Two years ago, the Memphis Grizzlies made a bold and ultimately unwise decision: they gave Chandler Parsons a max contract. Memphis believed itself to be a player or two away from true contention, and Parsons was an attainable free agent who, at max potential, could be just the perfect wing to join a battery of Mike Conley and Marc Gasol.
The Grizzlies are in peril of acting like a bad team again
Memphis has the No. 4 pick in the 2018 NBA Draft and Chandler Parsons. Will they sacrifice the former to get rid of the latter’s contract?
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Instead, Parsons has played in far less than half of the possible games in the first two years of his contract. This was basically the worst-case scenario imaginable when Memphis signed him: that his repeat knee surgeries were a harbinger of bad times ahead. They were! When Parsons has played for the Grizzlies, he’s looked nothing like the player he once was. And keep in mind that he was a tenuous max-level player at his best. At this level? It’s one of the very worst contracts in the league.
With two more pricey years left on the deal, Memphis is looking for an escape hatch. Reports suggest they are listening to pitches for the No. 4 pick that include taking Parsons off of the Grizzlies’ hands. ESPN’s Jonathan Givony also reports Memphis is looking to get talent back as well, and doesn’t want to move out of the lottery completely.
This is how a good team becomes a bad team before our eyes.
Memphis’ deal for Parsons had minimal upside and huge downside risk. It blew up in their face. The team survived enough to make the playoffs in 2016-17, despite Parsons’ injury-plagued season. But when Conley also went down in 2017-18, the Grizzlies tanked out. The perverse incentive the NBA offered for Memphis’ trouble was a very high pick in a well-respected NBA Draft: No. 4 overall.
Good teams use that perverse incentive to their benefit to bolster their team as it exists on the court. Bad teams are forced to use assets to clean up terrible messes.
Witness the Charlotte Hornets, a bad team, that used 2019 salary cap space to get rid of Dwight Howard, who they had traded for just a year ago, in order to avoid the luxury tax next season. The contours of what Memphis is apparently considering are different, but no less worrisome from a team-building perspective.
What’s perhaps more worrisome is the general manager who made the disastrous Parsons deal is the general manager now trying to clean up that very mess. Chris Wallace has been around a really long time, albeit with a break from action in there. This is what makes the Parsons clean-up really troubling: you wonder how much motivation is in simply getting Parsons out of sight so that can no longer be directly held over the general manager making the moves.
So long as Wallace and the Grizzlies get another player out of a Parsons and draft pick deal, they can justify the whole experience. Wallace can say the Grizzlies swung big in an attempt to remain near the top of the Western Conference in 2016, and it didn’t work out, but the team was still able to add talent in 2018 and make another run at it. Never mind that the caliber of player Memphis is likely to get in any deal for Parsons and No. 4 is likely to be a fringe starter at best. Never mind that if not for the apparent need to lose Parsons Memphis would be operating from a position of strength in shopping the No. 4 pick.
Good teams can make bad moves. Where the trouble lies is in digging a new hole trying to escape the one you put yourself into. That’s exactly what Memphis seems to be doing.
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It could, of course, work out for the Grizzlies if only because teams looking to move up in the draft typically act irrationally. Consider the Philadelphia 76ers, who fell in love with Markelle Fultz a year ago and got taken to the woodshed by Danny Ainge for their trouble. There are prospects worth falling in love with likely to be available at No. 4, and so the Grizzlies could find a team willing to make a risky deal that actually gives Memphis a decent return. History does not indicate that Wallace will do a marvelous job, but there are other GMs with questionable records in the lottery. That’s how a lot of these teams end up in the lottery!
If the Grizzlies do dig themselves a new hole in trying desperately out of the one created by the Parsons contract, it will mark a terrible waste of the end of the Gasol-and-Conley era, and the team might have to quickly shift from plans for a quick revival to a full rebuild. If it ends up being the latter, having traded down to escape Parsons will look like one heckuva foolish start.
