Zion Williamson isn’t quite ready to flex his muscles about being the NBA’s leader in steals.

Not yet anyway.

In fact, he wasn’t even aware he was leading until he was informed by some of the guys on the team.

“It’s cool, but it’s still early in the season,” Williamson said. “Ask me again around Game 20. Let’s see where I’m at then. If I’m still top five, then we’re doing good.”

Six games into the season, he’s top one. Williamson is averaging a league-high 3.2 steals per game. He’s recorded at least three steals in all but one game this season. He had five steals last week in a loss to the Denver Nuggets, one shy of his career high.

“What’s most impressive about Zion is how he’s sitting down and guarding,” said Pelicans’ coach Jamahl Mosley. “He’s leading the league in steals and he’s doing it from being positional. He’s not gambling or chasing, but just being in the right position at the right time. His aggression defensively is making the offensive side of the ball easier. He’s willing to do whatever is necessary to help this team win.”

Not only is Williamson leading the league in steals, but so are the Pelicans. After Saturday’s win over the Atlanta Hawks, the Pelicans are averaging 13.7 steals per game. They had 15 steals in the 121-99 victory. Saddiq Bey had four, and Williamson had three. The Pelicans had 34 points off turnovers Saturday, just two nights after a franchise-record 40 points off turnovers in a win over the Sacramento Kings.

The Pelicans rank fourth in the league in defensive rating, which measures how many points a team allows per 100 possessions. The Pels’ defensive rating after Saturday’s win was 104.0, fourth behind only the Boston Celtics, Portland Trail Blazers and Golden State Warriors.  

After dropping their first four games, the Pelicans have now won two straight since inserting defensive maestro Herb Jones into the starting lineup. They will try to make it three straight Monday night when they travel to face the Memphis Grizzlies. The Grizzlies (6-0),  the only remaining undefeated team in the NBA, have been one of the league’s biggest surprises this season. Mosley needs his team’s defensive success to carry over into this week. Mosley, hired because of his strength as a defensive coach, is starting to see some of the things he wanted to see. He was really pleased with how the team played in a dominant performance from start to finish against the Hawks.

“There is a lot of it there,” Mosley said. “I think us being able to crawl into the basketball, protect the paint the right way. The effort and the energy that our guys played with. That toughness that we’ve asked them to play with. That was closer to the 48 (minutes) of what it needs to look like.”

Atlanta had won the past four games against the Pels. All of those wins were by double digits. But the Pelicans flipped the script Saturday in CJ McCollum’s first game back in New Orleans. The Pels held the Hawks to 38.5 % shooting from the floor and an abysmal 17.4 % on 3-pointers.

“We’ve been trying to build expectations since the summertime,” Bey said. “We’ve got a lot of guys who can defend. We just had to get the cohesiveness together. We have to keep looking after each other and helping one another on that end of the floor and do it for 48 minutes. We’ve still got some ways to go, but it’s a step in the right direction.”