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Alvin Gentry looks back on the Pelicans' lost year with sarcasm

Alvin Gentry watches another one bite the dust. (Getty Images)
Alvin Gentry watches another one bite the dust. (Getty Images)

The New Orleans Pelicans started the season as likely playoff participants, coming off of the team’s first postseason appearance of the Anthony Davis era. Davis, due to his brilliant play and ungodly Player Efficiency Rating from 2014-15, was even considered an MVP candidate. A full-on player in a race featuring Stephen Curry and LeBron James, and for various good reasons.

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The team encountered heaps of injuries to start the year, however, and a schedule that paired them against nine playoff teams in its first 12 contests. The squad lost 11 of those 12 matchups to begin the year, but even after three consecutive wins left them at just seven games under .500 by Thanksgiving, the Pelicans never drew closer to the break-even mark.

On Monday, following a win to the New York Knicks in NOLA, the team was officially sent packing from the playoff picture. When informed of this, coach Alvin Gentry responded with a healthy dose of sarcasm:

“Oh yeah, we’re shocked,” Gentry said sarcastically about his 26-47 team. “I can’t believe that you brought that up, that we’re out of the playoffs. Man, we thought we had one more run in us. Especially with all the guys that we have healthy, and everybody’s back.”

From ESPN:

"I am gonna send out an all-points bulletin to anybody in the French Quarter or anywhere else," Gentry said after a 99-91 win at Smoothie King Center. "We need a voodoo doctor or something here. We've gotta find the bones under this place. We've got to do something, because this is becoming comical."

On Tuesday it was further realized that the Pelicans haven’t had a healthy dose all year. Guard Jrue Holiday, the lone Pelican to actually outsize expectations when it came to overcoming injury, was declared out for the season with an orbital bone fracture:

Holiday (6-4, 205) has been diagnosed with a right inferior orbital wall fracture. He will miss the remainder of the 2015-16 season. The injury occurred with 56.1 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter of last night’s game against the New York Knicks. The UCLA product has appeared in 65 games (23 starts) while averaging 16.8 points, 3.0 rebounds, 6.0 assists and 1.4 steals.

Anthony Davis is already gone. This leaves AD, Holiday, Ryan Anderson, Tyreke Evans and Eric Gordon all out with season ending injuries (though Anderson hasn’t officially been shut down). That’s a starting lineup, if you’re counting at home. Alongside rotation contributors like Quincy Pondexter, Alonzo Gee, and Norris Cole.

The Knicks win was rightfully most noted for the incident late in the fourth quarter when a young fan strolled onto the court toward New York forward Carmelo Anthony. Even that back and forth couldn’t help but shake a little gallows humor from the Pelican coach:

"Got to be careful, though," Gentry joked. "He could slip and fall and hurt himself, OK?"

This is Gentry’s first year in New Orleans, and he has to be wondering what he got himself into.

It was hummable to see the Pelicans reach the playoffs last season by the hair of its chinny-chin-chin, but the slow roll in the four-plus years since the team was forced into dealing Chris Paul away from the squad hasn’t been pretty.

CP3 was dealt for Gordon, already on his second contract and already dealing with injury concerns that have plagued him in the years since. Good luck in the draft lottery brought in Davis, but it also brought in (ridiculous) fix charges and yet another absence of tact from David Stern in response. The next year brought another trip to the lottery, and the sight of general manager Dell Demps dealing picks that turned into Nerlens Noel and Elfrid Payton for Holiday, who will have missed a total of 107 games (while working on a minutes restriction) in three years with the team.

Gentry, brought in to shore up what was seen as a lacking offense, is facing down a trip to the lottery while his former club in Golden State is about to enter April with single-digit losses. Demps has been at this since 2010, with little to show.

Provided the team’s ownership group gives the crew another chance, the Pelicans will have a little room to move this summer. Even with three (Davis, Evans, Holiday) and nearly four (center Omer Asik) players making eight figures, the team will have some cap space should it make quick decisions in renouncing free agents (and their lingering cap holds) Ryan Anderson and Gordon. The team has the sixth-best draft odds, but just about every bit of lottery help this year comes in the form of teenagers – unless the team goes after Oklahoma guard Buddy Hield, who is just six months younger than Davis.

These are frustrating options. The team has tried ways both old (starting Asik, sadly an anachronism in today’s game) and new (the sweet-shooting Anderson) alongside Davis. Their All-Star’s defense both on and off the ball could still use some work, and the idea of lining up three similar shoot-first guards in the hopes that the bumps in one’s head would fill out the holes in another just hasn’t worked. Gentry and Davis are still cornerstones, and Davis is locked up until 2021 (declining to re-sign to the effective two-year extension that Chris Paul inked to), but at some point this was supposed to turn.

They can always point to the injuries, but at full health was this ever an imposing outfit? Or did some of us – present company included – let the box score stats (funneled into the advanced metrics we’ve all been working in for over a decade) with Davis get the best of us? It’s always fun to see a star do his work on a great team, maybe we were projecting, but even with this crew playing free of pain it’s hard to see where those 50-plus wins were coming from in retrospect. Even in a Western playoff bracket that took a step back on its bottom end.

Gentry, with nine games left in a lost season and summer (or, sadly, “spring”) vacation approaching, is laughing now. How he’ll feel next November, how his team looks, might not be up to him.

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Kelly Dwyer

is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!