New Orleans Pelicans Bet on Jamahl Mosley After a Summer of Standing Still

The New Orleans Pelicans spent almost this entire offseason doing nothing, then spent the last week of July doing the smallest possible something. On July 25 they handed Kobe Bufkin a non-guaranteed training camp deal. On July 28 they agreed to a one-year contract with center Christian Koloko. Both are competing for the same open roster spot. That is the whole transaction log for a team that won 26 games last season and then watched another franchise use its first-round pick at No. 8 in June. If you were waiting for New Orleans to do something loud, the summer is nearly over.

The week that was in New Orleans Pelicans news

Bufkin was the more interesting of the two additions, mostly because of what he had just done in Las Vegas. The former No. 15 overall pick, waived by the Lakers in April, averaged 21.3 points, 5.3 rebounds and 3.0 assists in three Summer League games for New Orleans, including a 30-point night against Minnesota on 8-of-16 shooting with five threes. He is 22, he has shot roughly 21 percent from three across three NBA seasons, and he has fewer than four years of service time, which keeps a two-way conversion available. The Pelicans have one two-way slot open.

Koloko, agreed to on July 28, is the rim-protection swing. The 26-year-old center bounced between the Lakers, Grizzlies and Hawks last season, finishing with 14 games in Atlanta at 3.1 points and 2.7 rebounds. He is enormous, he is athletic, and he will not ask for touches, which is roughly the job description. New Orleans went into both signings with 14 guaranteed contracts, so at least one of these two is playing somewhere else by late October.

The No. 8 pick that got away

The most consequential thing that happened to this franchise in June happened without them in the room. Atlanta selected Houston guard Kingston Flemings eighth overall using the unprotected 2026 first-rounder New Orleans sent out a year earlier, along with the No. 23 pick in 2025, to move up to No. 13 and take Derik Queen. That was Joe Dumars' first real swing as head of basketball operations, and it was an aggressive one: a lottery pick in an unknown future for a rookie big man.

Queen was fine. He played 81 games and averaged 11.7 points, a genuine contribution for a 20-year-old on a bad team. The problem is fit. Neither Queen nor Zion Williamson spaces the floor or protects the rim, and lineups featuring both were outscored badly enough that James Borrego trimmed their shared minutes late in the year. Paying a top-10 pick for a player who cannot comfortably share the floor with your franchise centerpiece is the sort of arithmetic that follows a front office around for a while.

Jamahl Mosley inherits it

Willie Green was fired on November 15, 2025, about a dozen games into a season that was already gone. Borrego took over on an interim basis and went 24-46. The Pelicans finished 26-56, 11th in the Western Conference, mathematically eliminated on March 24 by, of all teams, the eventual champion Knicks. The underlying numbers matched the record: 21st in offensive rating at 114.4, 25th in defensive rating at 118.9, and 120 points allowed per night.

New Orleans hired Jamahl Mosley on May 18 and introduced him about a week later. Mosley spent five seasons in Orlando building a defensive identity out of long, switchable wings before the Magic moved on, and he arrives as the fifth head coach of Williamson's seven-year career. That number says more about the organization than about any of the coaches. The roster he inherits has one prime-aged plus defender in Herb Jones, one promising young rim runner in Yves Missi, and a lot of guards who need the ball in their hands.

Zion Williamson, Trey Murphy III and the standing questions

Dumars settled the Williamson question in April, at least out loud. "Listen, we have no intentions of doing that," he said of trade speculation. "We're going into the offseason looking forward to Zion coming back next year and playing great again next year." Williamson played 62 games last season, only his third 60-game season in seven years, and put together a career-best 35 consecutive appearances. His scoring dipped to 21.0 per game, a career low, largely because his usage rate fell to 25.7 percent against a career mark of 30.5. Reports out of New Orleans in late July described a serious conditioning summer and a noticeably leaner Williamson, which is approximately the same story that circulates every July. The difference this time is that the availability actually showed up first.

Trey Murphy III is the one genuinely movable asset, and the asking price is why he is still here. Murphy led the team at 21.5 points on 47.0/37.9/88.6 shooting splits in 66 games, and New Orleans has reportedly sought three first-round picks in return. The Athletic's John Hollinger wrote on July 20 that chatter around a Murphy trade, "while lessened, hasn't vanished," and tied any revival to the rest of the league's business sorting itself out. Nobody has met the number.

What the New Orleans Pelicans depth chart looks like now

The likeliest starting five is Dejounte Murray, Murphy, Jones, Williamson and Missi, with Jeremiah Fears, Queen and Saddiq Bey leading the bench. That group has an availability problem baked into it. Murray played 14 games last season while finishing his return from an Achilles tear. Jordan Poole played 39. Jones played 56. Fears, the 2025 lottery pick, was the only rotation regular to appear in all 82, averaging 14.3 points as a rookie.

• Guards: Murray, Poole, Fears, Jordan Hawkins, Bryce McGowens
• Wings: Murphy, Jones, Bey, Micah Peavy
• Bigs: Williamson, Queen, Missi, Karlo Matkovic, DeAndre Jordan

The backcourt is also thinner than it looks on paper. New Orleans shipped Jose Alvarado to New York at the February deadline for Dalen Terry and draft considerations, then waived Terry a day later, so the Pelicans effectively traded their most reliable backup guard for nothing and watched Alvarado win a ring. Bufkin and Pierre are competing to replace that role on the cheap, which is not the same thing as replacing it.

DeAndre Jordan, re-signed this summer, is 38 and played 12 games last season. He is here for the room and for practice, and that is a legitimate function on a young team. New Orleans has reportedly around $10 million of room left to work with, and the franchise has never paid the luxury tax, which is worth holding onto every time you hear that a big swing is coming.

Jaron Pierre Jr. and the Summer League ledger

The 58th pick was the summer's feel-good item. Jaron Pierre Jr. grew up in New Orleans, played his last college season at SMU, and gave the Pelicans three competent Summer League games: 12.7 points, 2.3 rebounds and 1.3 steals. His moment came against Phoenix, where he hit a pair of free throws inside the final 20 seconds of an 81-75 win and finished with 16 points and a plus-7. He shot 3-for-10 from deep, below his college rate, and at 24 he is old for a prospect. At 6-5 and 210 pounds he at least has the frame for the defensive role Mosley will demand. A two-way contract is the realistic ceiling, and he will have to beat out Bufkin to get there.

The calendar is short now. The league has typically revealed its opening night and Christmas matchups in the second week of August, with the full schedule arriving about a week after that. Training camps open in late September and the 2026-27 season tips off in October. Between now and then the Pelicans have one standard roster spot, one two-way slot, a trade market that has not moved on Murphy, and a coach who has to make a 26-win group look different without new parts. New Orleans Pelicans news this summer has been defined almost entirely by what did not happen. Mosley gets about eight weeks before that stops being an excuse.