Voodoo priest says he believes Pelicans are ‘jinxed’

by | Mar 30, 2016

Ask and you shall receive.

After Alonzo Gee and Jrue Holiday became the latest New Orleans Pelicans players to go down with season-ending injuries, head coach Alvin Gentry sent out a call for help.

“I am gonna send out an all-points bulletin to anybody in the French Quarter or anywhere else,” Gentry told reporters after Monday night’s 99-91 win over the New York Knicks at Smoothie King Center. “We need a voodoo doctor or something here. We’ve gotta find the bones under this place. We gotta do something. Because this is becoming comical.”

The Pelicans have had seven players go down with season-ending injuries, and two more (Ryan Anderson and Norris Cole) are sidelined with injuries. Matt Moore of CBS sports.com helps put New Orleans’ injury woes into perspective with a visual aid (he forgot Dejean-Jones):

Belfazaar Ashantison, a Voodoo practitioner for more than 25 years and a Voodoo priest for 14, says he’d come come to the Pelicans’ aid “in a heartbeat.” From Brett Dawson of the Advocate:

“I do believe, honestly, that they are jinxed, for lack of a better word,” Ashantison said. “I think there’s a negative energy that keeps surrounding them.”

Ashantison’s best guess is that the team’s hex is the result of the unrest in owner Tom Benson’s family. Benson is in a legal battle to remove stakes in the Pelicans and Saints from trust funds created to benefit his daughter and grandchildren. The family has challenged his mental competency.

That tumult “has caused this negativity to snowball,” Ashantison said, and he figures the Pelicans are the victims. But he’s sure there are fixes.

“The easy way around that is a spiritual cleansing,” he said. “There’s a number of different ones you could do.”

The easiest, he said, is a simple “sage smudging.” You light a smudge stick — a bundle of herbs bound with string — and cleanse the locker room. You throw some sea salt in the corners to “lock it down so none of these little jinxes work,” he said.

“The whole time, the team would be reciting Psalm 23, the most powerful of the protective psalms,” Ashantison said. “It also talks about prospering in the face of enemies. In this case, the enemies would be (opposing) teams and injuries.”

The Pelicans are 27-46 and were officially eliminated from postseason contention this week after making the playoffs a year ago.