First, do no harm. 

That’s a common command. Whether the Memphis Grizzlies, currently second in the NBA’s Western Conference and winners of 10 of their past 11 games, honored it at the NBA trade deadline is debatable. 

They did not add veteran help to a young team with high hopes. Instead, it was a day of subtraction. 

Right at the buzzer, the Grizzlies got their shot off. Most fans would say it clanked. 

Grizzlies trade Marcus Smart, Jake LaRavia in three-team deal

In a three-team deal, the Grizzlies sent out Marcus Smart, Jake LaRavia and their first-round pick in this summer’s draft while bringing back the expiring contracts (impolite modifiers essential) of forward Marvin Bagley and guard Johnny Davis, along with two future second-round picks. 

Doing nothing at all would have been unpopular, but given that Smart had clearly accrued negative value after two injury-marred seasons, doing nothing would have been easier to defend. Doing nothing would have done no harm.

Instead, the Grizzlies paid a draft pick to be rid of the $21.6 million Smart was set to be owed next season, sacrificing the most playoff-tested member of their roster. Was the draft-pick cost of the deal and the short-term risk of sapping the team’s depth and experience worth whatever flexibility is gained next summer? 

“Flexibility” has a sour history for long-time Grizzlies fans, who grew weary of hearing about it in a past era. Let’s revisit the legitimacy of that in this deal in a bit.

First, the draft-pick cost here isn’t really much. The Grizzlies’ first-rounder this summer is likely to be in the late 20s. It’s likely both second-round picks coming back will be legitimate ones, in the 40s or better. The Grizzlies have a good history with those picks. The draft-pick exchange is not neutral, but isn’t far off. Either way, it’s small beans. 

A ‘no confidence’ vote on Smart

If Smart, with another year on his contract, had negative trade value, the Grizzlies paying to move him is a tacit confirmation that they share the assessment. 

On Wednesday night, the Grizzlies demolished the Toronto Raptors with foundational star Desmond Bane out due to injury and LaRavia out of the rotation. It was the night that Smart and fellow defensive specialist Vince Williams Jr. returned from injury. Even with Bane unavailable and LaRavia demoted, the Grizzlies played an 11-man rotation. 

Smart was the worst of the 11, and the Grizzlies’ decision suggests they didn’t have faith that would change.

What was going to happen with Bane back? A 12-man rotation? Would better young players Williams or Scotty Pippen Jr. sit? Could the Grizzlies keep Smart and not play him? What would be the point?

The alternatives are young and unproven in playoff basketball. Smart was acquired a year and a half ago more for the postseason than the regular season. If they would never say it, the Grizzlies’ actions on Thursday say loudly that they no longer believed in that idea. 

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Smart played only 39 of 133 games as a Grizzly. Most of those missed games were the result of separate finger injuries — random injuries, not wear-and-tear warning signs. While Smart’s inability to stay on the floor was a bummer, this decision seems driven more by what the Grizzlies grew to expect when Smart did play.

In the end, the Grizzlies’ really bad Marcus Smart trade wasn’t this second one, but the first one. 

The Grizzlies were right in the summer of 2023 to trade Tyus Jones (an impending free agent who wanted a starting opportunity the Grizzlies couldn’t give him), a late first-round pick in a so-so draft and, most meaningfully, a second future pick to add a major veteran. They just acquired the wrong one. 

Smart, who had recently been the league’s Defensive Player of the Year and who would bring veteran presence into a then-troubled locker room, seemed like a good bet. But the Grizzlies were wrong about a decline the Boston Celtics perhaps saw coming. 

There was also a widespread sense, fair or not, that Smart left his heart in Boston. Maybe moving on again will re-energize him. But it wasn’t working here.

If you want to give the team credit for anything, and perhaps many are not feeling so charitable, it’s that they didn’t cling to a mistake.

LaRavia is a smaller matter. The Grizzlies also technically traded two first-round picks for him. It was a small move-up within a draft.

LaRavia got off to a slow start, as young players often do. He made major strides late last season and during this one. The Grizzlies likely erred in earlier declining LaRavia’s contract option for next season, if only because it ultimately lowered his trade value. But LaRavia emerged as a good young player on a team full of better ones. Choices have to be made, and this wasn’t a wrong one.

Essentially giving LaRavia away at the deadline was doing him a favor: The Grizzlies weren’t going to re-sign him and also weren’t likely to play him much the rest of the way.

