In a bit of poetic synchronicity, his first game at FedExForum was Tony Allen’s last. 

Let’s go back, briefly, to October 18, 2017.

Longtime Grizzlies cult favorite Allen, “The Grindfather” himself, was back in town, coming off the bench for the visiting New Orleans Pelicans and getting a big ovation before playing 11 non-descript minutes.

Grizzlies podcast: Parting with Dillon Brooks and offseason thoughts

Coming off the bench for the Grizzlies was a second-round pick making his NBA debut: Dillon Brooks. 

By the time the night was over, Brooks had managed to finish second to only veteran leader Mike Conley in both minutes played and points scored, in an opening night win. 

The rookie attacked his first NBA game with moxie, fighting through screens, jumping passing lanes, spinning into mid-range jumpers and playing bumper cars on the way to the basket. The final tally: 19 points, five rebounds, four steals and two blocks. 

It turned out to be a preview of coming attractions, not a one-off.

Nearly six years later, as Brooks exits the stage for the Grizzlies, he leaves as the ninth-leading scorer in franchise history (eighth in Memphis). He leaves as one of only seven Grizzlies to ever average more than 20 points in a playoff series. (Against Utah in 2021. You can look it up.)

And Brooks leaves as a particularly colorful character, whose stamp on franchise lore rhymes more than a little with the legend with whom he shared the floor for that one night only. 

A Grizzlies player getting national television highlight packages dedicated to his defense against Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry? Tone-setting rudeness in hostile opposing gyms? Colorful quotes and sartorial signatures (sunglasses instead of a blue bathrobe) from the postgame locker room? A memorable nickname? Scrapping his way into the All-Defense conversation? 

Dillon the Villain. What was old was new again. 

Report: Free agent Dillon Brooks will not return to Grizzlies

And now it’s over. 

As with Allen, though more noisily this time, it ended with the Grizzlies deciding to move on, deciding again, in part, that their playoff future couldn’t make room for a defensive specialist’s poor shooting. 

The end and the reaction

That Brooks’ tenure with the Grizzlies was ending became increasingly clear to close observers during the team’s first-round playoff loss, and all but confirmed at Sunday’s final media sessions, as lead executive Zach Kleiman notably tabled talk about the impending free agent’s future while citing a need to move on from “self-created distractions.” And with Brooks himself saying he would leave his future to his agent. 

What was assumed was publicly confirmed by a report from The Athletic on Tuesday that Brooks had been told that the franchise would not attempt to re-sign him. 

This message was relayed at Brooks’ exit interview with team officials Sunday. 

This is not that unusual.

When a team has an impending free agent, they have a decision to make: Yes, no or maybe? If and when the answer is “no,” relaying that to the player is the right thing to do. The answer is often no. Brooks will not be the first free agent the Grizzlies will not re-sign. Just ask Tony Allen.

The strong outside reaction to The Athletic’s story wasn’t a reaction to this substance: the Grizzlies deciding not to re-sign Brooks.

It was instead a reaction rooted in an assumption about, and a misreading of, the reporting. 

Many, even in the national NBA media, jumped to a conclusion not supported by the text: That the story had been strategically leaked by Grizzlies decision-makers in an attempt to … what exactly? Make Brooks look bad?

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If that were the case, it didn’t work, with the Grizzlies instead taking the incoming fire.

Context clues would have led to a different conclusion. (For starters, in NBA news-breaking circles, which national reporter gets the story is often a tipoff to where it came from. The Grizzlies are widely known not to put information out through this particular writer.)

But I can tell you that rather than wanting to get this story out, the Grizzlies were trying to keep it from getting out. 

The reaction was also a kind of object lesson in media literacy, including within the media: Those complaining most were confusing a characterization with a quote.

The report stated that the Grizzlies told Brooks they wouldn’t be bringing him back under any circumstances. This was a characterization of the situation, and perhaps an accurate one. But the phrasing was the reporter’s, which had the effect of heightening the drama. Most who objected attributed the language to the team. 

I don’t know what was said in the private meeting between Brooks and the Grizzlies, but I doubt it had the drama of a movie script. I doubt anyone pounded the table and said “not if you were the last small forward on Earth.” It was probably more along the lines of “it’s time for us both to move on.” And, indeed, if you read The Athletic’s story, instead of just the headline or tweet, it characterized the feelings as mutual.

And it wasn’t just that much of the national media reaction to this story seemed distorted, it’s that there was so much reaction. 

All of this for a former second-round pick who’s never been an All-Star and just had his second consecutive bad playoff series? Over a defensive-oriented role player who was the fourth option on his own team?

It was a byproduct of the way Brooks has turned into, and indeed has helped turn himself into, more than just a basketball player, into a kind of basketball celebrity. 

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Suddenly, some of the very same media figures who had been excoriating Brooks only days ago were clutching pearls about how he was allegedly being treated. 

It’s all in the game, I suppose. 

How it unraveled

It’s been reported that the Grizzlies offered Brooks a contract extension either last summer or at some point during the season, and that he declined it. 

This is something I’d assumed all season. League rules capped an extension offer from the Grizzlies at four years and $61 million. I assumed they’d offered that and Brooks had turned it down, hoping for more in free agency. If both of those things happened, then both parties were acting rationally. If Brooks had had a great season, he would have been in line for more this summer, including from the Grizzlies, who would have no longer been limited to that number. 

What happened to lead the Grizzlies from apparently making this type of offer to no offer at all? And when did it happen?

