The days after the All-Star break are a particularly slow time in the world of NBA news. The trade deadline has passed and there aren’t games for a few days, which means there’s a lot of time to fill on podcasts and in columns and you can only spend so much of it coming up with ideas to make All-Star weekend better.
That can mean unloading the notebook for reporters and insiders, and this weekend Howard Beck of The Ringer dropped a brief nugget on the Real Ones podcast that got a lot of traction. Beck said an executive told him to “keep an eye on” Ja Morant this summer if the Grizzlies were to have another early exit from the playoffs, indicating there was at least some belief Memphis could look to move the former All-Star guard.
With nothing else going on the last couple of days, that has been a point of conversation in the NBA as folks are always wondering who will be the next star to hit the market. In Memphis, that wasn’t something people were very happy about, and Grizzlies GM Zach Kleiman gave a statement to Drew Hill of the Daily Memphian that made it very clear that Morant was not going to get traded, calling it a “fantasy” of other executives.
“I can’t blame other “executives” for fantasizing about us trading Ja,” Kleiman said. “But it’s just that – fantasy. We are not trading Ja. Continue to underestimate Ja, this team and this city, and we will let our performance on the floor speak for itself. I’m not going to give this nonsense further oxygen and look forward to getting back to basketball.”
It’s smart of Kleiman to shut this down, and unlike Pat Riley’s statement from earlier this year about the Heat not trading Jimmy Butler, this is not a situation where there’s a trade request battle going on behind the scenes. A “no comment” would’ve only made things worse, so Kleiman does a good job of making it clear these rumors came from other teams — noting why they’d want them to be true in the process — and then shut down the idea and says they’re going to move on.
After what happened in Dallas with Luka Doncic, I think everyone around the league is curious to see if there is a real shift in how teams look at who is a max guy. Morant has three more years on his contract after this one, so unlike Doncic, there’s not a looming extension decision in the immediate future, but I also think people have been a bit too quick to point to the Luka trade as the beginning of a league-wide trend rather than considering it just might be a wildly erratic decision by a relatively new GM and ownership group.
