The Grizzlies are trying to hold onto a playoff spot in the face of imposing scheduling headwinds and with three pursuers nipping at their high-top heels. 

That’s bad enough. It’s now worse with the team’s second-leading scorer, top 3-point threat and best rim protector out for at least two weeks. 

Those three titles belong to one player, Jaren Jackson Jr., and the 20-year-old forward/center is on the shelf with a sprained knee suffered Friday night against the Los Angeles Lakers. The Grizzlies have announced that Jackson’s status will be re-evaluated in two weeks. While there’s no specific timetable to return, the expectation is that Jackson will be back on the floor sometime next month, perhaps around the same time the Grizzlies welcome Justise Winslow into the lineup for the first time. 

Grizzlies’ Jaren Jackson Jr. to miss time with knee injury

What do they do until then?

The obvious move is the one head coach Taylor Jenkins made to begin the second half against the Lakers: Simply move rookie Brandon Clarke into Jackson’s starting slot. Next man up.

The Grizzlies got back into the game on Friday after building a big deficit, but only played that second-half starting lineup for four minutes and never went back to it. The safe money would be on the Grizzlies returning to this lineup, but the proposal here is that they shouldn’t.

The four minutes the Grizzlies played with a Ja Morant-Dillon Brooks-Kyle Anderson-Brandon Clarke-Jonas Valanciunas lineup on Friday night brought that unit’s season total to 18. It’s struggled offensively, but that’s too small a sample to take seriously.

Clarke and Valanciunas, by contrast, have played 244 minutes as a frontcourt pairing this season, and the Grizzlies have been quite good (+14.3 per 100 possessions) in that time. 

But a full frontline of Anderson-Clarke-Valanciunas? A bad 77 minutes (-6.6 despite good defense). 

What to make of all of that? There’s a pretty serious shooting/spacing problem with those three players on the floor together. 

On the season, the two most frequent 3-point shooters on the Grizzlies roster have been Jackson Jr. (10.4 attempts per 100 possessions) and the departed Jae Crowder (9.3).

The Grizzlies already lost some spacing/gravity in their starting lineup in replacing Crowder with Anderson. If Clarke replaces Jackson, that would mean the Grizzlies will have replaced their two highest-volume 3-point shooters this season with their two lowest. (Anderson and Clarke are each at 2.2 3-pointers per 100 possessions.)

And if that forward combo joins incumbent starters Jonas Valanciunas (2.4) and Ja Morant (3.3), that would mean the Grizzlies would be starting their four least-frequent 3-point shooters. Is this even allowed in 2020? 

That shifts an awful lot of shooting onus to Dillon Brooks (third behind Jackson and Crowder at 8.7 attempts per 100 possessions), who, if you haven’t noticed (see below), has been in a hellacious slump of late. 

Simply moving Clarke into Jackson’s starting spot and keeping the remainder of the lineup intact is the path of least resistance, and thus most probable, but the Grizzlies should maybe consider something else. 

Newbie center Gorgui Dieng better approximates Jackson’s skill-set as a 3-point threat (7.1 attempts per 100 possessions on the season) and rim-protector. (Dieng’s block rate trails only Jackson on the current Grizzlies roster). But would a Dieng/Valanciunas combo leave the Grizzlies too slow defensively? 

What about starting Clarke and Dieng and bringing Valanciunas off the bench? Though it’s only been three games, Clarke and Dieng have already played 40 minutes together and the results have been promising, with the Grizzlies outscoring the opposition by 9.5 points per 100 possessions despite two of the three games being losses. Dieng’s spacing opens up the rim for Clark to sail above it, while Dieng can guard the centers who can shoot over Clarke.

The Grizzlies could instead address this spacing issue on the wing by replacing Anderson with either De’Anthony Melton or Josh Jackson (shifting Brooks to small forward in the first instance). Neither has been effective from 3-point range, but they are at least more frequent threats, which has its own value. 

The Grizzlies could even do both at once, though since I don’t expect either I certainly don’t expect both. But Morant/Melton/Brooks/Clarke/Dieng?

The recommendation here, in case Taylor Jenkins is reading, is to at least make the frontcourt switch to a Clarke/Dieng combo, at least in games without a major true center in the other team’s starting lineup, which will be most games. This risks messing up the chemistry of what’s been an effective bench unit. But it should make for a more effective primary lineup, allow Valanciunas to hopefully be a second-unit go-to-guy and make the starting lineup closer to the units the team is likely to be finishing games with anyway. 

Will this happen? Probably not. But I’ll be surprised if Jenkins doesn’t significantly alter his rotations over the course of the game to minimize the minimal spacing his presumed new starting unit will provide. 

Weekend Subplot: Dillon Brooks’ slump continues

How bad has Brooks’ February been? He’s been the Grizzlies’ leading shot-taker (14.6 field-goal attempts per game) but the team’s sixth-leading scorer (10.4). He’s shot 30% from the floor and a total of 6-33 (18%) from long-range. 

The 3-point shooting may be one of those shooting ebbs that happens over the course of the season, but Brooks has shot 36% on two-point attempts during this stretch, and shot selection seems to be, at least in part, fueling that. 

Brooks has typically not been as good of a two-point shooter as his shot-hunting tendency would suggest. Finding Brooks’ proper place in the pecking order will be a long-term project now that he’s been inked to a long-term contract extension. But with Jackson now out, it’s hard to imagine Brooks dialing his aggression back. The Grizzlies will hope he can relocate his January groove. 

Mar-Key Matters

Here we pay respect to Stax Records’ first instrumental hitmakers, who honked their way through “Last Night” back in 1961.

Last Week’s Mar-Key Player: Josh Jackson. With apologies to Tyus Jones, who continued his fine recent play, the Grizzlies’ other Jackson stepped into the spotlight in last week’s post-break two-game return. Jackson averaged 16 points and four rebounds across the first two games of the road trip, shooting 12-18 from the floor and 3-6 from 3-point range. Jackson is on a kind of extended audition for a rotation spot while the team awaits Justise Winslow’s debut, and the chain reaction from Jaren Jackson Jr.’s absence might open the door even further.

This Week’s Mar-Key Matchup: Ja Morant vs. Russell Westbrook. Morant’s already had his duel with Houston’s James Harden. On Wednesday, he should finally face off for the first time with one of the players with whom he’s been most compared, Harden’s teammate Westbrook, who sat the two previous meetings in Memphis. Westbrook has been dynamite since the Rockets’ embrace of small ball, averaging 33 points on 55% shooting over the Rockets’ past five games. The game will now have a national television audience after getting flexed onto ESPN’s schedule. 

Standings Watch

As the Grizzlies open the week, they remain in the eighth and final playoff slot in the West, but the race has tightened. On Sunday, the San Antonio Spurs lost in Oklahoma City while the New Orleans Pelicans won at Golden State and the Portland Trail Blazers won at home against Detroit. As a result, the race for 8 opens the week like this:

• Memphis: 28-28
• Portland: 26-32 (3 games back)
• New Orleans: 25-32 (3.5)
• San Antonio: 24-32 (4)

This Week’s Games

The Grizzlies will finish their current road trip on Monday night (9:30 p.m.) against the Los Angeles Clippers and on Wednesday (7 p.m.) at Houston. They’ll then return home to host the same two teams they began the road trip against: The Sacramento Kings on Friday and the Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday. 

I wrote about matchup wrinkles against all four teams in last week’s road-trip preview. 

Games matter: Previewing the Grizzlies’ West Coast road trip