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Like so many things, it changed gradually, then suddenly.

By the trade deadline, in February, the Grizzlies were actively trying to upgrade Brooks’ position, making now publicly known bids for potential replacements such as Brooklyn’s Mikal Bridges and Toronto’s OG Anunoby. And you can be sure the list of targets didn’t end here. 

At the same time, Kleiman publicly said the team wasn’t shopping Brooks. 

That was a factual statement. Brooks might have been included in one of those trades, but the Grizzlies did not decide to move Brooks and then search the league for a best offer. Retaining Brooks next season was still an option.

Things went poorly, and mostly publicly, during the playoffs.

Brooks shot terribly for a second straight playoff series, with that poor shooting crippling the team’s offense this time around. And he also shot his mouth off after Game 2.

Yes, he’d done so before, as had some of his teammates. 

But it was different this time. 

After Ja Morant’s March suspension, there had been an organizational effort to tamp down the drama. Morant ducked out on one media session during the playoffs, but was otherwise careful not to give the media any fodder. 

“There’s less drama. There’s less Ja on blogs,” Morant said with satisfaction Sunday.

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Not so with Brooks, whose seeking out attention was, at that stage, willfully at odds with the rest of the organization.

Franchise decision-makers were palpably irritated by Brooks’ off-court antics during the series, and he didn’t counter-balance that on the court. 

A last straw, perhaps, was a disconnect about his on-court role going forward, which Brooks made crystal clear Sunday, complaining about not getting enough plays called for him.

During the season, when the team’s stars were available, Brooks had assumed a lesser role, taking fewer shots. But he wasn’t making them, and he continued to bristle at being considered more of a “3-and-D” role player and less of a scorer. 

This growing difference in how the organization viewed Brooks' game and how he viewed himself was going to be difficult to bridge. The Grizzlies decided it was no longer worth the effort. 

Is this the right decision? 

From a purely basketball standpoint, it’s debatable. 

Many observers have looked at the Grizzlies and concluded, “(Brooks is) why they lose.” This was literally said by former franchise thorn Andre Iguodala to Grizzlies podcaster Keith Parish, who relayed the conversation on one of his podcasts. 

During the fourth quarter of first-round playoff series-ending Game 6 in Los Angeles, Lakers fans near the Grizzlies bench were chanting “We Want Brooks, We Want Brooks.” 

You mean in free agency?, I asked one of them. 

“No,” he said, with a laugh, and then added: “He’s why they lose.”

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This is not fair to a player whose defensive versatility has been crucial to the Grizzlies over the years, and whose presence has been a net positive according to the data. 

But there is a sense that the next step for the team can’t include a player who shoots both this often and this poorly.

What now?

Brooks may have driven his free agency price down with a poor playoffs, but he will not be without suitors. He’ll make millions of dollars playing NBA basketball somewhere next season. He’ll have good games. Good stretches. Good seasons. There will times when Grizzlies fans look up and say, we wish he was doing this for us.

And for a Grizzlies team that’s acknowledged needing to add proven vets, letting one walk for no return is not ideal.

The Grizzlies are in something of what’s known by NBA specialists as a “Bird rights trap.” 

“Bird rights,” named after former Boston Celtics great Larry Bird, is a rule that allows a team to exceed the salary cap to re-sign its own free agent.

The Grizzlies will be over the salary cap this summer with or without Brooks. If he simply signs elsewhere, the money he made can’t be spent on someone else. That salary slot will instead vanish.

There remains the possibility of a sign-and-trade, which would allow the Grizzlies to trade Brooks to a new team for some return. These are somewhat rare because they are complicated, and need to be in the best interest of all parties involved. But anyone assuming the perceived messiness of Brooks’ exit precludes this is again assuming too much. Everyone will do what’s best for business.

More than likely, though, Brooks will just sign somewhere else. And the Grizzlies will be trying to both replace Brooks and add more with yet more limited mechanisms at their disposal.

It’s going to be a tricky summer. 

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The six-year pairing of Dillon Brooks and the Grizzlies is not ending well, but as the moment recedes, hopefully fans will remember the good times.

The intense battles against Golden State, against Curry and Draymond Green. His big series as his team was a young, overmatched eighth seed against the Utah Jazz. The just-a-bystander night he almost got traded, but it was really a different “Brooks.” (Teammate MarShon.) The way he turned the NBA’s recent fascination with pregame player wardrobe into a kind of knowing performance art. Some deeply funny interviews and coinages. (We’ll always have “regular pedestrian,” Brooks’ dismissal of Lakers ticket-holder Shannon Sharpe.)

For better or worse, and there was plenty of better, Dillon Brooks was one of a kind.

And since so much attention has been given to the words the Grizzlies did not utter, let’s close with some they did, from Kleiman’s final season remarks Sunday. 

The tense is notable, and he was definitely trying to say something nice about Brooks on the eve of what Kleiman knew would be the player’s exit. But I also believe Zach Kleiman was speaking from the heart here, and for the organization: 

“There’s so much really good stuff that Dillon’s brought to the table for a long time. He’s been someone who’s worked as hard as anyone in this group. He’s set the tone for what we’ve been about defensively. He’s a really good person. I think a lot of you who know the storylines that have come up probably don’t totally get what Dillon’s like if you just sit down with him and have dinner with him, see what he’s like as a human being.”

The next sentence: “But, um, that’s all I’ve got.”