Less than a month before the NBA playoffs begin, the Memphis Grizzlies announced today that they have fired head coach Taylor Jenkins. This is fairly shocking news, for the timing and also because Jenkins was seen as rather entrenched in Memphis. He'd been there since the 2019–20 season, making him the fifth-longest tenured coach in the NBA. Jenkins was weeks away from coaching his fourth playoffs with the Grizzlies.
"I'm genuinely appreciative of Taylor's contributions to this team and this city over the past six seasons," general manager Zach Kleiman said in a statement. "This was a difficult decision given the consistent and tangible development of our players and overall success under Taylor's leadership. I wish Taylor the very best going forward." Kleiman and Jenkins were hired during the same offseason, so this is not a case of a GM dumping a coach inherited from a previous regime, but there were signs of unrest last summer. Kleiman oversaw a dramatic revamping of Jenkins's staff, cleaning out the entire bench save for Patrick St. Andrews and Anthony Carter, each of whom had been hired just the previous offseason. In came six new coaches, including, most importantly, Finnish coach Tuomas Iisalo.
The Jenkins-era Grizzlies have always been weird, and after treating last year's injury-ravaged campaign as an experimental year and hiring Iisalo, their offense this year is way out at the bleeding edge of basketball theory. They have ditched traditional set plays almost entirely and run very few pick-and-rolls, instead running what they call a "wheel system" based on constant player movement. I cannot recommend more highly James Herbert's incredible story for CBS Sports on the theory and process of this offense, which underscores just how different this way of playing is, and how much more demanding. Iisalo gets a great deal of credit as the orchestrator, and one assumes he will take over as interim coach, though Memphis hasn't said anything yet.
In addition to overseeing that strange, occasionally effective play-style, Jenkins is also at the cutting edge of another trend, which is playing a huge rotation and strictly limiting minutes for top players. Desmond Bane carries Memphis's heaviest workload at 31.7 minutes per game, which puts him at 76th in the league, between Cam Johnson and Alperen Sengun. Only Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr. join Bane in the top 165, and 13 Grizzlies players who've played 40 or more games have averaged more than 12 minutes per game. A few of the league's more interesting teams also lean on their depth like this, though nobody does so to this degree. It is not hard to imagine this platoon style rubbing the team's stars the wrong way.
On the other hand, it is somewhat difficult to imagine those larger-order tensions resolving with Jenkins's unceremonious dismissal on the last Friday of March if Memphis were also not scuffling. The Grizzlies have gone 8-11 since the all-star break, losing four of their last five games, all by double digits. That's an ominous turn of form, especially with the playoffs around the corner and most every team around them surging.
Even then, none of that seems to offer a clear, cut-and-dried explanation for why a team presently occupying the fifth seed in the Western Conference would abruptly ditch its long-tenured head coach mere weeks from the postseason. Nor has Grizzlies management yet provided any reason for the move, as of this writing.
