Sometime around 2020, Brandon Ingram made the transition from the Next Big Thing to The Big Thing. In his first season with the Pelicans, he figured out how to translate his All-Star level tools into an All-Star season, averaging 23.8 points, 6.1 rebounds and 4.2 assists per game. Alongside other young, budding stars like Jayson Tatum and Donovan Mitchell, he seemed poised to lead the new wave of Zillenial hoopers.
And then he didn’t. While Tatum and Mitchell kept ascending, Ingram idled. In the four seasons since he won Most Improved Player in 2020, Ingram has remained in the same narrow band of outcomes—he’s never averaged more than 24.7 points or less than 20.8; his assist and rebound averages never move by more than a few decimal points from year to year. The only difference between the 2021 and 2024 versions of Ingram is that he’s more or less stopped shooting threes. Whereas the league’s best players are constantly evolving and challenging themselves, Ingram has retreated to his hideyhole, refining his shot-making, but not his overall game.
Now, Ingram finds himself as one of the leaders of a team that has potentially outgrown him. Zion Williamson, when healthy, is the Pelicans’ undisputed gravitational core; by virtue of being an dominant interior force, Williamson can access a level that Ingram has never been able to reach.
Although Ingram is still a good player, he’s become an increasingly difficult one. Despite being a talented and gutsy shot-maker, he limits himself by refusing to take good shots. The math behind his relative inefficiency is a maddening word problem: how can a guy who’s an elite finisher and mid-range shooter and a league-average three-point shooter have a below average True Shooting percentage? How can someone so remarkable make himself so ordinary?
Accordingly, the Pelicans have built a team that suits Williamson’s needs, not Ingram’s. Herb Jones and Trey Murphy III are extremely useful complementary wings who play the same position as Ingram; CJ McCollum and Dejounte Murray are high-usage guards who operate from the same areas of the court as Ingram. For the Pelicans, Ingram is almost entirely redundant. He’s an effective pull-up shooter, but McCollum and Murray are better ones; he’s a slick passer, but Williamson is a much more consequential playmaker.
Over the summer, the Pelicans, unwilling to give Ingram a plush new deal, tried in earnest to trade him ahead of the last year of his contract. They found no takers. Despite Ingram’s statistical production and clear ability, he doesn’t have an obvious fit on a team with championship ambition. No team in the league is exactly one Brandon Ingram away from throwing a parade.
In his current state, Ingram exists within the uncanny valley of near-stardom, his almost-greatness becoming a form of badness. As a former All-Star in the prime of his career, Ingram is overqualified to be paid a mid-level contract and stand in the corner. But as a scorer who struggles to generate high-value shots, he’s not capable of being one of the best players on a championship-level team. Having been groomed for stardom his whole career, he’s become elite in form, but not function.
At this point, Ingram’s primary value for the Pelicans is that he’s insurance against Williamson getting hurt. It’s not so much that he vaults them towards the top of the West, but that he prevents them from sinking to the bottom. Notably, Ingram is a different and better player when separated from Williamson. In his 1,017 Williamson-less minutes last season, Ingram averaged 36.9 points and 10.2 assists per 100 possessions; comparatively, when he shared the court with Williamson, he put up just 26.0 points and 6.9 assists per 100 possessions. Similarly, the Pelicans were more than three points per 100 possessions better when Ingram played sans-Williamson than when the duo played together.
Still, Ingram is worth building around, if only because there aren’t exactly hordes of high-quality players trying to force their way to New Orleans. Small markets don’t have the privilege of letting perfect be the enemy of good—it would be silly for the Pelicans to jettison Ingram because it’s unlikely that they’ll land someone this gifted for the foreseeable future. More, Ingram isn’t so much lost as he is adrift; he could make a significant leap simply by tweaking his shot selection.
During Ingram’s tenure in New Orleans, the team has never demonstrated any real vision: his relatively disappointing career is more of an indictment of the Pelicans than it is of him. A better team would’ve had a better plan to turn Ingram into a better player—of all the ways to deploy a hyper-skilled 6 '8 forward, forcing him to subsist mainly on contested mid-range jumpers is both the least interesting and least effective. In an alternate world, the Pelicans could have found synergies between Ingram’s arachnid grace and Williamson’s unstoppable brawn, instead of placing the two in opposition to one another.
And now, even if Williamson stays healthy, the Pelicans don’t have the pieces or players to capitalize on it. Over the last few seasons, they’ve spent so much time worrying about worst-case scenarios that they’ve foreclosed any real promise for best-case ones. At some point, their caution turned into a ruinous fear—their roster is so overripe with backup plans and failsafes that it has no real identity. In doing so, New Orleans turned Ingram from a cornerstone into a contingency.