December 4th - New Orleans Pelicans @ Sacramento Kings - 11-10

In-Season Tournament Quarterfinals 🏆

🏀: vs Sacramento Kings
🕘: 9 pm CT
📺: @BallySportsNO & TNT
📻: @995WRNO#Pelicans | @SmoothieKing pic.twitter.com/QHgAHCBrDD

— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) December 4, 2023

Well, we lost last game and while you can point to a lot of reasons, the central reason was - as it has been multiple times for us this season - that we got shot out of the game from 3. Coby White alone made as many 3s as our entire team; that will generally doom you, regardless of what else you do. And we were competitive elsewhere; more FTs, even in TOs and rebounds, etc. Just got outshot. Not a huge surprise in a game where all of our shooters were out again.

Tonight, CJ and Trey Murphy return as both are unlisted on the injury report, and just in time for us to play Sacramento as part of the In Season Tournament. This game is a serious one for me, for two reasons.

1) It's a tournament game, and while I'm not the kind of people who is overly invested in the tournament I do think it would be neat to win if we can: and players on the team have said as much in interviews, most notably Zion. So here's a chance to bounce back from an irritating loss with a win that actually has stakes.

2) We currently have 13 games scheduled for Dec and it's an easy month, as myself and others have stated. I think a good realistic outcome (if the team plays well) for this month is 9-4 in those scheduled games. Chicago, while a game against a bad team, is an understandable loss in my eyes due to the fact that we once again had people missing, and it was a b2b on the other side of the country. But it was also our only b2b of the month, so that excuse is now dead until January; we are 1-1 in a month I want to go 9-4, so we need the wins now. We've shown we can beat Sacramento already twice this season, so it's time to do it again.

Since we last beat SAC, they've picked up wins over Minnesota and Denver and are coming off of rest at home, so they have some momentum behind them and will likely be a tougher challenge than last time, but I know this team can do it. Especially with CJ and Trey back, both of whom were missing the last two times we played them. They actually have a worse net rating than the Pelicans, particularly stemming from their awful defense; which makes sense, the last two times we played them Zion and Jonas couldn't miss and Ingram had his 5/5 from 3 game. I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes against the league's 19th ranked defense when we have even more shooting and space to operate in.

I know this team can do it, and if they want to live up to expectations this month, they basically have to do it. No real arguments there; or for the rest of the month, in fact. The time to win is now.

Let's see if they can do it.