
When Williamson scored in the third quarter, the Pelicans stayed with him and he even went straight to Gobert, a two-time defensive player of the year, a few times.
“It means he’s fearless,” Ingram said of 20-year-old Williamson. ‘Do you know that? [Gobert is] a two-time defensive player of the year or just a really, really good defensive player, he’s just fearless. He knows the angles of the shot. He knows what to do when he goes into the game. He’s not going to falter for anyone. He goes on and on until he gets where he wants to go. ‘
So far this season, the Pelicans have won over the Utah, Milwaukee and Phoenix Suns, as well as a 24-point return over the Boston Celtics, but they have also lost to the Detroit Pistons and Minnesota Timberwolves, teams at the bottom of the standings in their respective conferences.
For a team that Williamson ‘is almost there’, Van Gundy said the Pelicans are talented enough to beat anyone in the league, but they make too many mistakes and were not consistent enough in defense to win together as they do not want. .
Williamson agreed.
“For us to take it to the next level, we have to keep it going for the next few games,” Williamson said. “We have to agree with that.”