The Memphis Grizzlies listed Ja Morant on the injury report against the Oklahoma City Thunder.
The Memphis Grizzlies are set to play Game 3 of their first-round series against the Oklahoma City Thunder tonight at 8:30 p.m. CT. Headed back home, the Grizzlies are in a must-win scenario down 2-0 after losing Games 1 and 2 by a combined 70 points.
The Thunder have been dominating the series thus far, so the Grizzlies will need all they can get from star point guard Ja Morant. The former All-Star is averaging 20.0 points on 38.1% shooting from the field across the first two games of the playoffs.
Morant has been dealing with an ankle sprain sustained in the Grizzlies’ Play-In Tournament loss to the Golden State Warriors back on April 15. There were questions surrounding his health after the injury, but he hasn’t missed any time since then, appearing in Memphis’ Play-In win against the Dallas Mavericks and then the first two games of the playoffs.
Morant is expected to play tonight against the Thunder in a situation where the Grizzlies could end up down 3-0. Oklahoma City has dominated Memphis on both sides of the floor, as the Grizzlies shot 42.9% from the field and 32.3% from three in Game 2. Game 1 was even worse, as the 131-80 loss ranked among the highest point differentials in postseason history.
Memphis will certainly have a better shot at winning, playing at FedExForum. A win would give the Grizzlies some momentum for the second part of this upcoming home stand and guarantee that the series would be heading back to Oklahoma City. No NBA team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit.
Ja Morant’s role has increased since Grizzlies’ coaching change, but is that beneficial to the team?
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.