A three-point loss to the Indiana Pacers in the season opener in the Smoothie King Center.
A one-point loss to the Utah Jazz on the road.
A six-point road loss after blowing a 23-point lead to the Denver Nuggets.
That’s the way the New Orleans Pelicans have started in the first year under head coach Jamahl Mosley. There has been a familiar theme in all three losses — a failure to close.
“Those aren’t losses, those were lessons,” guard Dejounte Murray said, “because we controlled all three of those games, and we felt like we beat ourselves. We didn’t look at those like, ‘Damn, those teams beat us’ or ‘they whooped us.’ That wasn’t the case. We beat ourselves. We’ve got to be disciplined from top to bottom and finish games.”
Paying attention to details has been a point of emphasis for the Pelicans in the time between Saturday’s collapse against the Nuggets and a three-game home stand that starts Wednesday night.
The Pelicans host Denver on Wednesday and then the Sacramento Kings on Thursday. They wrap up the home stand Saturday against the Atlanta Hawks.
Practice and film study over the past few days have focused on the final few minutes of games. The Pels will need to excel in that area to get Mosley his first win in New Orleans.
“You saw for 42 minutes that the process was absolutely right,” Mosley said about Saturday’s loss to the Nuggets. “And then the last part of it is the details we have to start to clean up as a unit. You can focus in on the things that are fixable on the court, the X’s and O’s. The spacing and all those pieces can be fixed.
“I think that’s the big key with this group. They are playing hard. They are playing together for 42 (minutes). Now the other side is can we stick to that process and can we play that hard for 48 (minutes)?”
It’s the second straight season the Pelicans have started 0-3. Last season, they didn’t get their first win until the seventh game. This year’s team doesn’t plan to let the slow start snowball like that. The Pelicans would like nothing more than to get a win or two (or three) in the Smoothie King Center over the next four days.
“We’ve lost these three games by (a total of) 10 points,” Saddiq Bey said. “That means down the stretch, we’ve got to figure out how to close games the right way. It’s tough. We are 0-3. We still have 79 games left. It’s different than college when you have to wait six days to play. We can make a run and go on a streak and see what happens. It’s a long season. We can’t get down.”
Veteran center DeAndre Jordan agrees. Jordan got his first start of the season in Saturday’s loss when he replaced Yves Missi, who is dealing with a left knee contusion and bone bruise from Friday’s loss to Utah. Missi was seen shooting shots at the end of Tuesday’s practice, a promising sign that his injury isn’t nearly as bad as it seemed when he had to be helped off of the court.
“We have the talent,” Jordan said. “We’ve been in every game this year. The first two games we lost by one possession and obviously the other night we all know what happened. But I think that (finishing) comes with maturity and comes with games and minutes played together.
“That’s no excuse for us losing that game. We should have finished the game out. Too many lapses where we played the score and not the game. Hopefully we can learn from that.”
The next three games will provide some answers.
“It’s been a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda,” Bey said. “We could be 3-0, so we are doing a lot of great things. But now we’ve got to win it in the margins. Being able to get the stops we need, the shots we need and execute. We can flip it right back over.”
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