Without Williamson, Pelicans can’t compete with top-seeded Thunder

NEW ORLEANS – Any chance the New Orleans Pelicans had of extending their season beyond the first round of the playoffs disappeared Saturday afternoon.

It came in the form of a 106-85 beat-down at the hands of the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Smoothie King Center.

The top-seeded Thunder have a 3-0 lead in the best-of-seven series and have to win one more game to officially advance to the Western Conference semi-finals. It could – and probably will – happen as soon as Game 4 on Monday night in the Smoothie King Center.

But Saturday’s lopsided victory by OKC confirmed what was apparent in the Thunder’s 32-point dominance in Game 2 three days earlier: The Pelicans without Zion Williamson are no match for the Thunder.

It’s safe to assume that they would be far more competitive and might well have won Game 1 instead of losing by two points if their best player were healthy.

But he’s not healthy and his teammates aren’t capable of extending this series long enough for him to get healthy.

So New Orleans is left to battle the young, frisky, balanced and confident Thunder. The absence of the team’s No. 1 scorer has required greater output from their No. 2 scorer (Brandon Ingram) and their No. 3 scorer (C.J. McCollum).

It hasn’t happened.

McCollum missed 15 of 22 field-goal attempts, including 6 of 8 3-pointers, while scoring 16 points Saturday. Ingram shot better (7-14 from the floor, 2-of-3 from beyond the arc), but that produced a mere 19 points.

Trey Murphy III, the team’s top long-range marksman, went scoreless in the fourth quarter for the second consecutive game and attempted just two shots while playing nine minutes, 28 seconds in the final period.

On top of the inadequate scoring from the three players most capable of mitigating the absence of Williamson’s scoring, the 21 turnovers committed by New Orleans led to 23 points for OKC.

The Thunder, led by MVP finalist Shai Alexander-Gilgeous, is clearly a much better offensive team that the Williamson-less Pelicans. But they demonstrated in Game 3 as they did in Game 2 that they are a much better defensive team as well.

OKC held New Orleans to 92 points in each of their first two games, marking just the second time this season that the Pelicans have scored fewer than 100 points. (By the way, the previous time that it happened they won both games, prevailing at Memphis and Portland).

On Saturday the home team fell nine points short of its scoring total in those first two losses.

When McCollum’s off-balance jumper at the final buzzer in Game 1 narrowly missed and allowed the top seed to escape with a victory, the question was whether this was going to be an unusually competitive 1-8 match-up or was the opener a case of the lower seed being sharp and confident after winning a play-in elimination game while the inexperienced top seed was cooling its heels.

The question was answered early and emphatically in Game 2: Game 1 was an aberration for the Thunder and it was a performance that demonstrated the Williamson-less Pelicans’ ceiling of modest height.

The Pelicans cannot score enough points to keep up with the Thunder. They can’t make enough shots – partly because their turnovers are reducing their number of opportunities and partly because they are shooting poorly with the opportunities they are getting.

After Saturday’s loss, head coach Willie Green said: “Right now our mindset has to be that we’re willing to take a chance and try some things we haven’t tried before and see if that can spark us.”

He’s correct that the Pelicans have to evaluate what they’ve been doing and be creative in modifying it. But it’s difficult to imagine what can be implemented in barely 48 hours to narrow the cavernous gap between these two teams.

Naturally the Pelicans have to focus on finding a way to score at least one more point than the Thunder on Monday night.

Nothing else.

“Look,” Green said, “we’ve got another game here at home and we’re not going to fix all of our issues tonight. Go home, have a good meal and we’ll come back tomorrow and practice and go over what we need to do and get ready for the next game.”

He also said his message to his team was this: “It’s not over. It’s not over.”

It’s over.