When the Grizzlies fired head coach Taylor Jenkins, plenty of national pundits wondered — loudly — why Memphis’ brain trust would move on from the winningest regular-season coach in franchise history, who’d led one of the league’s most injury-stricken teams to a 44-29 record, a top-five net rating and fourth place in the West. More than that: Why’d they do it nine games before the playoffs?
Plugged-in beat reporters, though, noted that the writing had been on the wall for a while, dating back to a summertime overhaul of Jenkins’ coaching staff, and hastened by a pronounced midseason malaise.
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Pop the hood on that record and net rating, and you’d see a team that struggled mightily against opponents with winning records and top-10 point differentials; that had gone 9-13 since the trade deadline, ranking 16th in offensive efficiency in that span and — crucially — 22nd in points allowed per possession, according to Cleaning the Glass; and that had gone nearly two months without a win over a top-tier team. Not exactly the résumé of a contender.
“Fairly or not,” Chris Herrington of the Daily Memphian wrote, “the sense [that] Jenkins’ voice had lost its impact was becoming widespread.”
Particularly, perhaps, in one important corner of the locker room.
Firing Jenkins and elevating Tuomas Iisalo, a Finnish coach who’d drawn raves for his work in Germany and France before coming to Memphis as an assistant, “was a decision that was about optimizing Ja Morant,” ESPN’s Tim MacMahon said on the Brian Windhorst and The Hoop Collective podcast. “That was a primary motivator for this decision.
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“Look, there has been noise about Ja being unhappy all season long. There has been noise about, ‘Hey, you know, could Memphis look to move Ja this summer? Could Ja look to get out of Memphis this summer? Could Ja look to force a trade, or at least request a trade? And would Memphis shop him this summer?’ There’s been a lot of that […] They got away from [optimizing Morant] for a lot of this season, and they’re leaning back hard into it.”
To be clear: “This was a decision about optimizing Ja Morant” is not necessarily synonymous with “Ja Morant got his coach fired.” Morant told reporters that he was still in bed last Friday when his phone began blowing up with messages to check the Internet, and that his initial assumption was that “somebody said something about me again.”
“And then I [saw the news of Jenkins’ firing],” he said. “I was shocked.”
In a brief press availability on Saturday, Grizzlies general manager Zach Kleiman said that no players, including Morant, had input on the decision to jettison Jenkins, and that the choice was “mine and mine alone.”
“I came to the conclusion that this is in the best interest of the team,” Kleiman told reporters. “And urgency is a core principle of ours, so I decided to go on with the move.”
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That said: At issue, reportedly, was the extent to which the Grizzlies’ more democratized offensive approach this season had diminished Morant’s standing and statistics.
In search of answers for how to improve a half-court offense that had ranked in the bottom-third of the league not just throughout Morant’s tenure in Tennessee, but for the better part of two decades, Kleiman and Co. hired assistants who’d helmed attacks that zigged away from where the rest of the NBA had zagged. The new approach earned plenty of attention for eschewing bread-and-butter NBA actions like pick-and-rolls and dribble handoffs in favor of prioritizing off-ball screening, off-ball movement and creating wider gaps to attack in a kind of drive-and-relocate perpetual motion machine.
The system has had its benefits. Memphis has vaulted back into the top 10 in offensive efficiency and into the top half of the league in half-court scoring. Jaren Jackson Jr. has had a career year offensively, one likely to result in his first All-NBA selection. Players like Santi Aldama, Scotty Pippen Jr. and rookie Jaylen Wells have emerged as stars in their respective roles as part of what’s been one of the NBA’s deepest rotations.
Where the Grizzlies’ depth has shined, though, Morant’s star has at times dimmed.
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The two-time All-Star is averaging fewer minutes, field goal attempts and points per game than he has since his second season — before he exploded into All-Star and All-NBA territory, and the Grizzlies ascended to would-be contender status. He is posting career lows in touches per game, time of possession, seconds and dribbles per touch, and on-ball percentage (the share of a team’s possessions on which a player has possession of the ball).
It all tracks. The Grizzlies’ decision-makers wanted to build a more multifaceted offense, aimed at creating as much space as possible, to better leverage the growth and offensive skill-sets of players like Jackson and Desmond Bane by allowing them to more frequently attack individual defenders in a spread floor. They chose to do so by de-emphasizing the pick-and-roll, which inherently brings a second defender into the play.
