Ja Morant is starting to seem like more trouble than he's worth for Grizzlies after latest controversy

Landing a superstar is the single most important component of building a competitive NBA team. It is also, quite often, the most stressful. Maybe once in a generation, someone lands a truly undramatic star like Tim Duncan or Stephen Curry and reaps the dynastic benefits. Most of the time, it's a bit more complicated.

Stars have never wielded more influence over an entire organization's operations than they do today. That manifests in ways big and small. Maybe it's a quote that raises some eyebrows in the press. Maybe it's a request to spend an extra night in a certain city rather than decamping for the next stop on a long road trip. Maybe it's hiring people close to the star to team positions. Maybe it's a request for personnel changes that may or may not be truly beneficial. Maybe it's a contract that's necessary to keep the peace today but potentially disastrous tomorrow.

There's a sort of continuum of grievances a team is willing to tolerate in the name of keeping a star happy and engaged. Who cares if LeBron James grumbles about his teammates to the media? Having him at his peak virtually assured a trip to the Finals. If Giannis Antetokounmpo wants a new coach, you get him a new coach because no coach has ever been as important as Giannis Antetokounmpo. The better the player, the more they can or should be able to get away with. And if a player declines, well, that bar lowers with his production.

Rewind to 2022 and Ja Morant was emphatically on the right on side of value vs. headaches graph. He was a 22-year-old Second Team All-NBA point guard for a No. 2 seed. He had some minor injuries, sure, but the Grizzlies thrived in the games he missed with Tyus Jones as his backup and a stellar defense surrounding him. He wasn't a great shooter, but he showed signs of improvement. Minimal drama. Sky-high upside. It wasn't hard to imagine him winning an MVP three or four years in the future back then.

Well, quite a bit has obviously changed since then. The headaches have mounted. Injuries have become a bit more persistent. We're now into Morant's seventh year and he's missed more than a third of the regular-season games his Grizzlies have played since drafting him. He's had some regrettable moments with the media as well. He was not, in fact, "fine in the West." He's had quite a few problems off of the court as well. We couldn't exactly have imagined multiple gun-related suspensions back in 2022.

Most pertinently for the time being, though, has been his interference with the team's basketball operations. Last season, the Grizzlies introduced a somewhat revolutionary new offensive system under the guidance of head coach Taylor Jenkins and assistant Noah LaRoche. That system largely eliminated ball-screens and handoffs. Instead, the Grizzlies led the NBA in drives by a laughable margin, over 59 per game while the second-place Thunder topped out at 54.5. Those drives relied on simple player-movement principles and a relatively egalitarian distribution of possessions. From a team perspective, it by and large worked. The Grizzlies were the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference at the All-Star break, and even after their well-publicized midseason lull, they still finished the season ranked No. 6 in offense.

That lull cost Jenkins and LaRoche their jobs. Though we cannot state empirically how responsible Morant was for that decision, The Athletic reported that he complained about the new offense. As one league source told Sam Amick, Fred Katz and Joe Vardon in that story, "Some days he looks like he's ready to play, and some days he looks like he doesn't want to be there … because he hates the offense."

Morant would hardly be the first star to get a coach fired. Rarely will that same star publicly question his replacement so soon after the change. New head coach Tuomas Iisalo has reincorporated many of the old principles Morant seemingly preferred offensively. The Grizzlies are running pick-and-roll again. Morant is touching the ball almost 76 times per game this season, up from below 68 last year. He's holding the ball longer and dribbling it more often, per NBA.com tracking data. Yet after a loss against the Los Angeles Lakers on Friday, Morant attacked Iisalo and his staff. When reporters asked him about what went wrong in the game, he responded multiple times telling them to "go ask the coaching staff." In a follow up about how the Grizzlies could have achieved a different outcome, he said "according to them, probably don't play me, honestly. That's what basically the message was. It's cool." He has since been suspended one game for conduct detrimental to the team.

Whether these offenses would place a superstar on the wrong side of that invisible production vs. drama line is debatable, but for the moment, it's not even clear if that's a fair question in Morant's case because he hasn't exactly played like a superstar lately. Whether you're looking at box score stats or advanced metrics, the numbers suggest that Morant has slowly been declining since that 2022 peak.

You should take all of this with several grains of salt. Morant played nine games in the 2023-24 season, and he's played just six so far this year. Yet seeing all of those numbers continuously trend downward is concerning for a player who is still only 26 years old.

The theory of Morant as an MVP-caliber player was that he was so athletic and such a gifted finisher that he could perhaps be a Russell Westbrook-level rim threat, but develop into at least an average 3-point shooter to at least keep defenses honest off of the ball. Instead, since that 2022 peak, the opposite has more or less occurred. Morant isn't getting to the rim as easily or frequently as he once did, but his shooting has regressed to Westbrook-ian levels. He's now down to 31.3% from deep on 6.4 attempts per 100 possessions for his career. Westbrook, by contrast, is a career 30.6% shooter on 5.4 attempts per 100 possessions. Morant has never had Westbrook's on-ball vigor defensively, nor has he ever been a Westbrook-level rebounder or playmaker.

