With roughly an hour to go before the NBA’s annual trade deadline, the Memphis Grizzlies made a deal. It involved a guard and a future draft pick and a would-be Eastern Conference contender. 

And, no, it wasn’t Ja Morant going to the Milwaukee Bucks or Miami Heat.

It was 37-year-old Eric Gordon coming over from the Philadelphia 76ers. Or, I should say, passing through. Odds are Gordon won’t play for the Grizzlies. He’ll be taken in and waived to open a roster spot for the Sixers and the Grizzlies will be paid with (squints) a 2032 NBA Draft second-round pick swap. 

Hill: Weighing pros and cons of Morant in Memphis after trade deadline

This is the kind of small-time accounting maneuver that happens during any NBA transaction period, the kind fans can just ignore. It drew a chuckle from a few particularly aged Grizzlies observers who remembered that some in the organization wanted Gordon back when the Grizzlies were debating Kevin Love and O.J. Mayo in the 2008 draft. 

For anyone else? You already know more than you need.

But this one paperwork trade happened when everyone who follows the Grizzlies was waiting on a big thing that never materialized. 

It was nearly a month ago that the Grizzlies let it be publicly known that Ja Morant was very available. Now the trade deadline has passed with no deal and with Morant presumably remaining with the team at least into the summer. 

It was already messy. What is it now?

While NBA trade rumors have become their own kind of industry, real deals often move in silence. 

That was the case with Jaren Jackson Jr., a franchise stalwart who was dealt to Utah in a big and unexpected trade earlier this week. 

Jackson had real value on the trade market and seemingly still a strong relationship with the organization. 

The Grizzlies apparently concluded that silence wasn’t going to be an option with Morant, where the relationship was no longer as strong and an acceptable deal was going to be harder to find. 

The Morant process was about as public as these things reasonably get, the NBA trade season version of a vaudeville routine: take our point guard … please.

Grizzlies trade for Eric Gordon, future second-round pick swap

The plea returned a shrug. 

What the passing deadline perhaps reveals is that trading Jackson was the main business all along, with the Morant process playing out as a flashy sideshow. 

The Grizzlies got a good haul for Jackson — three future first-round picks and two recent ones, along with a large trade exception they did not use this week but which they can access until next February. 

But it wasn’t an overwhelming haul.

It was the kind of trade return that, I think, revealed the Grizzlies’ active interest in finding a deal rather than just passively fielding calls. It wasn’t the kind of return that overcomes resistance, not a ‘we really hate to do this, but we can’t say no’ bounty. More of a ‘this is good enough’ return. 

The Grizzlies had set themselves up for a possible rebuild when they traded Desmond Bane to Orlando last summer. Their lack of comfort in committing to Morant going forward pushed them into committing to the rebuild instead. And they seemed to conclude that meant dealing Jackson. That’s where the value was. Moving Morant, by this point, had become a problem, not an opportunity.

The Grizzlies’ asking price for Morant was apparently low, but they did have one. They weren’t going to attach draft picks to a deal just to move Morant, as at least one team reportedly asked. And they weren’t willing to take back “bad” contracts without some level of compensation. 

Would they have simply moved Morant for expiring contracts or, as the Washington Wizards did for Atlanta’s Trae Young, only some more-neutral future salary? Were those kinds of deals even available?

More importantly: What now? How is this managed, through the season and into the summer? And, presuming the Grizzlies are still looking for a deal then, will the market be any better?

There’s no need for gossip. Morant’s problems are now apparent and in quadruplicate: defense, shooting, durability and, well, difficulty. 

Grizzlies can’t find trade, hold Ja Morant through deadline

Even then, the conventional wisdom outside of Memphis — not just among fans and media but, more importantly, rival league executives — has swung too far. 

On ESPN, in the hours leading up to the deadline, there was the spectacle of a dour-faced panel sternly disappointed in how Morant’s career has gone, culminating in Kendrick Perkins (yes, of “Bust his butt, Marc” fame) talking himself into a lather.

“Ja Morant better wake the h--- up,” Perkins said. “ ’Cause in two years, after this contract, he could find himself out of the league.”

OK, pal. 

I guess there’s always gotta be a guy who takes things too far. 

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The notion that Morant will be out of the NBA by age 28 is silly. But it’s been hard to square Morant’s apparent desire for a major contract extension and some fans’ confusion over why the Grizzlies would possibly consider trading him with the now stark reality that other NBA teams don’t currently want him, even for a pittance. Like, none of them. 

Some of those other teams blew it, by the way.

Morant still has All-Star caliber seasons — yes, plural — in him to summon. A chip on his shoulder and the realization that he truly does need to earn his next contract could bring it out. Some franchises without much going on — Sacramento, Chicago, Brooklyn, talking to you — should have bought low, and they’ll probably get another chance come summer. 

The Grizzlies have decided to move on from a core of players now reduced to one and an era that underperformed by any measure. But can it be the end of an era if the face of that era is still around? 

Yes.

The ending is awkward, but it’s here. It’s over. As over as the grit-and-grind era was when Marc Gasol was traded at the 2019 deadline and Mike Conley was left to wait until summer for a relocation. That time, the ending felt a little overdue. It was bittersweet. 

This time it feels like it’s come too soon. This time, for now, it mostly just feels bitter. 

Sputtering to the finish line

The beginning of the Grizzlies’ Ja Morant era was fast and thrilling, both down the floor and up the standings. 

The ending has been a low, slow slog that continues on, the pain and disappointment and growing tension dripping out over the course of more than three full years and now counting.

The 2021-2022 Memphis Grizzlies, who won a franchise-record-tying 57 games and took the eventual champion Golden State Warriors to six games in the playoffs’ second round, was as good and as compelling as any squad in franchise history. They may well have been the most of both. 

