re: Pelicans are not expected to offer BI extension this offseason, moving in new direction

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It hasn’t been brought up often but Willie benching him and choosing not to bring him back in against the Lakers in the play in was a big deal. He was absolutely terrible after that game, almost like he couldn’t recover.

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He was pretty good in the Kings game a couple days later so I think his play had much more to do with the matchup with OKC.

However, I think you are correct in that it probably had an effect on how we played the Thunder series. I didnt seem like there was anyway we were going to sit him in crunch time of any of those games no matter how poorly he was playing. I wonder how much of that was missing Zion versus our fear of him pouting about benching him again