Basketball

Why the Grizzlies’ flexibility to do anything could result in them doing nothing


One oddity of the two-month-long traipse through the NBA postseason is that our perspective on early playoffs series tends to shift a bit as a result of what happens in later rounds.

For instance, Utah’s loss to Dallas in the first round may not look so bad now that the Mavs vanquished mighty Phoenix two weeks later. Similar but opposite, Toronto’s loss to Philadelphia probably looks worse in light of how Miami handled the Sixers in the next round. Every team wants to grade itself relative to the top contenders, and the playoffs are a quick lesson in how close or how far away a team really is.

With that in mind, the Memphis Grizzlies have to be watching Golden State’s romp through the Western Conference playoffs and wondering what might have been. The Grizzlies gave the Warriors a tough six-game series, including a 49-point beatdown in Game 5, despite not having All-Star point guard Ja Morant for the final three games; a three-point loss in Game 4 in particular will sting all summer as a series turning point.

Of course, dreaming of best-case scenarios also ignores some less comfortable realities. Memphis was not the only team to have an injured player in this series, for starters, and lost Game 1 at home despite the ejection of the Warriors’ Draymond Green. And of course, the Mavericks were the Grizzlies’ kryptonite this year, slowing the pace to a crawl and Luka-ing them to death while winning three of the four regular-season meetings. As much as the Grizzlies might be what-iffing about that second-round series, one can argue the Mavs are doing at least as much of it.

But the Grizzlies’ summer of what-if is interesting for a second reason. As the league rapidly moves into offseason mode — 26 teams are already there, and trust me, they aren’t waiting for the last few stragglers to join them — no contender or quasi-contender has anywhere near the menu of options that the Grizzlies do. (Full disclosure before we get too deep in the weeds: I was the Grizzlies’ VP of Basketball Operations until 2019.)

For most teams above the nuclear-rebuild level, the offseason offers a well-pruned decision tree: Sign somebody with the midlevel exception, trade a current player and a future pick for another team’s player, decide which free agents are worth paying. For many, the offseason maze has even fewer forks, as luxury-tax penalties and legacy contract mistakes funnel them into a narrow set of options. Fellow second-round victims such as Philadelphia and Milwaukee, for instance, have a paucity of offseason cards to realistically play.

For the Grizzlies, however, virtually everything is on the table. Want to use cap space? Sure. The Grizzlies have $19 million in room, even after accounting for two-first round picks and John Konchar’s partial guarantee, and pretty easily could get to max room if needed. Want to run it back with the same guys? Sure. The Grizzlies have 12 players already signed for next season and have full Bird rights on their two significant free agents, Tyus Jones and Kyle Anderson; signing both would still keep them well below the luxury-tax line.

Push their chips in? Yep, they can do that too. In fact, that’s where it gets really interesting. Again, for most contenders and quasi-contenders, the options on the table under this category are far more limited. For those who still have worthwhile chips remaining, it usually boils down to trading one decent veteran on a somewhat gross contract along with a heap of future picks and pick swaps.

In contrast, the thing about Memphis pushing its chips in is that there are so many chips. Their owns firsts? They have all of them going forward. Other teams’ picks? They still have a bunch, including No. 22 from Utah in this year’s draft, a lightly protected 2024 first from Golden State and what are likely to be seconds from Indiana in 2024 and 2026. Cap relief? Memphis can offer that to anyone as part of a deal, standing a whopping $46 million from the tax line and, for the moment, able to use cap room for a lopsided trade. Good young players on affordable contracts? C’mon now. That’s practically their whole damn team.

All of this presents a completely different decision tree for Memphis, one that consists a lot more of questions like who, when and how? Like, who is the player who gets Memphis to consider an all-in strategy, when is that player actually going to come available and how far would the Grizzlies be willing to go asset-wise to net that hypothetical player?

These aren’t easy questions. The Grizzlies are sitting on a future wins gold mine, with a core of 22-year-old All-Star Morant, 22-year-old All-Defense forward Jaren Jackson Jr., 23-year-old sharpshooter Desmond Bane and 26-year-old defensive ace Dillon Brooks.

Youth abounds beyond that; 23-year-old guard De’Anthony Melton is an advanced stats darling, 25-year-old center Brandon Clarke thrashed the Timberwolves in the first round and 20-year-old rookie Ziaire Williams could quickly become a 3-and-D staple. The oldest player on the entire team, big man Steven Adams, won’t turn 29 for two more months.

Yet Memphis is in the historically rare position of being both really good and really young. When GM Zach Kleiman opined that “the window is open” at his postseason news conference, he was telling half the story. It’s not just that the window is temporarily open, but that it’s set to have a breeze of championship equity blowing through for several years, propped open by a phone book’s worth of young talent.

The irony is that Memphis’ youth in some ways makes the choices harder. If Morant and Bane were both 30, for instance, cashing in the Grizzlies’ other assets for a soon-to-be 30-year-old Rudy Gobert and one last shot at glory might make a ton of sense. When they’re trading out of a scenario with dynastic upside, however, maybe not so much.

In fact, the maddening thing about Memphis’ situation is just how long it can play this out. While this is likely their last summer with significant cap space — Morant’s supermax extension should take care of that — the Grizzlies will have contracts and future picks to entertain trade scenarios for elite talent for years if they want to keep that balloon in the air.

