At just 48 percent of regular season minutes logged by returning players, New Orleans experienced the sixth-most roster turnover in the NBA last season, with only Brooklyn, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and Sacramento giving less floor time to returnees from 2015-16 (on the opposite end of the spectrum at 85 percent, Portland was No. 1 in that stat, per Basketball-Reference.com). The offseason will partly determine where the Pelicans rank in that statistic in ’17-18, but they’ll enter the July 1 opening of free agency with fewer key unrestricted free agents than many clubs.
One such free agent will be combo forward Dante Cunningham, who declined a player option for next season, giving him the ability to sign with any NBA team. Cunningham will join Jrue Holiday and Donatas Motiejunas as the three New Orleans free agents who played significant minutes but will now be on the open market.
Since arriving in the Crescent City in 2014-15, the last time the Pelicans made the playoffs, Cunningham has been relied on for hard-nosed defense, rebounding and hustle plays. At the other end of the floor, he’s adapted to a leaguewide trend, as a 6-foot-8 big who now regularly launches three-pointers, despite never having done so over the first several years of his NBA career.
It’s not always easy to measure the Villanova product’s impact in statistics, though he finished fourth on the Pelicans in defensive win shares (1.6), trailing only Anthony Davis (5.1), Holiday (2.6) and Solomon Hill (2.3). One area where Cunningham experienced some bad luck in ‘16-17 was health, with him sustaining a broken leg in late November that caused him to miss 12 consecutive games. At the start of Cunningham’s tenure with New Orleans, he compiled a streak of 98 consecutive games played, including appearing in each of the team’s final 66 regular season contests in ’14-15. He logged 75 playoff minutes in that spring’s first-round series vs. Golden State, the first time he’d played in the postseason since a ’12 appearance with Memphis.
NBA experience: 8 seasons (3 with Pelicans) || Games played/started: 66/35 || Age: 30