None of this is meant to suggest Morant can't bounce back to his prior form or perhaps even improve upon it. But this trajectory largely tracks. You'd think a small guard that plays as aggressively as he does and gets hurt as frequently as he does might lose a bit of that explosive athleticism earlier than his counterparts. Off-court issues and injury rehab can make it harder to focus on development during offseasons. If a player is unhappy with the way his team is playing, odds are, he's not going to play his best basketball.

But all of this leads back to the spectrum we've been talking about. Since 2022, the number of headaches Morant has given the Grizzlies has risen dramatically. The value he's provided and can be expected to continue providing in the future has declined dramatically. At this point, he's almost certainly on the wrong side of that ledger. He's become more trouble than he's worth.

That puts the Grizzlies in a somewhat precarious position. Could they try to bring Morant back after this suspension, massage the relationship, and hope this is a turning point? Sure, but that seems like an uphill battle on multiple fronts. We're not on Morant's second chance here, after all. It's more like his fifth or sixth. Did suspending Jimmy Butler last year help the Heat get their season back on track? You don't often see situations like this salvaged once they've gotten this bad.

But what's the alternative? It's not as though these are private concerns. Every other team around the NBA is watching this play out. They're aware of Morant's flaws as a player and as a figure within an organization. He has two max salary years left on his contract after this one. He's not exactly going to be easy to trade. If there are interested parties, it might be at a price somewhat reminiscent of what the Wizards paid for Kristaps Porziņģis in 2022. That is to say, no meaningful draft value. The Mavericks were just happy to split that giant contract up into two smaller pieces they could more easily maneuver elsewhere.

Who might the interested parties be? Cross off the asset-rich teams. If you have six or seven first-round picks to trade, you're going to be more discerning. The true contenders are mostly out as well. Morant's shooting and defensive weaknesses mean he basically has to be a primary ball-handler, and most teams that can win at a high level already have a better one. The pool here is pretty narrow. Small guards have never been perceived as less valuable on the trade market than they are in today's wing-heavy league. That's especially true when those guards can't shoot or defend. You're looking at teams with less assets to work with that realistically need to take a high-risk swing on a major talent in order to take their next step.

Teams like Phoenix and Sacramento, who've already dug themselves into significant holes, make sense here. How else are they adding All-Stars? The Heat are the peak of this group, a far-better run franchise that finds itself in a bit of a rut that Morant may be able to pull them out of. The irony here is that Miami is succeeding thus far this season largely by adopting the offensive principles Morant seemingly disliked in Memphis last season.

If the Bucks hadn't started out the season so well, Morant would be an interesting candidate for Jon Horst's semiannual splash to convince Giannis Antetokounmpo to extend. Things are just going too well for them with this shooting-heavy formula to deviate at the moment. Portland's in the same boat. The Blazers probably need an All-Star-level creator if they plan to win anything more than a Play-In game or two, but they're playing well and still holding out hope that either Shaedon Sharpe or Scoot Henderson can be that player. Are things bad enough in Toronto for the Raptors to consider it? Minnesota hasn't shaken up its roster in a bit more than a year. They're overdue for something unexpected based on Tim Connelly's recent history, and they could use a long-term point guard now that Mike Conley is declining. Of course, with so much money tied up in their front court and a lot of young guards already on the team, the Wolves are likely content to slow-play things on the transaction front.

There isn't a team out there right now that looks as though it's a Ja Morant away from competing for a championship. Maybe Boston with a healthy Jayson Tatum next year, but fitting Morant's contract within their existing salary structure seems impossible, and it's hard to imagine this specific Celtics team valuing Morant over Derrick White if it came to that.

The reality for most players like Morant is that their best bet is usually to stick it out with their current teams because the market doesn't value them as much as their stats suggest they might have in the past. Think of the boat Trae Young is in with the Hawks. They sniffed around trades a few years ago and found nothing, and he comes with fewer headaches than Morant at this point. He was eligible for an extension this offseason (like Morant) and didn't get one. He'll likely ultimately re-sign, but at a number below the max. Supply outpaces demand at point guard. Demand, given everything we've covered, is probably minimal for Morant.

If there's a way out of this for Memphis, though, it's almost certainly worth considering. The Grizzlies are reasonably well-positioned to retool quickly. They have another All-Star in Jaren Jackson Jr., but they're in the loaded Western Conference, so if they wanted to lay low for a year or two, they could secure a lottery pick relatively easily. They likely have at least one coming in from the outside this season regardless of their own fate thanks to the Desmond Bane trade. They'll almost certainly wind up with either Washington's or Phoenix's lottery pick when the dust settles, The other prize of the Bane trade, rookie Cedric Coward, has been a home run thus far. The Grizzlies develop players better than practically any team in the NBA. They're as schematically innovative as any team as well, as last year's experiment proved. It's not hard to envision them building something pretty interesting pretty quickly without all of these Morant-induced headaches.

If he's going to justify those headaches with superstar-level play, he'd better start doing it quickly. If the Grizzlies have a breaking point, it's hard to imagine they aren't nearing it already. Even if they knew they never had a Duncan or a Curry on their hands, there's only so much any team can take before deciding that enough is enough.