Meanwhile, another future issue hangs over their potential decisions: the luxury tax. Memphis has never been a tax team, but the Grizzlies have also never been owned by somebody this wealthy. Owner Robert Pera’s net worth has skyrocketed over the last decade since buying the team in 2012; the company he founded, Ubiquiti, is worth over $15 billion, and Pera owns nearly three-quarters of it. While the economics of a tax-paying team in Memphis, Tenn., fairly clearly don’t pencil out, if Pera doesn’t care about the losses, it won’t matter.

This is likely to become an issue, especially if Morant makes one of the three All-NBA teams a year from now and qualifies for a supermax extension. (Morant was just voted second-team for 2021-22, but that doesn’t affect the dollar value of his imminent deal.)


Photo of Ja Morant: Joe Murphy / NBAE via Getty Images

Having Morant on his deal and Jackson and Bane on near-max deals (Bane is extension-eligible next offseason) wouldn’t be enough to push the Grizzlies into the tax on their own, but that’s where one of the truisms of young teams comes in: You can’t pay everybody. Brooks, Clarke and Adams are free agents in 2023, Melton in 2024 and Williams in 2025. Cheap, young teams usually lose, but in the rare cases like this one where they don’t, they get expensive quickly.

Looking at it that way raises a completely different question: Can another big-salaried player even fit into this framework? And how would that player actually come to exist, by the way?

This takes us back to that question of who. Memphis’ ideal target is somebody in his 20s, probably capable of paying the three and four given that a big wing is one of the few soft spots on the roster and under contract for at least two more seasons to minimize flight risk. How many elite players like that have even come on the market in the last decade? The chips-in scenario is fun to talk about and one the Grizzlies absolutely need to prepare for, but at times it feels like planning for what to do if a meteor hits your apartment.

Thus, there may be some short-term irony: The Grizzlies’ bevy of options could result in an extremely boring offseason that focuses on keeping those very options open. Let’s start with the draft, where picking at No. 22 or No. 29 might be nice … but moving one of those picks for a future first-rounder might be even nicer. Such a pick would keep their optionality open for including another first in a trade, which might help them more than adding two more rookies onto a roster already bursting at the seams with young talent. (League sources say the Grizzlies have already signaled to agents that their pick at No. 47 will almost certainly be on a two-way, if it’s a domestic player at all, because there is just no room left to roster another player.)

And in free agency? It doesn’t seem like a splurge on a Miles Bridges max offer sheet is in the cards; beyond him, good luck trying to find a forward in this free-agent market worth $19 million.

So the next best thing to do with $19 million in cap space and $46 million below the tax line is to turn it into a giant trade exception and roll it over to future seasons, keeping that optionality open for the next deal that may come along. Memphis could do something like this by re-signing Jones, Anderson or both to overly generous one-year deals that maintain the roster in the short-term but retain maximal trade flexibility in the longer term. (They could even do this with Jarrett Culver, actually, who can sign for a maximum of $8.1 million after his 2022-23 option was declined last summer.)

Because of the one-year deals, the player could refuse a trade in that scenario (players can do this if they would lose Bird rights as a result of being dealt). That’s one reason why an alternate version of this strategy is signing-and-trading Jones and/or Anderson for expiring money and more picks. Jones, in particular, will not lack for suitors in that scenario and may be itching for a larger role than the one he has now behind Morant.

The Grizzlies could also sign Jones or Anderson or another free agent a multi-year deal with team options or non-guaranteed years in 2023-24 and 2024-25. Again, the basic idea is a short-term overpay for somebody who is perhaps useful but not worth $19 million in order to roll the flexibility over to the trade deadline.

The Grizzlies, it should be pointed out, probably should do something this offseason. They’ll need a backup point guard one way or another, especially with Morant’s knee issues becoming the franchise’s biggest long-term worry. Size on the wing, a concern partly addressed with the Williams pick, still looms as an issue if Anderson walks. Consolidating roster spots and draft equity by trading up on draft day — something Kleiman has done with every pick he’s made except Morant — again seems like the right play, especially with two picks in the 20s. Decisions on extending Brooks, Clarke and Adams loom as we get into the fall.

But the very flexibility that makes the Grizzlies’ situation so tantalizing likely also incentivizes them to keep those options open as long as possible. The Grizzlies have won so many small bets over the last few years that even a disaster-scenario offseason (Anderson and Jones leave, no significant players are acquired) would still likely leave them with a top-five team for next year. At the same time, they’re so solid across the board already that few additions would meaningfully alter their projection.

As a result, Memphis could stay on this “build, draft and develop” course for a while longer, even while fielding one of the best teams in the league; the salary-cap math really doesn’t start working against the Grizzlies until a Bane extension in 2024-25.

At some point, however, that chips-in move is sitting out there. In terms of assets and cap flexibility, Memphis has more ability to do this than almost any contender in memory. Alas, assets aren’t enough; it still requires the right player in the right situation for the Grizzlies to confidently pull the trigger. Who, when and how remain the key questions, and we might be asking them for quite a while.


Related reading

Aldridge: What does the future hold for second-round losers?
Hollinger: Will Denver Nuggets pay for this roster?

(Top photo of the Memphis Grizzlies: Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via Getty Images)





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