Has Zion Williamson played his last game for the Pelicans? Latest injury should set up needed separation

Once again, Zion Williamson is injured. This time, the team announced, he's dealing with a grade 2 right hip adductor strain. According to ESPN, he will be re-evaluated in three weeks. Where Williamson is concerned, these early timelines tend not to be especially helpful. He might be out three weeks. He might be out three months.

There was a time in which the Pelicans could do little but hope for the former. You make allowances for No. 1 overall picks. Williamson is a genuine All-NBA talent. Even this season, despite the injuries, only Giannis Antetokounmpo is scoring more points in the paint per game than he is. There's a superstar in there. The Pelicans have spent seven years trying to find it. But we may finally have reached a breaking point here.

The Pelicans turned over their front office last offseason. While Joe Dumars and Troy Weaver haven't exactly earned plaudits for their work in New Orleans thus far, they have less invested in Williamson than the previous regime did. They even traded a haul to get his replacement. The early returns on Derik Queen have been quite positive. He ranks seventh among rookies in scoring, fourth in assists and third in rebounding. 

The early returns on the Queen-Williamson partnership? That's more of a mixed bag. The Pelicans score 120.3 points per 100 possessions when they share the floor... but allow 123.3, according to Cleaning the Glass. Their offensive upside is considerable. You won't find many more skilled pairs of big men. They are untenable together defensively. Neither protects the rim. In a perfect world, you'd pair Queen with a defensive-minded center who could maybe shoot the occasional 3 to offer some extra spacing. You want the ball in Queen's hands. That's why you paid what might become the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 NBA Draft to get him. Between Queen, Jeremiah Fears and Trey Murphy, there are suddenly a fair number of mouths to feed in New Orleans.

Williamson outranks all of them on stature. He leads the team in usage by a meaningful margin, which creates an uncomfortable dynamic when these injuries inevitably arise. The Pelicans are one sort of team with him and an entirely different team without him. It's hard to know on a week-to-week basis which one they'll be. That makes planning for the future and developing younger talent significantly harder. Continuity and stability are essential to growth. The Pelicans haven't had much of either since Williamson's arrival. Now that Queen is in place, it's time to begin thinking more realistically about life after Zion.

Normally, this is part where we'd cover which teams might be interested in Williamson and what sort of return New Orleans might be able to get for him. At this point, though, the idea of some team wanting him enough to trade a substantial package is unrealistic. If the Pelicans can't rely on him, it seems unlikely that another team could. Williamson's true value right now lies in his contract, not his production.

Williamson is owed max money in both the 2026-27 and 2027-28 seasons, but with a caveat. At the moment, none of that money is guaranteed. According to The Athletic's Mike Vorkunov, 20% of his annual salary each season is guaranteed based on six weight check ins. The remaining 80% guarantees based on a games-played threshold: 40% for 41 games or more, another 20% for 51 games, and then the final 20% for 61 or more games. His team can't control the weight check ins, but the remaining 80% is another story. Some team could simply trade for Williamson, not play him, and then waive him to get off of the majority of his contract.

In other words, some team with a big, guaranteed contract it would like to dump could send that money to New Orleans in exchange for Williamson and plan to waive him thereafter for the savings. The value the Pelicans could generate would therefore be however much a team is willing to pay to get off a bad contract, which would of course vary by the contract in question. Depending on how much bad money they'd be willing to take on, the return could therefore be minimal or substantial. 

Given how reluctant this team has historically been to spend, the true answer is probably somewhere in between. Hopefully, it would be closer to the latter. With Williamson gone, the Pelicans would not be slated to employ any of the NBA's 50 most expensive players next season. They can afford to wait out a bad contract. This rebuild is going to take time.

The longer the Pelicans wait to move here, the longer that rebuild is going to take. Sometimes, a breakup is just in everyone's best interests. Williamson, given his injury history, frankly shouldn't shoulder the load New Orleans has asked of him anymore. He should be playing 20 minutes a game on a better, more stable team at a substantially reduced salary. He's not a max player anymore. So long as he remains with the Pelicans, he's burdened by those expectations. They hold him back, but they also hold the team back.

It's time to see what they really have with Queen and Fears, to hand more of the team over to Murphy, and yes, probably tank for a few years to try to add to this young core even with their 2026 pick going to Atlanta. How many injury-related press releases can one team release before enough is enough?