NBA Rewind: Can Grizzlies’ season be saved? And Thunder, Magic, Bulls are on the rise

The NBA had another serving of shocking news entering the weekend when the Memphis Grizzlies fired head coach Taylor Jenkins. With roughly two weeks before the playoffs and the Grizzlies battling for the No. 4 seed in the Western Conference, it seemed like curious timing. Elsewhere, you’ve got teams chasing history, others trying to salvage their season and franchises trying to be bad to set themselves up for the future … no matter how embarrassing it is in the current.

Here’s your latest NBA Rewind!

NBA Stock Report extended

We only have two more NBA Stock Reports left in this season, including this one. There’s no better time to highlight the team that has been making waves and dominating all season long. It’s still shooting for more history as another young and exciting squad tries to get back to where it once was. For the bad trends, a coaching change isn’t the only reason a team is heading in the wrong direction, and another squad is trying to rebrand its own long rebuild:

📈 Oklahoma City Thunder (62-12): The Thunder have a real chance to win 70 games. They’d have to win out, but they’re already on a nine-game win streak. The Thunder have been so dominant, and as you look at their remaining schedule, the toughest hurdle to clear on a quest to become the third team to win 70 games would be Friday at Houston, followed by two home games against the Los Angeles Lakers. The Thunder are 3-1 against Houston this season (including an extra game from the NBA Cup), and they’re 1-0 against the Lakers. With the Play-In Tournament building in a week of rest for teams in the top six, there isn’t the same issue of going for it and tiring yourself out as maybe we had in the past. We might see the Thunder ride a 17-game win streak and history into the playoffs.

📉 Memphis Grizzlies (44-30): It isn’t just the abrupt coaching change, which we’ll talk about below. We touched on this in The Bounce last week, but the Grizzlies have been one of the winning teams propping up their record against bad teams (33-9) as they struggle against good teams (11-21). Memphis has lost six of its last eight games, including the first one under interim coach Tuomas Iisalo. But the Grizzlies’ bad stretch is deeper than that. The last time the Grizzlies beat a team with a winning record was their victory over the Milwaukee Bucks on Feb. 2. They have lost 10 straight games against teams with winning marks. Their next two are against the Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors.

📈 Orlando Magic (36-39): The Magic aren’t totally back, and they won’t be totally back because Jalen Suggs and Moe Wagner are out for the season, but they look really good again. They’ve won seven of their last 11 games, and we’re seeing a great stretch of basketball from Paolo Banchero. There are some good wins in here against Milwaukee, Cleveland, the Lakers and obliterating Sacramento by 30 on Saturday. Banchero is averaging 30.6 points on 50.2/37.0/75.3 shooting splits with 7.9 rebounds and 4.2 assists. Franz Wagner is playing well, too, even though he can’t make a 3-pointer again. I don’t think they’ll have enough offense to pull off a first-round upset, but Cleveland definitely won’t want to deal with their physicality to begin their playoff journey.

📉 Milwaukee Bucks (40-34): The Bucks won’t fall into the Play-In, but the recent news of Damian Lillard’s deep vein thrombosis spells big-time trouble for them. There appears to be optimism that it won’t end his season and he could be back for the playoffs, but I will always err on the side of caution when it comes to expecting a player to come back early from something like this. Even if Lillard does, what kind of shape will he be in? What kind of continuity will the Bucks have? And will they be at their best to take down either the New York Knicks or the Indiana Pacers in the first round? They’ve lost nine of their last 13, and I’m not sure there is enough time for Milwaukee to rally and get to a level of play it might need to reach for postseason success.

📈 Chicago Bulls (33-41): The Bulls were supposed to be focusing on young players, easing into some losses and maybe watching the draft-lottery odds pile up for themselves after trading Zach LaVine at the trade deadline. It turns out the kids can play. The Bulls have been on fire. Chicago has won nine of its last 12, including that improbable half-court game-winner by Josh Giddey to bury the Lakers. When Coby White gets going, this entire team seems to be galvanized with irrational confidence. Rookie Matas Buzelis is having a great finish to his first year, and this team might not be an easy out in the first round if it make it through the Play-In.

📉 Utah Jazz (16-59): This should really be for Jazz fans because what they’ve had to watch for most of this season has been truly terrible. The product on the floor hasn’t even really been interesting from a development standpoint, and that’s the point of the rebuild. The product has been so bad that the Jazz are now trying to rebrand this as the first true season of the rebuild because the previous two seasons were “teardown” seasons … because they were too good to be rebuilding then? I’m sorry, but the summer you traded Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert for a truckload of picks is when you started rebuilding. It’s an interesting marketing ploy, but it doesn’t work that way. Will Hardy was disgusted with their recent effort against Memphis. He seems fed up with everything happening.

