Written by Grant Hughes at Bleacher Reports.com
With a historically unprecedented opening-night eruption, Anthony Davis bellowed at the fickle basketball world that had forgotten him.
In the New Orleans Pelicans’ 107-102 loss to the Denver Nuggets, Davis did everything imaginable to reestablish his status as the game’s best young talent—a status he’d lost following a disappointing 2015-16 campaign.
He scored 50 points, snared 16 rebounds, gifted five assists, swatted four shots and swiped seven steals.
That has never happened before:
Davis was ultra aggressive, taking 34 of his team’s 92 shots. No other Pelicans player connected on more than six field goals, while Davis made 17.
He moved freely, showing no sign of the preseason ankle injury that, for a while, put his opening-night status in doubt. Working for space off the dribble, finishing at the rim, connecting on difficult in-between flips through contact—AD displayed everything, from everywhere, offensively.
So dominant and so clear was Davis’ scoring mentality, point guard Tim Frazier quickly developed tunnel vision, searching for AD whenever possible.
Frazier, pressed into duty by Jrue Holiday’s absence, had 11 assists on the night.
Defensively, Davis’ length and quickness were all the way back. Though he made a few positional mistakes, the lapses in attention and sporadic effort that contributed to a major step backward last year were gone. He was locked in, aggressive and committed on both ends.
Yet we’re here talking about a loss and, more dispiritingly, a possibly season-defining trend, as Scott Kushner of the Advocate observed:
All that statistical brilliance didn’t amount to anything because the Pelicans are too injured (again), too invested in talent that can’t help AD (as always) and too painfully lodged in a half-rebuild that shows no sign of producing a second star.
The lottery pick, Buddy Hield, had four points in 17 minutes. The biggest free-agent acquisition, Solomon Hill, had two points in 27 minutes.
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