Offensively, the Grizzlies had become something of a science experiment this season, offering glimpses at how several radical offensive concepts from Europe, and spacing principles found in hockey and soccer, would work in the NBA, but also how difficult it is to get full buy-in from players to implement them.
There were two architects and one supervisor -- Jenkins -- charged with blending the competing visions. One was Tuomas Iisalo, a Finnish coach who'd had a meteoric rise in Europe by implementing innovative offensive concepts around pick-and-roll schemes, pacing and offensive rebounding. Another was player development specialist Noah LaRoche, whom the Grizzlies had lured from a consulting role with the San Antonio Spurs and charged with teaching an offense that prioritized spacing and largely did away with pick-and-rolls and dribble handoffs.
Jenkins, the fifth-longest-tenured NBA coach, had never met either of the assistants before interviewing them, one source said.
Still, the Grizzlies paid a seven-figure buyout to Paris Basketball, which Iisalo (pronounced EE-za-lo) coached to a EuroCup championship last season. Memphis also gave Iisalo and LaRoche seven-figure salaries. That's especially lucrative for a second-row assistant such as LaRoche, but it's also extraordinarily unusual for a second-row assistant to have his fingerprints all over the revamping of a team's offensive system. In fact, Memphis hired LaRoche first (in May 2024) with the intention of building the staff of assistants around him, one source said. The club wouldn't bring in Iisalo until nearly two months later.
To make room for these new voices, Kleiman insisted Jenkins replace five of the assistant coaches who'd been with him throughout his time in Memphis: Brad Jones, Blake Ahearn, Scoonie Penn, Vitaly Potapenko and Sonia Raman.
Jenkins went along with the request, in an effort to be a good partner, said a league source, who added, "Taylor shouldn't have allowed that to happen."
The coach was so upset at the news he'd have to deliver to each of his longtime assistants, he invited each over to his house in Memphis for individual sessions.
The front office felt the new approach needed space to get off the ground, according to a source. So the club cut ties with virtually everyone associated with the team's ways of the past.
"It was a total shock because we'd already had our exit meetings and were preparing for the summer," one former assistant said. "We'd all gone away for a few weeks and came back to start work again. Taylor felt so bad about it. But apparently they decided to go in another direction."
"Going in another direction" has become cliché -- a nice way of glossing over a difficult situation and avoiding specific issues. But in this case that's exactly what it was.
"They were going all-in on these new concepts," another source close to the situation said.
The immediate, unintended effect was to signal to the rest of the league, and the Grizzlies' players, that Jenkins was on thin ice.
"Players aren't stupid," another source said. "They know where this is heading when you fire five assistants after the season."
And when the job is getting players to buy into new offensive concepts, already uncomfortable for most NBA players, being taught different schemes by two assistant coaches immediately undercut Jenkins' authority.
He had overcome that already after Kleiman hired him as a first-time head coach in 2018. Jenkins had established a strong reputation as an assistant on Mike Budenholzer's staff in Atlanta and Milwaukee. But he had a nontraditional background to say the least, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School of Business and eschewing a career on Wall Street for NBA coaching.
He had played high school ball and intramural basketball at Penn, but that was it. Still, players routinely said he won them over with his work ethic, basketball IQ and affable personality. It didn't hurt that he was a burly, 6-foot-3 guy who could jump in against anyone on the court.
But this was an entirely different challenge.
"The principles that we're talking about, the amount of movement that we're going to have from off of the ball is going to be significantly different," Jenkins said on the first day of training camp, which was held at the Ensworth School, a luxurious private school on the outskirts of Nashville.
"But some of our lead core guys that drive our offense, we have to react to how they're adopting the system and make sure that we're all fitting in the right place."
Simplified, Memphis' offense consisted of utilizing pace with purpose and keeping the ball off the floor. If there's an easy bucket to be had, take it immediately, otherwise morph into attack mode to break down and tax the opposing defense. Some of the offense was predicated on a player breaking down his man one-on-one without a screen. Initially, Morant seemed open to the new concepts that Jenkins and Kleiman had considered a year before implementing them. "I'm seeing a lot of different looks now," Morant said. "I'm getting a lot of catch-and-shoot opportunities, back cuts, catch on the run, so I feel like it plays right into my hands and allows me to get better looks and not have to create so much."
But when asked how he felt about playing off the ball more, which is what the new offense called for, Morant seemed less enthusiastic.
"If that's what it is," he said. "Whatever coach wanna call, man, I'm fine with it."
FOR ALL OF his individual gifts, Morant has never been a great pick-and-roll player. He's not even above average, according to ESPN Research.
Morant averages just 0.99 points per direct pick as the ball handler in his career when using an on-ball screen. That ranks 39th among 56 players to run at least 5,000 on-ball screens as the ball handler since 2019-20.
He also has just a 44.7% effective field goal percentage on jumpers when coming off an on-ball screen in his career. Only Russell Westbrook has been worse among 111 players to take at least 750 jumpers when coming off an on-ball screen since 2019-20.
The appeal of an offense that doesn't rely on pick-and-rolls is obvious for a franchise built around Morant's offensive talents.
LaRoche's system replaces pick-and-rolls with relocations. Players move away from the ball handler into space, instead of bringing their defender toward the player with the ball. The goal is to create space and quality shots in the shortest time possible.
Iisalo's expertise was to be deployed in coaching pace and the transition offense, where Morant excels.
Statistically, the results were immediate and impressive. The Grizzlies led the NBA in scoring, pace and ranked second in offensive rebounding rate as they bolted to a 35-16 record. Jackson's versatile skill set also shined, the big man averaging 22.4 points with a true shooting percentage of 59.7%, both near his career bests.