Unless …

Opportunity costs and future ‘flexibility’

The real short-term risk here is health. The Grizzlies made this deal at what’s their healthiest moment of the season. Right now, they’d perhaps rather not play Smart or LaRavia, but the team’s effective depth has taken a hit. Bagley and Davis, barely contributing on the NBA’s worst team, are less reinforcements than placeholders. The Grizzlies should keep an eye on the buyout market.

If the team is healthy in the playoffs, and the Grizzlies are correct that Smart was unlikely to help, this won’t matter. If the Grizzlies suffer major injury problems, it also may not matter. But if they find themselves needing a little bit of extra depth they no longer have?

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Since Smart had negative trade value, flipping him for a better veteran would have meant paying twice, once to move Smart and again for whatever was coming in. Some of those moves might have been worth it. It’s hard to judge things that don’t happen.

There was enough reporting out there to conclude the Grizzlies discussed a similar deal this week that would have brought back Chicago Bulls point guard Lonzo Ball. That would have accomplished the same subtraction and salary goals while adding someone more likely to help. The Bulls got a contract extension done with Ball instead. 

In most scenarios, though, that would have meant adding salary that would overlap with a looming major new contract for Jaren Jackson Jr. And that brings us — and, sorry, but we must — back to that dreaded word, “flexibility.” 

At the moment, erasing Smart’s $21.6 million from the team’s books this summer moves the Grizzlies from roughly $10 million over the projected salary cap to roughly $10 million under. There’s a chance — I’ll write more on this topic next week — that cap space could be used to renegotiate and extend Jackson Jr.’s current contract. I think that’s unlikely. More likely is that this gives the Grizzlies breathing room to re-sign restricted free agent Santi Aldama and either re-sign Kennard or replace him with a similarly priced free agent. 

Is this value real? Sure. Would I call it a necessity? Not really. 

Would Smart’s expiring contract have been a better trade piece this summer or next season? Yes. But that next Jackson Jr. contract looms. The Grizzlies have been ducking the luxury tax. Jackson Jr.’s next deal may soon make that impossible. 

Would it have been cheaper to simply vanish Smart’s contract this summer rather than move it now? Maybe, but that would be taking a chance. 

Again, as tough as it is to swallow, the Grizzlies are signaling a belief in short-term subtraction, even as their young team barrels towards the playoffs. 

A bet on self-belief

Here’s another familiar phrase: “My team is on the floor.”

I’m not sure Grizzlies general manager Zach Kleiman could deliver the line like Gene Hackman in the hoops flick “Hoosiers,” but even in trading away two players, those are the words his actions spoke. 

Transactions can be exciting, or in this case disappointing, but the Grizzlies have grown a real contender while people have been waiting for them to trade their way to one, while they blew one attempt with Justise Winslow and another with Marcus Smart. 

The same front office that made those trades also built this often thrilling, almost constantly winning team, one that wasn’t missing Smart.

Bane and Ja Morant are now in their mid-20s and on max-level contracts. Jackson Jr. is the same age and could be headed to an even more massive extension this summer. 

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It’s hard to maintain more than three max-level players in a league where financial penalties and restrictions have grown more onerous. This is perhaps the biggest reason that the loud chatter about the Grizzlies and Miami’s Jimmy Butler, who inked a $121 million extension in a trade to Golden State this week, was always overstated. 

Did the Grizzlies make an offer for Kevin Durant this week when he suddenly and improbably seemed available, as former Warriors executive Bob Myers said on an ESPN broadcast? I think probably so, which shows the Grizzlies will make exceptions for certain opportunities. Durant was not traded, and was never going to be coming to Memphis. 

Around Morant, Bane and Jackson Jr., the Grizzlies have assembled a balanced group of mostly young players mostly on track to get better and mostly in line for more lucrative contracts over the next few seasons: Physical force center Zach Edey, defense-first wings Jaylen Wells and Williams, combo forward scorers Aldama and GG Jackson, frontcourt finisher/defender Brandon Clarke.

This team is second in the West for the third time in four seasons and those nine players — a full, functional rotation — could form a contender for the next half-decade or more. 

Gnawing at this is the understanding that the relationship between time and opportunity is mercilessly uncertain. 

That nine may check every box except for what’s tended to be a particularly necessary one: Experience. 

While Smart has mostly been watching, the Grizzlies have grown two other options in Wells and Williams, but neither has ever been in a playoff game. That’s about to change.

So here they are. 

Merely keeping this group together will be difficult. Until it stalls out or breaks up, it may be that the time for major outside additions has passed. The ones the Grizzlies have attempted along the way haven’t worked.

Now, their team — absolutely humming ahead of a Saturday collision with the first-place Oklahoma City Thunder — is on the floor.