They were the “We Here” Grizzlies, their young-core energy and theatrical group dynamics later purloined and (truth hurts) perfected by the rival Oklahoma City Thunder. 

They were “Team Running Alley-Oop,” that highly specific attribute the emblem of teamwork in high-octane action. 

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What could be more fun than Morant in open-court motion? The answer, in the basketball world, was absolutely nothing.

Morant wasn’t actually on the floor for that “We Here” game — a late-season ESPN All-Access showcase — and that now looks like a harbinger of the absences to come. 

Morant was never better than in the 2022 playoffs.

In the first round’s fifth game, he hurdled the Timberwolves’ Malik Beasley for a third-quarter ending dunk and then went off for 18 points in a do-or-die fourth-quarter comeback, polishing it off with a game-winning layup. The truest “Call 12.”

In the second round’s second game, Morant torched the Warriors for 47 points in a home-court win. It was probably the best game anyone’s ever played in a Grizzlies uniform. 

Morant got injured later in that series. Morant’s Grizzlies appeared in only two more playoff series after, and Morant would miss time to injury in both of those too. 

That season’s promise — the first steps of a dynasty? — took a small hit the following summer, when franchise decision-makers, perhaps a little too smitten by their strong draft record, parted ways with two members of that team’s fantastic bench and larded the roster with rookies. 

This was a mistake, but in no way a fatal one. The Grizzlies added back a vet (Luke Kennard) in-season and finished second in the West again anyway.

Things began to skid in the second half of that 2022-2023 season with a succession of major injuries (Steven Adams, Brandon Clarke) and troubling Morant-connected incidents (January against Indiana, March at Denver). 

And while the Grizzlies failed in various trade bids (Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby) to add a major upgrade to their core of Morant, Jackson and Bane, success in those bids likely would not have changed things much. 

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“Blame/credit” is the wrong framework. Things happen for reasons. The primary — not only — reasons that this era of Grizzlies basketball rose too low and ended too soon were injuries, Morant issues and perhaps especially Morant injuries. 

Morant entered the league as a spectacular talent who carried with him at least three of those aforementioned concerns: shooting, defense and durability. 

The first, so important for a small guard as he ages, never really developed. The second improved but remained a weakness. The third concern only grew, to the point that it overwhelmed the rest. Nothing else matters when you aren’t on the floor. 

Last season, Morant missed 33 games spread across 15 separate absences. This season, as of the trade deadline, he’d missed 29 of 49 games spread across six separate absences. 

The last time Morant participated in a Grizzlies victory at FedExForum against a team with a winning record? January 20, 2025, MLK Day against the Wolves, more than a year ago. Will he experience another?

Grizzlies trade two-time All-Star Jaren Jackson Jr. to Utah

Is Morant “to blame” for this era going off course and now ending even as he remains? No one tries to get injured. You can work to become a good shooter but will, alone, can’t guarantee that. 

That fourth concern — “difficulty” — appeared later, and if you want to apportion blame for that one you can spread it around, to Morant foremost but also to the people around him and to an organization that was perhaps too cowed by Morant’s initial stardom to guide him as effectively as he needed. 

We’re not talking here, primarily, about the high-profile off-court issues that plagued Morant, and the Grizzlies, in the darkest days of 2023. Morant and the franchise seemed to get past that, or enough past it. 

But Morant remained a difficult personality in a more normal, day-to-day way. And if those issues weren’t fully public they were plain enough for those on the outside to see. Morant wasn’t one to hide his feelings. 

Pouting on the bench, quitting in a game, lashing out in the locker room. Morant’s frequent cryptic, attention-seeking social media posts were taken by many as a manifestation of immaturity. The messy shift in representation that resulted in Morant confronting an uncertain future — including potential contract extension and trade negotiations — without a traditional agent did him no favors. 

Hill: The Grizzlies are opting for a rebuild. Does tanking in the NBA work?

Through it all, Morant remained a star, but what does stardom ultimately mean for a franchise without availability, much less results? The returns are diminishing. The proof, or lack thereof, was in the stands. 

Over time, Morant became too unreliable for too much cost and too little impact. 

Morant was the engine of this era of Grizzlies basketball, once the most promising and now the most disappointing.

He was the star and by the end he was held in far lower esteem by the rest of the NBA than his two ostensible Grizz Next Gen sidekicks. Two trades and a third that couldn’t happen made that plain. 

So what now?

It’s going to be an odd, awkward finish to this season, and not just for the Grizzlies. 

There’s going to be a league-wide spectacle of teams adding (Utah, Washington, Indiana) or not trading (Milwaukee, Memphis) major players and yet still presumably wanting to lose enough to maximize their draft lottery odds. 

How will these teams navigate the rest of the season and how will the NBA police it? 

How much Morant, currently out with a legitimate injury, plays the rest of the way and how the Grizzlies manage that situation is one thing. 

But how do they — which means lead executive Zach Kleiman — explain the past month and where it now leaves Morant and the team? How does he explain to a fan base that deserves a thorough explanation where the franchise is and where it plans to go?

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How does the stark proof of his league-wide reputation impact Morant’s on-court mood, off-court demeanor and future expectations?

Do Kleiman and Morant suggest that Morant may still have a future, beyond the rest of this season, in Memphis? And if so do they mean it? 

Or, if both sides know a parting is coming this summer, can they effectively work together to make that process more productive? Or does it get messy? Or, um, messier?

The answers will likely begin Friday, when Kleiman will presumably make a public address and take questions. It’s going to get interesting. But it’s unlikely to be satisfying or pleasant. 

Then again, the end of something once good and promising rarely is.