The Grizzlies set the fewest ball screens in the league by a wide margin -- 40.4 per game, almost 10 fewer than any other team, according to Second Spectrum data. The Grizzlies have run a total of 49.8 ball screens and dribble handoffs per game, the fewest in the NBA since tracking began in the 2013-14 season.
Opponents seemed confused by the new offense and Memphis was making them pay. Green seemed genuinely impressed.
"They run an unconventional offense. ... What they're doing is weird," Green told reporters after Golden State's home win over Memphis on Nov. 15, a little more than a month before the Grizzlies routed the Warriors by 51 points in Memphis. "In the NBA, most rotations and patterns are pretty similar. What they're doing is, like, I haven't seen it."
After a while, though, the novelty wore off. Opponents adjusted. Injuries mounted. Jackson sat out five games in March because of a sprained ankle. Morant has been in and out of the lineup all season, sitting out extended stretches because of a hip subluxation, sprained AC joint in his surgically repaired right shoulder and a hamstring strain that sidelined him for the final six games of Jenkins' tenure. Morant returned for Saturday's home loss to the Lakers, the first game after Jenkins' firing.
And as the sample size grew larger, other issues and side effects started to emerge. The new offense worked great against bad teams but not against good ones. Memphis' loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder on Feb. 8, when Morant finished with 16 points on 7-of-19 shooting, started a discouraging trend. Since that game, the Grizzlies have lost their past 11 games against teams that currently have winning records.
Perhaps most concerning was how Morant was functioning in the offense. Instead of freeing him up in transition and for moments of individual brilliance, the system was effectively taking the ball out of his hands. This season, Morant is averaging career lows in touches, average touch length and dribbles per touch this season. Morant's 22.4 points per game is his lowest scoring average since 2020-21, his second season, and his field goal percentage (.448) is the worst of his career.
That didn't sit well with him, and he voiced his frustrations publicly and privately, sources said. As the Grizzlies spiraled, losing six of eight after the All-Star break, pressure mounted to the point where one Western Conference general manager believed, until the firings, that the team would be forced to shop Morant this summer.
Jenkins tried to adjust and compromise. He started calling for more pick-and-roll sets. In March, Memphis ran 59.8 on-ball screens and handoffs per game, up significantly from the earlier months of the season.
On March 7, Morant capped a comeback road win over the injury-ravaged Dallas Mavericks by scoring 11 of his 31 points in the final 6:15. All five of his buckets down the stretch came off of pick-and-roll or isolation, the sort of dribble-centric plays the Grizzlies had gone away from for most of the season. Morant had exhibited his delight in the final minute by flexing in the paint after making a floater and dancing while pretending to play guitar after drilling a dagger 3-pointer, a stark contrast to his often dour mood this season.
"A little bit of Ja, the old Ja," Morant said postgame while describing those moments.
How often had Morant felt like that this season?
"Not at all," he said.
Had Memphis won more during this stretch, this could've gone down as a good adjustment. But the Grizzlies weren't winning much. They were regressing, offensively and defensively -- once the strength of the team. The Grizzlies rank 20th in defense since the All-Star break, giving up 117.1 points per 100 possessions. Memphis is 8-13 since the break, including a 6-7 record with Morant on the court.
The feeling within the Grizzlies' organization was that Jenkins had "lost the locker room," a predictable development after the summer reconstruction of his coaching staff. The internal perception was that players, most importantly Morant, had tuned out Jenkins.
"That team has lost all of [its] swagger," a rival Western Conference player told ESPN. Players started to bicker in huddles. A heated exchange unfolded on the bench during a March 25 win over the Utah Jazz, when Bane shoved forward Santi Aldama during an incident that quickly went viral.
"You could just tell no one was on the same page," one team source said.
STILL, THE GRIZZLIES seemed to be in a relatively good place. On the day they fired Jenkins, they were fifth in the Western Conference with nine games to play and Morant about to return from his hamstring injury.
Their likely first-round opponent, the Lakers, had also been scuffling, losing four of five games in March, and struggling against younger teams such as the Chicago Bulls and Orlando Magic.
Kleiman weighed all of his options and decided the urgency to see what this core group could do together outweighed the benefits of letting Morant come back from injury and hoping Jenkins could reconnect the team and get it back on track before the playoffs. The anticipation had been that Jenkins would be fired after a first-round playoff exit. Kleiman decided there was no benefit to waiting.
So he fired Jenkins, LaRoche and assistant Patrick St. Andrews, who'd joined the staff the previous season to also work on the offense. Iisalo was promoted to interim head coach and tasked with clarifying the vision offensively, which had become muddled in its attempt at radical simplicity.
The hope is a new voice will connect with and elevate a core that has stagnated since that epic series against the Warriors in 2022.
That the Grizzlies will be rewarded, just as the Cavaliers have this season under new coach Kenny Atkinson, for sticking with a core group they believe in and making the right adjustments around the margins and at the top.
Memphis is committed to extending Jackson and Aldama this summer, sources said. And Kleiman publicly denied trade rumors and affirmed the commitment to Morant in February.
But those decisions -- and leaning into a pick-and-roll-heavy offensive system again under Iisalo -- signal Memphis' commitment to Morant is much more than lip service. There are doubts throughout the league about whether Morant, whose superstar ascension has been interrupted by off-court issues and injuries, can be the face of a contending franchise.
"Does he sell tickets? Yes," the rival GM told ESPN. "Is he a top-25 player when healthy? Yes. Can he win multiple series as the best player? No. Not sure most years you can win even one. Plus he is always hurt."
Another question remains, and that one has no easy answer:
The Grizzlies are committed to this core, but is it good enough to contend for a title?
Three years ago there was little question -- or urgency -- about that. But time moves fast in the NBA. And another "reality check" is coming in Memphis.