Big Story: Grizzlies fire coach with nine games left

We’ve seen a lot of ridiculous coach firings in the NBA. During the 2015-16 season, the Cavaliers had the best record in the East in the middle of the season and fired David Blatt coming off an NBA Finals appearance. In 2013, the Denver Nuggets dismissed George Karl after he won Coach of the Year by leading a team of zero stars to 56 wins before Steph Curry burned the whole thing to the ground in the first round of the playoffs. The Toronto Raptors fired Dwane Casey just before he accepted his 2018 Coach of the Year award, and the team’s social media account had to send out a congratulatory message.

I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a team in the hunt for a top-four seed in its conference fire a head coach with fewer than 10 games left in the regular season. That’s precisely what the Grizzlies did last week. Jenkins has been extremely successful for them in the regular season, but the franchise was not convinced he was going to take it any closer to the promised land than we’ve previously seen, especially with the West looking increasingly more difficult with each passing season.

The firing was shocking due to the timing, but the Grizzlies getting rid of Jenkins wasn’t surprising. That was the feeling around the NBA when the news came out on Friday. A slow start this season probably would’ve resulted in his pink slip, but the Grizzlies didn’t have a slow start. They were fantastic for a long time but eventually started sliding. More importantly, the Grizzlies were sliding against the good teams, and you can’t inflate your record against bad teams once you get to the playoffs.

Jenkins is a good coach, but he does not have a good track record in his brief postseason appearances. The Grizzlies were in four playoff series during his time, winning just one of them (a first-round series against the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2022 that featured the worst playoff basketball I’ve ever seen). In the second round, the Grizzlies got handled and put in their place in six games by the Warriors, which isn’t too bad considering the Warriors won the title that year.

Jenkins will get other opportunities, but where the Grizzlies go next is interesting. They implemented a new offense that appears to be working. The previously scoring-challenged Grizzlies rank sixth in offensive rating this season. Ja Morant maybe doesn’t love running it, but the results are technically there. However, the Grizzlies also fired Noah LaRoche, the assistant coach who was the main mastermind of that system. Interim coach Iisalo, the high-priced coach they brought in from Europe, presumably is the guy they’d like to make the full-time head coach in the future.

If Jenkins lost the locker room or enough of the team’s confidence that you felt the need to salvage what little of this season was left while giving a crash-course audition to Iisalo, then this move had to happen. This is usually the type of move that happens at the All-Star break, though. The problem is the Grizzlies weren’t starting to unravel then. Will they be able to come together in the next two weeks and find new life in the postseason?

The Week Ahead: Tanking/Experimenting

I want to bring you back to April 19, 2006. The Timberwolves were 33-48, and, much to their chagrin, headed to overtime against the Grizzlies. The Wolves did not want to win that game. They were tanking. The season was lost, and the Wolves wanted to improve their lottery odds in a last-ditch effort to bring some inexpensive help to Kevin Garnett — something they’d failed to do time and time again. The Wolves didn’t want to risk winning the game but were in overtime, so they decided to unleash the ultimate tanking weapon.

Mark Madsen was 1-of-9 from 3-point range in his career at that point. He hadn’t made one since December 2000, his rookie season. He hadn’t attempted one since the 2003-04 season. The Wolves let him fire off two attempts in overtime, and the unthinkable happened. Madsen missed them both, and the Wolves still couldn’t lose. They went to overtime again. The Grizzlies just couldn’t beat them.

In the second five-minute overtime period, the Wolves had Madsen attempt five more 3-point attempts. He missed every single one of them because of course he did. The Wolves were outscored by 10 in that period and earned their 49th loss of the season. The tanking attempt was egregious and hilarious at the same time.

In today’s NBA, where 3-pointers are shot by nearly everybody, attempts by big men who don’t really shoot them can be masked by the words “development” or “experimenting.” Fred Katz wrote about the Jazz “experimenting” with Walker Kessler taking 3-pointers. The Jazz organization is trying to lose games by putting a bad product on the floor in the hopes that it will land them the pick that brings in Cooper Flagg. Over the last six games, Kessler has taken 27 3-pointers. He’s made six. For his career, he’s 11-of-55. He’s obviously not an outside shooter. He’s a guy who scores hyper efficiently around the rim and an elite rebounder and rim protector.

During this time of the season, the NBA has an issue with the product on the floor. I haven’t bought any of the criticism of the product in the first few months of the season. The games were really good. The competition was awesome. The storylines were compelling, and the product on the floor was fantastic. In the last couple weeks, it’s been rough. Too many teams are not putting real squads on the floor as they try to get to the right lottery odds to get them the top pick. The Play-In Tournament has curbed that to a degree, but it’s the one time of year where the NBA can’t really do anything about what Philadelphia, Charlotte, Utah, Brooklyn, New Orleans and Washington are doing.

I’m guessing season-ticket holders for these games don’t get some portion of their money back or applied toward next season. The league has to be hoping March Madness can distract from some of it as we get to the regular season’s finish line. It’s fun to poke fun at the Madsens and Kesslers of the league taking all these 3-pointers, but you ultimately still have paying customers you should care about.

(Top photo: Petre Thomas / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)