The Art of the Two-Way Conversion

How the Grizzlies constructed one of the deepest and most sustainable rosters in recent memory.

The Memphis Grizzlies are back to being a top seed in the Western Conference. They have a 20-9 record which is the fourth-best in the league and second-best in the West. Many expected them to bounce back like this after a lost year. They experienced an unprecedented string of bad injury luck that forced them to roster extra players for long stretches¹.

However, it’s not clear if last year’s roster if healthy would’ve repeated the highs of previous seasons. That’s because the deep bench that kept them afloat in the regular season was slowly being chipped away. And that’s a challenge all good young teams face when their best players graduate from their rookie-scale contracts.

If there’s one word to describe the Grizzlies’ front office, it’s “scouting”. They’ve drafted incredibly well since taking over in 2019: Ja Morant, Brandon Clarke, Desmond Bane, Xavier Tillman, and Santi Aldama. There were some misses shortly after, but a hitting percentage like that will afford them some.

The Grizzlies have been competitive as soon as they added Morant, a selection that in fairness involved a lot of luck². It also helped that they inherited recent draft picks Jaren Jackson Jr. and Dillon Brooks and veterans Jonas Valanciunas and Kyle Anderson. Along with the additions of Tyus Jones and De’Anthony Melton, the Grizzlies remained in the playoff picture while nailing selections from any draft range.

You could say they were playing with house money from 2019 to 2022.

In 2022 they won their first (and only) playoff series thus far. They also began to make some changes. They traded Melton to the Sixers for a first-round pick³ and didn’t re-sign Anderson in free agency. They were no longer 12 deep, but closer to 10 deep in 2022-23.

They later traded Jones and let Brooks walk in free agency. Between Melton, Anderson, Jones, and Brooks, they only retained one of those salary slots, which was later allocated to Marcus Smart.

These decisions were made with upcoming maximum deals for Morant and Bane⁴ in mind. They had to sacrifice several great role players to balance their cap sheet, and so they looked to replenish their depth by leaning on their bread and butter: drafting and developing.

But the Grizzlies had a lot of question marks from their young players. Ziaire Williams, David Roddy, and Jake LaRavia all got extended playing time last season with all the injuries and none looked promising. They also severely lacked playmaking and offensive facilitators without Morant and Jones. This is partly why I was skeptical that last year’s team would’ve been a top seed again if fully healthy.

The Grizzlies lost a ton of games in 2023-24 mostly due to historically bad health but also from a lack of quality rotation players. So while they were waiting for their top players to recover, they were also quietly building out their bench in plain sight.