Pelicans Defend DeAndre Jordan Contract Blunder as Backlash Grows Over Two-Year Deal
The New Orleans Pelicans are officially in damage-control mode. And it looks exactly like you would expect.
Veteran basketball writers Marc Stein and Jake Fischer reported Tuesday on Substack that New Orleans believed it had to outbid other teams to re-sign veteran center DeAndre Jordan this offseason. The report says the Pelicans thought Jordan had one-year interest elsewhere, so they went to a two-year deal to lock down what they view as a valuable locker room presence.
Convenient explanation. Delivered right on cue. Believe it if you want to.
Here is the setup. Jordan is about to turn 38. He signed a two-year, $7.9 million contract to return to New Orleans this month. He spent last season with the team, played 12 games, and won the NBA’s Teammate of the Year Award. All good things.
But when the report broke earlier this week that New Orleans had botched the mechanics of Jordan’s deal, the team went quiet. The blunder is not the money. The blunder is the structure.
Players with 10 or more years of experience on one-year veteran minimum deals get a subsidy from the NBA. It is one of the more team-friendly rules in the collective bargaining agreement. It has been sitting there for years, gathering dust, waiting for front offices to use it. Every functional cap department in the league knows about it and treats it like free money.
The Pelicans instead inked Jordan to a two-year deal. Which means no subsidy. Which means New Orleans is on the hook for the full cap hit and the full salary. On a nearly 38-year-old center who has not averaged double figures in scoring or rebounding since 2019-20, has played 68 total games over the last two seasons, and did not exactly have the league banging down his door.
That is the piece that stings. The Pelicans are now trying to tell the public that Jordan had other one-year offers strong enough to force the two-year structure. The timing of that reporting, right after the blunder story hit, is not coincidence. This is a Joe Dumars front office story that was built to be leaked.
Are we supposed to believe that some other team was ready to pony up a full one-year minimum on Jordan and force New Orleans’s hand? Maybe. Rings and locker room reputations still carry weight. Jordan is well liked, respected, and does not cause problems.
But the entire market this offseason was telling everyone the opposite. Jordan is 37 turning 38. He played 12 games last year. Teams with cap flexibility were shopping in the frontcourt, and his name was not moving the needle anywhere. The idea that the Pelicans had to give up the subsidy to keep him is a story you tell yourself after you already made the mistake.
New Orleans has real problems beyond this. Zion Williamson’s availability is a coin flip. The roster around him keeps getting older and more expensive at the margins. Losing a veteran subsidy on a role player is not going to sink the franchise. But it is exactly the kind of small paper cut that keeps stacking up under a Dumars front office that has yet to prove it can consistently execute.
Jordan will earn his money. He will run the locker room. He will be a good teammate. And the Pelicans will still be explaining next summer why they gave up money the league was literally handing them.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
