It’s time for David Griffin to finally identify the right coach for the Pelicans

David Griffin is running out of mulligans.

The New Orleans Pelicans executive vice president of basketball operations made his fourth major decision regarding the franchise’s head coach since he was hired barely two years ago when he and Stan Van Gundy “mutually decided to part ways” on Wednesday.

None of Griffin’s three previous decisions worked out well.

This one – meaning the selection of Van Gundy’s successor – must represent a breakthrough for Griffin and the franchise.

Shortly after being hired, Griffin added a year to the one remaining on Alvin Gentry’s contract even though Gentry’s most recent Pelicans team had plodded through a 33-49 season and missed the playoffs one year after advancing to the second round of the Western Conference playoffs.

The 2019-20 season was no better – neither before the onset of COVID-19 nor after the suspended season was completed in the Orlando bubble – as the Pelicans stumbled to the finish line with a 30-42 record.

So Griffin fired Gentry.

The move was understandable after the lackluster season, which was mostly consistent with Gentry’s five-year tenure in New Orleans and his four previous head coaching opportunities.

But the wisdom of removing a head coach cannot be properly evaluated until a successor is chosen and is on the job long enough to be evaluated.

Van Gundy lasted eight months.

And now Griffin and the Pelicans are back where they were after last season.

Griffin began his search for Gentry’s successor from a position of strength. The presence of 20-year-old Zion Williamson, a handful of other talented, ascending young players and a trove of first-round draft choices in the near future made the Pelicans’ job an attractive one.

Van Gundy had been successful in previous stints in Orlando and Miami, but his most recent tenure in Detroit had been disastrous.

Griffin believed that Van Gundy’s track record of developing young players and winning with defense first was the optimum combination for the leader of a frisky young group.

The reasoning wasn’t faulty.

But the timing wasn’t ideal. The shortened offseason because of COVID necessitated a short training camp and a condensed regular season left virtually no time for meaningful in-season practices.

Van Gundy’s ability to teach his defensive concepts and develop his young players was hampered by the circumstances. It showed as the Pelicans were one of the worst defensive teams in the NBA – and no better than Gentry’s last team.

The circumstances didn’t help – but neither did they excuse – the team’s shortcomings.

The Pelicans often lacked adequate defensive energy, routinely allowed historically high levels of 3-point shooting success by opponents and made a habit of losing games that they led by double-digits.

Van Gundy spoke regularly throughout the season with frankness about his frustration with his players’ lack of defensive effort as well as chronic mental lapses.

He often sounded like a coach unhappy in his position – with his inability to reach his players in a productive manner.

He and the roster – the roster that Griffin created, at least in part, for the specific purpose of blending with Van Gundy’s coaching strengths – were a bad combination.

When the Pelicans finished this season one game better than they had last season, Griffin said the off-season requirements included upgrading the team’s defensive ability, toughness, 3-point shooting and basketball IQ.

Most of those shortcomings must be attributed not to coaching weaknesses, but player and player-evaluation weaknesses.

Nonetheless as a month passed from the end of the season until Wednesday, the VP and the coach realized that this pairing was not going to work going forward.

Griffin said that once that realization emerged he had to recognize that “we don’t have time to waste.”

So Van Gundy is out.

Griffin spoke obliquely on a conference call about the reasons for the divorce, using vague language about Van Gundy and the organization not being “in lock step,” having “philosophical differences,” and “a disconnect” without clarifying exactly where Van Gundy and the organization diverged.

He praised Van Gundy’s coaching ability while acknowledging the shortcomings of a group of players “anxious to be coached.”

“It’s on all of us from top to bottom,” Griffin said. “We all have to get better.”

So now Griffin will take yet another crack at identifying the right coach for the Pelicans.

He said that a year ago the Pelicans evaluated “a very extensive pool” of candidates, zeroed in on 20 of them, then on nine of those 20 before settling on Van Gundy.

He said some of those candidates will be considered again and some new ones will join the pool. He said the organization has “an incredible coaching staff,” a group that “we want to conserve as much as we can.”

Shortly after Van Gundy’s departure was announced, speculation on social media trumpeted current assistant Teresa Weatherspoon as someone likely to be given significant consideration to succeed her former boss.

Griffin praised Weatherspoon as being “really, really central to our future”, but called her candidacy “premature” and suggested it was an overreaction to her being asked to coach the Pelicans Summer League team.

It was been just eight months since Griffin examined the pool of head-coaching candidates and determined that Van Gundy was the best fit for the Pelicans.

Now that Van Gundy has proven not to be a good enough fit, has the pool of candidates changed enough in such a short period of time for Griffin to be able to identify a better successor to Van Gundy than the one he identified to succeed Gentry?

Griffin said he’ll be looking for a head coach with “a shared vision” who is “the right fit,” words he used when he launched the search that produced Van Gundy.

He acknowledged the difficulty in finding the right fit, which makes hiring a head coach “the hardest thing to do in our business.”

No matter the difficulty, it’s Griffin’s job to finally get that right.