You could feel it during the pre-season: Ja Morant was about to hit the gas.
After winning the Rookie of the Year honors last season and leading rookie Grizzlies to a victory from a vague surprise in the playoffs, the 21-year lightning bolt looked set to explode in an exhibition game, averaging almost 18-10- 5 in just 26 minutes per game while shooting 55.6 percent of the field and getting where he wanted on the court. The fact that Memphis missed their first two games of the regular season was a disappointment, but Morant’s game in them – the career record of 44 points out of 18 out of 27 shots with nine assists against San Antonio, followed by 28 points and seven assists in a duel with Trae Young – he certainly didn’t.
The Grizzlies left the schneid on Monday, scoring a 116-111 win in overtime against a Nets team that played without Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and the injured Spencer Dinwiddie, but it was one of Pirro’s victories. Just before the break, Morant hurried to try to erase a late shot attempt by Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot, but fell awkwardly at the swingman’s Brooklyn foot; Morant immediately jumped off the court, writhing in agony, and ended up needing a wheelchair to get back to the locker room.
Morant later returned to the Memphis bank wearing a hiking boot after negative X-rays. (Thank heavens for small mercies.) His night was over; all that was left was to determine how many more nights he would miss. O Grizzlies announced on Tuesday which will be some of them: An MRI revealed that Ja had suffered a grade 2 sprain in his left ankle “with an expected recovery time of 3-5 weeks.” This timeline would place Morant’s return somewhere between the day of Martin Luther King Jr. and the beginning of February; this would cost somewhere between 11 and 18 games, potentially as much as a quarter of the reduced 72 game schedule.
Given the severity of Morant’s response, it is no small feat that the injury was no worse. Still, a month or more on the shelf hurts for the second-year star …
… And for a Grizzlies team that has struggled a lot at the beginning to keep Morant off the court. In three games, Memphis beat opponents by 12 points in Morant’s 81 minutes of play, and was beaten by 29 points in 68 minutes without him, according to NBA Advanced Stats.
Last season, Tyus Jones, 24, was one of the best reserve guards in the league, scoring 7.4 points and 4.4 assists in 19 minutes a night, with a 5.2 to 1 assist / sparkling turnover ratio; his absence from the blister due to a knee injury played a significant role in the explosion of the Grizzlies during the game. But Jones had a hard time finding both his shot – he’s only 3 out of 21 in the 3-point range between preseason and the first three games – and his playing pace with his second-team mates Brandon Clarke and De’Anthony Melton (which is currently removed as part of the league’s COVID-19 protocols). As a result, what was one of the best banks in the league failed early; in 140 possessions unrelated to garbage without Morant, the Grizzlies obtained a grim offensive rating of 93.6, according to Cleaning the glass—A number taken from a smaller and smaller sample, yes, but also reminiscent of the offensive efficiency of the 2011 Charlotte Bobcats outage season, which they were, and you I owe trust me, not a team you want to be compared to, in any context.
Memphis is in trouble without Morant; no team should play very well without its top scorer and superior facilitator. However, it must be interesting how second year coach Taylor Jenkins tries to fill in the gaps. Jones is the only other “pure” shipowner on the list; you’d expect him to slip into the starting position, especially with Melton and Justise Winslow (who once was a point guard in Miami, but whose back and hip injuries prevented him from preparing for Grizz yet) unavailable.
You wonder, though, if Jenkins would be better served by keeping Jones and Clarke tied up in an attempt to rediscover their flow and put more creative responsibility in someone else’s hands. Kyle Anderson fought for most of last season when he returned from shoulder surgery, but he started to look sharper after the All-Star break, and at times he looked like Memphis’ second best table setter in the bubble. He is shooting 54.3 percent off the ground and 46.8 percent long-distance in seven preseason and regular season games, and he set a career record of 28 points to help deliver Memphis’s first win in the Brooklyn with Morant looking from the bench:
Even though “Slo Mo” can maintain a high level of play as an unlikely savior at the point of advancement and if Jones can get back into shape last season, a Grizzlies team that has already lost several key components can be pressured to endure three to five weeks without the straw that messes with their drink. This does not necessarily mean that everything is lost in Memphis this season, especially in a Western Conference, in which several teams – the staggering Warriors, the Rockets hit by the Harden saga, the Thunder, who considers the future, Karl -Anthony Towns-less Timberwolves- seem to be in flux.
There are two different best case scenarios here, depending on your preferred perspective. In one, Anderson’s herky-jerky impulse diets, Jonas Valanciunas mauling in the mail and Dillon Brooks pulling from wherever he wants to keep the Grizzlies afloat for a play-in tournament spot and eventual returns from Morant, Jackson and Winslow make Memphis the proverbial Springtime Nobody Want to Play. In the other scenario, Grizz lost pace quickly; wounded stars take a long time to return; Jenkins and executive vice president of basketball operations, Zach Kleiman, have a detailed look at how young people like Clarke, Desmond Bane, Xavier Tillman, Jontay Porter and Killian Tillie can fit into Memphis’s future plans; and Memphis is in a privileged position to achieve one of the best choices in the 2021 draft and add another blue-chip prospect to the Ja-JJJ core.
Either result would be more or less good, because of the presence of this tandem from the inside out. Tuesday’s update hurts, but as soon as the X-rays were negative on Monday, Morant had already avoided a more serious injury and the worst Memphis scenario; as long as Morant is able to make a timely return, the Grizzlies have a lot to look forward to. Even if they have to wait for a while.