New Orleans is not rushing Dejounte Murray back. The Pelicans guard is dealing with a toe contusion, and head coach Jamahl Mosley gave reporters a diagnosis and no timeline on Saturday.
“We are going to continue to be precautionary about it,” Mosley said. He added that the team will keep “evaluating him and how he responds to the treatment we’re giving him,” and that he would assess Murray’s status “once we start to get into regular-season games.”
The season opens in eight days. That last sentence is doing a lot of work.
The Trail So Far Is Short
Murray played the preseason opener against Oklahoma City and finished with six points, six assists and four rebounds. He sat the Oct. 8 game against Miami. He did not participate in Saturday’s practice, with the team 10 days into camp.
A toe contusion is one of those injuries that sounds minor and behaves badly. There is no surgical fix and no rehab protocol that speeds it up. It stops hurting when it stops hurting, and in the meantime a guard who plants and cuts for a living cannot plant or cut.
The History Is Why This Matters
Murray has appeared in just 45 games across the last two seasons since joining New Orleans before 2024-25. When he has played he has been productive, averaging 17.2 points, 7.0 assists, 6.1 rebounds and 1.9 steals.
Forty-five games in two years is the number that should worry anybody in that building. The Pelicans traded for a two-way starting guard and have gotten barely half a season of him.
So the caution is correct and it is also familiar. New Orleans has spent several years being careful with players who then missed most of the year anyway.
What Being Precautionary Actually Buys
A contusion that is managed in October is a contusion that does not become a six-week absence in December. That is the entire argument for sitting him now, and it is a good one.
The counterargument is that Murray has not had a healthy run in New Orleans long enough to build any continuity with the roster around him, and preseason reps are where that continuity gets built.
Mosley is new and is not going to spend his first October asking a player with that injury history to play through a sore foot. Nobody should expect him to.
The Read for Opening Night
Treat Murray as questionable until the Pelicans say otherwise. Mosley explicitly deferred the decision to the regular season, which is a coach telling you he does not know yet and is not going to guess in front of a microphone.
If Murray plays 70 games this season, New Orleans has a very different team than the one it has fielded for two years. Getting there probably means losing a few games in October, and the Pelicans appear to have made peace with that.
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.