That makes sense. It also isn’t exactly the cleanest fit for a primary shot creator who became a superstar by being one of the league’s premier pick-and-roll creators.
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The numbers lay the central conflict bare. Including both the plays where he shoots after receiving a ball screen and the ones where he passes to a teammate who shoots, Morant’s pick-and-roll workload has dropped precipitously this season, according to Synergy Sports’ tracking — not only to a career-low rate, but to nearly half of what it’s typically been:
Of note: Morant-finished pick-and-rolls have produced 0.998 points per possession for the Grizzlies this season — a good-but-not-great mark that ranks him 81st among 183 players to have finished 100 such plays. That continues a trend that’s seen Morant’s pick-and-roll volume (consistently in the top 10 in the NBA) outstrip the offensive efficiency of those plays …
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2023-24: 0.956 points per possession, 106th out of 185 players with at least 100 such plays
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2022-23: 1.036, 59th out of 183
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2021-22: 0.971, 92 out of 192
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2020-21: 0.980, 84 out of 179
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2019-20: 1.000, 48 out of 170
… which gets to the heart of the matter: If building the offense out of a heavy dosage of high pick-and-roll is the best thing for Morant, but it might not be the best thing for the offense overall, then which direction do you go?
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While Jenkins had stepped up the Grizzlies’ pick-and-roll frequency in recent weeks, it appears to have been too little, too late. The adjusted and curtailed offensive role “didn’t sit well with” Morant, ESPN reported, “and he voiced his frustrations publicly and privately.”
Kleiman, it seems, heeded those concerns. One of the assistants who departed alongside Jenkins was Noah LaRoche, who reportedly instituted a lot of the space-cut-drive-relocate principles in the Grizzlies’ new offense. Iisalo, meanwhile, got the interim tag; as Marc Stein and Jake Fischer wrote, he’s “routinely described by fellow coaches and advance scouts as [a] tactician partial to the pick-and-roll who drills his teams in those concepts like a sergeant.”
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Iisalo noted after taking the reins that, with it so late in the regular season, “there is not time for a complete [offensive] overhaul, nor is there a need to do that.” There is time to tweak things, though, and it seems the new coach has shifted them in Ja’s direction.
Morant has averaged 78.7 touches per game since Jenkins’ firing — much more in line with his career marks than the 66.6 he’d been getting. He’d topped 20 shot attempts 14 times in his first 43 games this season; he’s done it in all three games since Jenkins’ ouster, with a usage rate (35.2%) that, over the course of the full campaign, would be the NBA’s third-highest, trailing only LaMelo Ball and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
The uptick in offensive workload has resulted in increased individual production. Morant is averaging 28 points and seven assists per game under Iisalo, shooting 50.8% from the floor. Against the Warriors on Tuesday, he finished 14 plays as a pick-and-roll ball-handler, according to Synergy, and scored 36 points — both his second-highest totals of the season:
Unfortunately for Morant and Co., though, that production ran smack into a historic outing from Stephen Curry, and a Warriors team better equipped to generate crunch-time stops than a flagging Memphis team (especially with Jackson Jr. fouling out late in the contest). The result: the Grizzlies’ third loss in three outings under Iisalo and fourth straight overall, running their winless streak against opponents with winning records to an alarming 12 games.
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After the loss to Golden State, the Timberwolves’ remarkable survival of the unbelievable Nikola Jokić and the Clippers’ Wednesday win over the Pelicans, the Grizzlies enter Thursday’s nationally televised matchup with the suddenly surging Heat in eighth place in the West. Multiple postseason projection models now peg Memphis as more likely to land in the play-in tournament than in the top six in the West — an outcome that would’ve seemed unthinkable back in early February, when the Grizzlies sat in second, as the only team in the NBA to rank in the top five in both offensive and defensive efficiency, and with the best net rating of any team outside of Oklahoma City or Cleveland.
“Every game [the urgency] ratchets up,” Jackson Jr. told reporters Tuesday. “It’s got to be at an all-time high now. We know that there’s no time for it to not be as urgent as possible. It’s at an all-time high.”
Any good vibes associated with that strong start have long since dissipated. They’ll have another chance to start restoring them against Miami on Thursday. If they can’t tighten up a defense that’s ranked in the bottom third of the league for three months against a Heat squad that just hung 124 on the Celtics, though, it probably won’t matter how many pick-and-rolls Morant runs.
