On Tuesday, Kleiman found one.
Notably, the list of first-round picks the Grizzlies will receive in exchange for their big man does. No include Utah’s first-rounder for 2026. The Jazz already negotiated the rights to that pick, back in 2021, as part of a deal to transfer Derrick Favors’ salary to the Thunder. The defending NBA champions will get Utah’s first-round pick in this year’s draft… but only if they fall outside the top eight in the 2026 NBA Draft Lottery.Advertisement
The Jazz enter action Tuesday with a 15-35 record, the sixth-worst record in the NBA. Adding Jackson, a two-time All-Star and former Defensive Player of the Year, a very good player averaging 19.2 points per game, would theoretically put Utah in position to win a few more games down the stretch, potentially jeopardizing the fate of that draft pick.
You know: in theory.
In the short term, it will be interesting to see how precisely the Jazz (who, lest we forget, said they were sick of sinking, sir, nothing to see here) navigate the league’s strictest injury reporting guidelines to avoid racking up even more six-figure fines for roster management shenanigans. But in the bigger picture? Jazz could end up being very interesting, very soon.
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Longtime NBA insider Marc Stein previously reported that Utah was projecting confidence that they would be able to retain center Walker Kessler, currently rehabbing from a season-ending shoulder injury, when he hits restricted free agency this summer. According to Tony Jones of The Athletic, the Jazz still plan to retain him, and by effectively acting “pre-agency” to use their cap space on Jackson, they put themselves in position to start an oversized front line next season: 7-foot-2 Kessler at the 5, 6-foot-10 Jackson at power forward and 7-foot-1 Lauri Markkanen (reportedly quite pleased with the JJJ deal) at small forward, with Kyle The 6-foot-11 Filipowski came off the bench to fit in any of the three spots.
Since his partnerships with Jonas Valančiūnas, Steven Adams and Zach Edey, Jackson has tended to play his best ball next to a suitable big man, allowing him to kick and wreak havoc as a weak-side rim protector. The Jazz have been terrible defensively for four years. With Kessler and JJJ roaming the backline, they immediately profile as significantly better than that, even with young, poor point-of-attack defenders in front of them; the fit of JJJ operating as a stretch 4 attacking from the perimeter and Kessler working as a diving screen and lob finisher also feels pretty clean.
Moving down the positional spectrum shouldn’t be a problem for Markkanen either. He has a lot of experience and comfort working as a big wing; There’s a world in which this looks like the juggernaut team Markkanen briefly aligned with in Cleveland, only with more offensive firepower and shooting touch. (We know head coach Will Hardy likes big-to-big passes.)
Jaren Jackson Jr.’s tenure in Memphis came to an end on Tuesday. (Photo by Bradley Collyer/PA Images via Getty Images)
(Bradley Collyer – PA Images via Getty Images)
If Jackson returns to form after an occasionally slow 2025-26 season, if the bigs stay healthy and adds a dynamic downhill creator and pull-up shooter in Most Improved Player candidate Keyonte George along with talented offensive swingers Ace Bailey (a 6-foot-9 starting two-guard seems to make perfect sense in this oversized lineup structure) and Brice Sensabaugh, potential growth from players like Cody Williams and Isaiah Collier, and a top-half lottery pick in what is shaping up to be one of the most talent-laden drafts in years…suddenly, the Jazz look less like a rebuilding underdog, and more like a team that could harbor realistic optimism about pushing for a return to the postseason as soon as next season.
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The Grizzlies, on the other hand, have opted to take the scenic route back to meaningful spring basketball.
Kleiman told us exactly what he thought of his team last spring, after the eventual champion Thunder swept the Grizz in the first round: “There’s a level that I think everyone has to accept and be willing to reach to reach the ultimate goal here… I don’t think we can look back at this series and this season and say, ‘Oh, we’re close.’ No, we’re not. We’re not close. There’s a lot of work to do. I need to be open-minded on multiple aspects.”
On Tuesday, with the Grizzlies once again decimated (only Portland has lost more player games to injuries this season, according to Spotrac) at 19-29, three games south of the last play-in spot in the West, that open-mindedness has brought about the end of an era. Just over nine months after that sweep at the hands of OKC, Kleiman has turned Jackson and Desmond Bane into Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (who has a $21.6 million player option for next season), rookies Cedric Coward and Walter Clayton Jr., third-year forward Taylor Hendricks, five future first-round draft picks (plus a top-two protected 2029 pick swap with Orlando), about $17.4 million in expired contracts. in the form of old friend Kyle Anderson (who played in Memphis from 2018-2022) and Georges Niang, and, through creative deal structuring, what is evidently the largest trade exception in NBA history.
In total, the Grizzlies now control 12 first-round picks in the next seven NBA drafts, more than any team outside of Oklahoma City and Brooklyn, including a protected Lakers top-four pick in 2027, and unprotected first-round picks from Orlando in 2030 and Phoenix in 2031. With Jackson and Bane now elsewhere, the only non-rookie-scale guaranteed salary left in the balance beyond the end of next season belongs to Morant; With Memphis reportedly “continuing to field offers and interest” for him, the books may end up completely clean by Thursday afternoon.
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From a cold, sober, analytical perspective, this is what you do when you decide you don’t have a winning hand, especially if you’re a small-market team without much of a history of success in free agency. You fold it, shuffle the deck and see what the next deal is.
You’ll see what Coward, who averaged just under 19 points, 8.5 rebounds and four assists per 36 minutes with league-average shooting efficiency as a rookie, can do with the ball in his hands more often. (Provided Ty Jerome, finally healthy and able to play right out of the box, abandons him.) You give a roster that is now heavily weighted toward players under 25 (newcomers Clayton and Hendricks, holdovers Jaylen Wells, GG Jackson and Cam Spencer, and, when they can recover, Zach Edey and Scotty Pippen Jr.) a chance to earn a spot in whatever comes next in Memphis.
You’re heading into the next 48 hours about $34 million under the luxury tax line, with plenty of flexibility to act as a facilitator in other teams’ trades, renting out that cap space in exchange for even more draft picks and/or young players to try out. You take as many bites at the apple as possible and hope that the next package of picks and prospects turns out to be at least as successful as the guys you just threw away.
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It’s worth remembering that that’s a very high bar. Morant, Jackson and Bane were the linchpins of teams that produced two of the six 50-win seasons in franchise history, and one of just five Grizzlies playoff series wins. They never reached the heights they seemed destined for in the spring of 2022, and they didn’t go as far as the Z-Bo/Gasol/Conley/Allen Grit ‘n’ Grind era teams whose mantle they assumed. But they won a batch of regular-season games, and they were favorites of the fans the city fell in love with—reasons to show up at the FedEx Forum and tune in night after night.
That, in addition to on-court production, is what Kleiman will have to replace. Overflowing selection coffers do not put asses in seats or victories on the board. The players do it. After the best-laid plans of the last era turned to ashes, Kleiman and his front office had better find some really good ones if they want to continue presiding over the next competitive iteration of the Grizzlies when it’s ready to go.