Which finally brings us to the very best aspect of Morant and the Grizzlies’ rise. (Worth around $1 billion when he purchased the team, Pera-the founder of publicly traded tech giant Ubiquiti-is now worth $18.6 billion, making him the third-richest owner in the NBA.) The Grizzlies, in other words, are a small-market team that doesn’t need to act like one, and with the team they are building, cash-flush ownership, and a home city that might offer all kinds of appeal to NBA players, the Grizzlies’ transformation from outpost to destination might already be underway.
As ESPN’s Brian Windhorst has repeatedly pointed out on his podcast, the Grizzlies’ owner, Robert Pera, has quietly become one of the richest owners in the league since purchasing the team in 2012.
Gymnastics Is on the Verge of an International Crisisīut push those dark thoughts aside, and the future in Memphis is spectacularly bright. I Was Going to Quit Playing Competitive Scrabble. Men’s Soccer Team Miss the World Cup Again? Meet the NCAA Tournament Referee Who Lost His Day Job as a Police Chief for Allegedly Discriminating Against White PeopleĬould the U.S. Former first-rounder Jaren Jackson Jr, healthy after playing only 11 games last season, seems finally on his way to manifesting the enormous potential that made him the fourth overall pick in the 2018 draft. Second-year wing Desmond Bane, who looks like a budding All-Star, was picked by the Boston Celtics with the last pick in the first round of the 2020 draft and promptly purloined by Memphis in a heist of a trade the team’s second-leading per-game scorer, Dillon Brooks (currently injured), was originally a 2017 second-round pick of the Houston Rockets. But they’ve proven to be a remarkably well-run organization, with a talented young coach in Taylor Jenkins and a front office that’s drafted well and shown itself to be exceptionally adept at identifying undervalued players. 2 pick, with which they drafted Morant), and the previous season they’d been even worse, finishing an abysmal 22–60. In 2018–19, the year they drafted Morant, Memphis was tied for the seventh-worst record in the league (some lottery luck brought them the No. It wasn’t long ago that the Grizzlies were one of the lousiest teams in the NBA. Morant is a precociously intelligent and explosively athletic player who’s also one of the most charismatic stars in the league, an inveterate trash-talker beloved by his teammates who’s not above ice-grilling little kids who try to dap him up while wearing the opposing team’s jersey. He gives me something to look forward to at the end of one day and the beginning of the next, when clips of his near-nightly feats are still swirling around NBA Twitter. Morant might already be the league’s most electrifying attraction on a night-to-night basis, the perfect basketball player for yet another COVID winter that seems to only grow more monotonous. The biggest reason I watch the Grizzlies, and the biggest reason for their astonishing ascent this year, is their third-year point guard, Ja Morant. That 22–5 run is no longer a “hot streak” rather, it is the Grizzlies evolving from a middling team to one of the very best squads in the NBA during the season, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that Memphis opened the year with the second-youngest roster in the league. A much bigger one is that, lately, the Memphis Grizzlies almost never lose: Since beginning the season 9–10 they have gone a smoldering 22–5 in their past 27 games, roughly a third of an NBA season. I have been watching a lot of Grizzlies games on League Pass recently, and one reason for this is what I just described.