NBA Draft Week is here and the Oklahoma City Thunder got off to an early start. 

The Thunder, who topped the West in the regular season, made the first trade of the offseason, dealing talented but ill-fitting young guard Josh Giddey to Chicago for defensively dogged and snug-fitting veteran guard Alex Caruso. 

Consider that a shot across the bow to a Western Conference where as many as a dozen teams may harbor serious competitive hopes next season, your Memphis Grizzlies very much among them. 

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve done deep dives on the three main, potentially interrelated questions facing the Grizzlies this offseason: Who to consider with their top draft pick at No. 9, how to fill their empty spot at the center position and what to do about reserve guard Luke Kennard’s $14.7 million team option. 

This week, the Grizzlies front office will begin weaving these three threads, likely with other smaller and/or unexpected ones, into the tapestry of an offseason. 

If the past becomes prologue, then the Grizzlies could be active, and early. 

Lead executive Zach Kleiman has a history of making major trades ahead of the draft: Dealing Mike Conley and acquiring Steven Adams and Marcus Smart. 

He also has a penchant for moving within the draft: Through the five drafts Kleiman has so far conducted, six of the seven first-round picks that landed on the Grizzlies roster have been the subject of trades, with Ja Morant the lone exception. And even that might undersell the case, with last year’s first-round pick sent out to acquire Smart and two second-round picks (Xavier Tillman Sr., Kennedy Chandler) also acquired via trade. 

Today, I’ll revisit and update those three main offseason topics, sorting through some of the latest rumors along the way. 

Donovan Clingan pursuits and No. 9 revisited

This is the most uncertain draft in recent memory, with even the top overall pick totally unknown as draft week arrives. But if you believe the highest-profile mock drafts, some things have solidified since we first looked at pick No. 9 in this space nearly a month ago.

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There are now five players who seem fairly certain to be off the board when the Grizzlies pick: Imports Zaccharie Risacher and Alex Sarr, true center Donovan Clingan and combo guards Stephon Castle and Reed Sheppard. 

While draft week is most definitely “smoke screen” season, with much of what you hear and read not actually true, there’s an awful lot of chatter out there about the Grizzlies angling for Clingan. 

With seemingly no hope of getting him at No. 9, how high would they need to get? 

Mocks discuss Clingan as a possibility starting with Atlanta at No. 1 and at most picks after, down to Portland at No. 7. That’s where ESPN’s latest mock has Clingan landing, while noting that NBA executives actually expect him to go earlier, likely with a team trading up to get him.

The Grizzlies are the most prominently mentioned trade-up candidate. 

I’ve always thought the Grizzlies would be far more likely to trade up for Clingan if he fell to five (Detroit) or six (Charlotte) than to move up higher. But most of the talk so far has been about moving up to three (Houston).

As it turns out, two high-profile mock drafts on Monday afternoon hint in this direction. Yahoo’s Krysten Peek has Clingan going No. 5 to Detroit. 

The Athletic Sam Vecenie, who had Clingan going No. 1 last week, updates not only with Clingan coming off the board at No. 5, but going from Detroit to Memphis via trade. 

This is the scenario I suggested in the center column a couple of weeks ago: Clingan falling to five leading either to the Grizzlies trading up for him, with a future first-rounder paying the way, or opening up a trade bid for Pistons incumbent center Jalen Duren. (The same scenarios could play out with Charlotte and their incumbent center Mark Williams at No. 6.) We’ll see.

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A rumor from The Athletic about the Grizzlies using Marcus Smart to trade up with Houston warrants the kind of close reading that gets lost when reports get aggregated and repeated on social media. 

The report cites the Grizzlies as having an interest in moving up and notes that Smart is held in high esteem by Rockets decision-makers (Houston coach Ime Udoka coached Smart in Boston) and then connects the dots in the form of a question. It doesn’t actually report that Smart has been discussed, much less offered.

An offseason notebook from Yahoo’s Jake Fischer suggests the Grizzlies are not interested in dealing Smart, period. Separately, it suggests Houston may be more interested in future draft picks if they trade down. 

This, to me, seems to be the key question for Grizzlies trade-up possibilities: The team has access to all of its future first-round picks. How aggressively are they willing to spend them to make a move now?

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If the Grizzlies stay at nine, the most prominent mock drafts are currently split among four guard/wing players of various sizes: Colorado’s Cody Williams, Tennessee’s Dalton Knecht, Providence’s Devin Carter and the G League’s Ron Holland. 

Holland (young, athletic, raw) and Knecht (polished college scorer, old for a draftee, defensive questions) are sort of opposites, but were both in my draft column last month. Williams and Carter weren’t.

