What is the offseason plan?
Grizzlies’ Hollinger talks about the team’s moves
The Commercial Appeal’s Peter Edand miston recently spoke to Grizzlies Executive Vice President of Basketball John Hollinger for an wide-ranging look at the Grizzlies’ offseason and their future. In Part 1, Hollinger talks about the Grizzlies’ offseason plan, Tyreke Evans, and the team’s salary situation.
In Part 2, Hollinger talks about the team’s ownership, decision-making, a focus on player development.
In Part 3, Hollinger expounds on Jaren Jackson, Jr. and his blinding potential.
When you guys mapped out what you wanted to do this summer, how closely has what’s happened matched what you wanted to do?
People have this
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idea that you come in with a plan, when you really need about 20 or 30 different plans that are contingent on other things that may or may not happen. I’d say the outcome here was close to our best- or better-case scenario. We were able to get a player we really wanted
(Jackson) with our (first round) pick, using our Mid-Level Exception to get what we see as a long-term piece in Kyle Anderson. Those were two huge things for us, not just for the present but for the future of this team. I guess it’s too early to say whether we nailed those or not, but we feel pretty good about the outcomes we had from that. Those were probably the primary goals and we achieved them.
We came into the offseason thinking we needed to get better on the wings, and if that didn’t happen in the draft, we needed to make it happen in other ways — which I think we did in getting Kyle Anderson and Garrett Temple out of our summer. And even late in the season, when we were mapping things out (for the offseason), we didn’t know until extremely late that MarShon Brooks would be capable of the things he did, so locking in that piece was important for us, too.
So in a big picture sense, you had roles to fill, but you didn’t necessarily know for sure who was going to fill them?
Yeah, I think if you sat us down and held a gun to our head (after the season), we would have said that if we could get three significant players, one via draft, one via free agency, and one via trade, we would have been happy with our offseason.
Do you regret how anything happened with the Tyreke Evans situation? Is there anything you would want to re-do?
Hindsight is always 20-20. You make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time. We had no idea that MarShon Brooks was going to emerge as a potential bench scorer for us that could make it easier for us to go in a different direction and go after someone like Kyle with our Mid-Level.
I look at it like it was a stock option. We knew there wasn’t a 100 percent chance we were going to be able to resign Tyreke. There was some percentage chance we had to estimate based on the factors in the market, and we had to weigh that relative to the return that we were looking at on trading him, which was likely to be pretty paltry.
When you’re dealing with secondround picks in the 50s that end up on playoff teams, now you’re getting into a scenario where there’s been six rotation players picked in the last 10 years, so you’re getting into pretty low odds you can get anything out of that. We felt OK with retaining that optionality even though we knew it wasn’t 100 percent, or anything that close to 100 percent, that we’d be able to (re-sign Evans). We felt the expected return off that would be better than the expected return from what we were going to get with the things we were being offered.
That approach is interesting from you, considering the higherthan-average success rate you’ve had
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as a team in second-round picks and undrafted players. There are four or five players in your rotation who were second-round picks or undrafted, so I’m a little surprised to hear you say that.
JH:
I think if you can get in the upper half of the second round, it’s a much different picture in terms of your ability to have some success there. JaMychal Green was undrafted, so was Wayne (Selden), but Andrew (Harrison) was 44th, Dillon (Brooks) was 45th, Ivan (Rabb) was 35th, I think in those spots you feel better about getting a player. The hit rate is low enough very late in the second round — you had the one jackpot pick in Isaiah Thomas, you had E’Twaun Moore, James Ennis III, that’s pretty much it from the last 10 years in those late second-round spots.
You guys appear to be shifting in a direction towards increasing ball movement and passing on the court. Did moving on from Tyreke have anything to do with that?
Not in an overarching or major way. MarShon was definitely an unexpected wild card in all of this, (getting) that kind of guy locked in on a minimum (contract). There is only one ball, so you do kind of want to make sure your second group is set up so that everyone can play their game.
On MarShon Brooks, his production only came in seven games, and during a time in the season where numbers can be deceptive. What gives you the confidence that what you saw at the end of the year isn’t a small sample size blip?
There’s obviously an eye test element to this, because we’ve all seen people do things in April that aren’t necessarily replicable in November. But at the same time, these weren’t garbage games for our opponents on most nights. Minnesota’s fighting for a playoff spot, and he’s basically our goto guy in the fourth quarter to help win that game.
Utah, at Utah, is playing for seeding with their best players, an elite defensive team, and he’s getting buckets. So I think what we saw is, even matched up with playoff-caliber teams that were playing for something important, he was still able to be effective and play his game.
With regard to the luxury tax situation, you guys are very, very close to that line.
Will there be any business done to the back end of the roster to help the financial side?
Are you guys comfortable with where you’re at?
We’re comfortable where we’re at, there may be one or two small moves still coming as we optimize things a bit, but I don’t really see any haymakers coming. I think we’re pretty happy with how our offseason has gone, and the types of guys we’ve brought in. The luxury tax dance is one I’m familiar with -- this is my seventh season, and in six of them we’ve danced right up to the line, so this is not unfamiliar territory.
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