Over the years the sinking feeling I've had about the owner of New Orleans' two sport franchises has coalesced into a certainty neither the Saints or the Pelicans will be worth a damn as long as Gayle Benson is signing the checks.
When she took over after the 2018 death of her husband Tom - a saturnine figure who kept his own counsel - the pie-eyed optimist in me theorized that since osmosis isn't an operative factor in creating a top-shelf owner, Gayle would cede judgement and leadership to the pros: seasoned football vets like president Dennis Lauscha and GM Mickey Loomis, for instance. That Saints personnel moves at the time hadn't paid off generously was a concern, and the arrangement meant the Pelicans would forever be an also-ran, but Loomis had developed winning teams in the past, and it didn't seem unreasonable to assume the Pelicans would flourish without heavy-handed upper management guidance.
Six years later the Saints are a mediocre team in a listless division that ought to be ripe for the taking annually while the Pelicans are basically a joke. New QB Derek Carr's principal talent seems to be peevishness. Zion Williamson, who occasionally demonstrates basketball acumen, more often prompts Norm Macdonald's joke about Lindsey Lohan: she can't swim a lick but she knows every dive in town. Alvin Kamara and Brandon Ingram collect checks. Everyone else - Pelican and Saint - plays with single-minded inconsistency.
Such is the harvest when people don't get fired. To her credit, Gayle is willing to pay for players, though the whole contractually mandated minimum aggregate salary plays a roll. Still, she is unwilling to fire anyone in an upper management position, as if doing so would result in third degree burns over her face and chest. I understand it's frustrating to pay people not to work, but that's the cost of doing business in professional sports.
So fans are stuck with Loomis doing almost nothing this off-season after the stunning mediocrity of last year. And they're stuck with Pelicans GM David Griffin lying to reporters, making shitty draft picks, and trading players like Jrue Holiday for sentimental reasons unconnected with fielding a competitive team. (Sure, the Pelicans fired Teresa Weatherspoon - or more likely, decided not to re-sign her - after three years of her incompetently managing Zion Williamson's development, but if Griffin and Williamson were married the only adjective to describe it would be uxorious. Zion zip lines into the nearest strip club every evening and shows up overweight to camp, and all Griffin can do is kiss his ass and bullshit reporters about his injury status. I wonder if the weight clauses said to be in his contract are enforced and by "I wonder" I mean "I doubt.")
There's far more to managing a team than firing people, of course, but I see none of that coming from Gayle. She never articulates a plan and appears to have no governing philosophy, while the only thing that engages her seems to be giving lousy advice to the Catholic Church. To their credit, the Saints keep their heads down, but the Pelicans can't stop stepping on their own dicks. Exhibit A is the near-constant lionizing of VP of basketball operations and team development Swin Cash, who seems like a nice person when she's not exhibiting unbearable smugness during draft lotteries or not developing a team.
Zion's jagged trajectory has long been understood, but what explains drafting Dyson Daniels or Nickeil Alexander-Walker? Daniels is a project; you don't draft him to find out if 15 minutes a night will turn him into Magic Johnson. He needs to be cultivated! The Pelicans wouldn't or couldn't, so off he'll go in a trade for a point guard, inshallah. No one on the Pels staff could make head or tails of Nickeil, so off he went to Minnesota where he turned into a reliable, if unspectacular, bench player. (This is the same Minnesota that's in the Western Conference Finals this year.) I could say remarkably similar things about Jaxson Hayes, now with the Lakers, but there's no need to gild the lily.
It doesn't strike me as hyperbole to note that unless a player's a hyper-motivated self-starter like Jose Alvarado or Herb Jones, the Pelicans don't know what to do with him. And the idea the Pelicans were moving in the right direction this season was atomized by Cannae-like defeats against the Lakers in the play-in and the Thunder in the first round. The Pelicans may have gotten better, but so have 10 other teams in the Western Conference.
Other than Cam Jordan and Alvarado, I can't think of a football or basketball player who's pining to play in the Big Easy. Theories abound - including the idea New Orleans isn't a big enough town to support the outsized ambitions of professional athletes - but there are worse explanations than the teams aren't managed properly. (Ask Delvin Breaux if he thinks management has brought its A-game to the medical and training staff. Or Jrue Holiday, for that matter. Or even David Griffin, who fired the Pels' much-hyped trainer.) I'm not saying every player has to be as emotionally demonstrative as Dan Campbell - the guy Gayle passed on to promote Dennis Allen - or Tom Brady, but would it kill some of these guys to at least appear to give a shit?
Given Louisiana's dearth of billionaires, there will be no calvary coming to the rescue; her late husband purchased the Pelicans only when it was clear he was the only person in the state with the wherewithal to do so. With Gayle, there's only Calvary.
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