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Carter is exactly the kind of player I tend to love: A perimeter player in the De’Anthony Melton/Vince Williams Jr. mold who defends and rebounds above his size due to a combination of length/athleticism, aggression and feel. My reticence was two-fold: The duplication Carter would bring on a roster that already includes similar types in Williams and Smart and some uncertainty about his shooting. But Carter has apparently been dominating in team workouts.

Cody Williams, like Holland, is a big-wing ball of clay. He’s a fluid athlete with great size for the perimeter at 6-foot-8 but a meager track record of performance. The draft is about trying to see the future. This is more true for Williams and Holland than most. 

If none of these options seems ideal, well, that’s the reason that the Grizzlies are one of the most prominent teams in trade-down speculation as well. 

It feels like if the Grizzlies want to target a center in the draft, they’ll be moving, in one direction or another. (For what it’s worth, ESPN continues to cite the Grizzlies' interest in Purdue behemoth Zach Edey.)

Brook Lopez and the center market

That same Fischer piece mentioned five centers being discussed around the league as trade targets. Four of those were among the 20 players I discussed in my recent centers column: New York’s Mitchell Robinson, Atlanta’s Clint Capela, Utah’s Walker Kessler and Detroit’s Isaiah Stewart. 

One more who I mentioned in the column but did not make my list: Milwaukee’s Brook Lopez. 

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Given both Lopez’s importance to the Bucks’ style of play and, from the Grizzlies’ perspective, his combination of high cost ($23 million) and advanced age (36), I’d considered him and ruled him out. 

Maybe he should have made the cut. Outside observers have drawn a line between Lopez and Smart as a trade that could make sense. The contracts roughly match. The Grizzlies need a center and now have faith in Vince Williams Jr. to play the (on court) role for which they acquired Smart. The Bucks could use more defensive protection in the backcourt for star Damian Lillard and have another starting center option on the roster in Bobby Portis. Maybe?

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The value seems a little off. Maybe swapping Milwaukee’s pick at No. 23 for the Grizzlies’ pick at No. 39 takes care of that. I still don’t see the Grizzlies wanting to move Smart in that deal.

If Lopez were available, could there be a deal that didn’t include Smart? I wouldn’t include the No. 9 pick. Kennard, Santi Aldama and either Ziaire Williams or John Konchar would work, and allow depth-starved Milwaukee to break Lopez’s contract into three contributors. Still doesn’t seem to be enough for them. (Incidentally, if I had to bet on one Grizzlies player to be traded this week, it would be Ziaire Williams.)

A center that just missed my list of 20, mostly because there had been no indicators of availability, but was mentioned favorably both there and back in an earlier center market column from March: Brooklyn reserve Day’Ron Sharpe. 

Sharpe has been a personal sleeper pick, so I was surprised to see him mentioned in connection with the Grizzlies by the Action Network’s Matt Moore last week, who suggested (sourcing implied but not cited) the Grizzlies could move a surplus wing player and a second-round pick for him. 

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Hmm. 

Moore suggests this would be a secondary move, in addition to adding a higher-profile new center as well. Segments of the Grizzlies fan base took it as “news” that the Grizzlies could add multiple frontcourt players this summer, but isn’t this self-evident?

Since the start of last season, the Grizzlies have subtracted three frontcourt players (Adams, Tillman and Kenneth Lofton Jr.) with no additions. Adding back one more is a necessity. Adding back more than one is a strong possibility. 

Luke Kennard, the center search and the tax

All of these interrelated issues were dealt with in my Kennard piece last week, but the intersection of these three issues may deserve to be underscored a bit more: The Grizzlies could, if they kept Kennard on his $14.7 million team option or traded that contract for veteran return, find themselves past the “first apron” of the NBA’s revised luxury tax system. 

They could also, if they declined Kennard’s option, find themselves below the luxury tax line entirely. The gap between “under the tax” and “above the first apron” is only about $7.4 million, or half of Kennard’s current salary.

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For what it’s worth, I do not think the Grizzlies have predetermined they want to be below the tax. But the more I dig into the various scenarios in play, the more likely it seems that they could end up below the tax line. Counter-intuitively, the need for a center could push payroll down.

The best scenario for the Grizzlies is likely to address the center situation via draft or trade, enabling them to either still keep Kennard or maintain his salary slot. What if the team can’t fill that slot through those two paths and instead needs to use free agency? 

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The Grizzlies will be above the salary cap regardless. In free agency, they could keep Kennard and access the league’s tax-payer mid-level exception ($5.8 million). To access the full mid-level exception ($12.9 million), they’d need to decline Kennard’s contract. The Grizzlies could be headed towards a decision about the value of Kennard on his current contract versus the value of the purchasing power difference between those two exceptions.

Historically, free agency has not treated the Grizzlies very well. The most fruitful outcomes will likely involve using the draft and trade markets to conduct the team’s main business.