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Ja Morant's diminished role was reportedly a 'primary motivator' for Grizzlies' coaching change

In the immediate aftermath of the Grizzlies firing head coach Taylor Jenkins on Friday, outsiders and national pundits wondered loudly why Memphis’ brain trust would move on from a coach who’s not only the winningest regular-season bench boss in franchise history, but who’d also 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 — and why they’d do it just nine games before the start of the playoffs.

Plugged-in beat reporters, though, noted that the writing had been on the wall for a while, dating back to a dramatic overhaul of Jenkins’ coaching staff over the summer, and that the Grizzlies had seemed to be barreling toward an inflection point for months.

“Fairly or not,” Chris Herrington of the Daily Memphian wrote Friday, “the sense [that] Jenkins’ voice had lost its impact was becoming widespread.”

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 Feb. 6 trade deadline, ranking 16th in points scored per possession outside of garbage time in that span and — crucially — 22nd in points allowed per possession, according to Cleaning the Glass; and that had gone without a win over a top-tier team in nearly two months.

That’s not exactly the résumé of a true-blue contender. Indeed, after two more losses following Jenkins’ dismissal, as the Grizzlies head into a massive Tuesday matchup with the Warriors, who are just a half-game behind Memphis for fifth place in the West and have beaten the Grizzlies twice in three meetings this season, several projection models now peg Memphis as more likely to land in the play-in tournament than with home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs.

That would’ve seemed unthinkable back in early February, when the Grizzlies sat in second in the West, the only team in the NBA to rank in the top five in both offensive and defensive efficiency, with the best net rating of any team outside of Oklahoma City or Cleveland. Any good vibes associated with that strong start had long since dissipated, though … if, in fact, they were all that good in the first place, at least where the franchise’s signature star was concerned.

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 this season, “was a decision that was about optimizing Ja Morant," ESPN’s Tim MacMahon said on Monday’s episode of 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.” In a brief press availability about the firing on Saturday, Grizzlies general manager Zach Kleiman said that no players, including Morant, had input on the decision to jettison Jenkins, saying 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.”

That said: At issue, reportedly, was the extent to which the Grizzlies’ more democratized offensive approach this season had diminished Morant’s standing in the team’s offensive pecking order.

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 perpetual-motion drive-and-relocate 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 efficiency. 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 vaulted into the ranks of Western Conference contenders — and 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).

Building an offense aimed at creating as much space as possible so you can attack one-on-one, and doing it by de-emphasizing the pick-and-roll, which inherently brings a second defender into the play, isn’t necessarily the most snug fit for a primary shot creator who has vaulted to stardom by being one of the league’s highest-volume pick-and-roll creators. The numbers lay that 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’ data tracking.

While Memphis had stepped up its 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 Tuesday, “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 Monday, 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.”

Iisalo noted before Saturday’s loss to the Lakers that, with just two weeks to go 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 notable that the early returns appear to be shifting the machine in Ja’s direction.

Morant had 85 and 76 touches against the Lakers and Celtics, respectively — numbers much more in line with his career marks than the 66.6 per game he’d averaged prior to Jenkins’ firing. He’d topped 20 shot attempts 14 times in his first 43 games this season; he’s done it in both of the games since Jenkins’ ouster, with a usage rate (34.8%) that, over the course of the full campaign, would tie Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for the third-highest mark in the league.

The changes haven’t paid immediate dividends, though: The Grizzlies dropped both contests against the Lakers and Celtics, running their winless streak against opponents with winning records to an alarming 11 games. They’ll have another chance to break it against surging Golden State on Tuesday; if they can’t tighten up their defense against a Warriors side that has scored at a top-10 clip since trading for Jimmy Butler, though, it might not matter how many pick-and-rolls Morant runs.

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