Memphis traded Ja Morant to Portland for Jerami Grant, Kris Murray, and zero draft picks, per ESPN, and my first reaction was to check if it was a burner account that posted the news.
No picks. For a two-time All-Star with 22.4 points and 7.4 assists per game for his career. A 32-year-old and a fringe restricted free agent. That’s it. That’s the haul.
The cynical read — and I am a Jets fan, so cynicism is basically my primary personality trait — is that Memphis’s front office spent three years watching Morant miss 79 of a possible 246 games, serve a combined 34 games in suspension across two gun-related incidents, and shoot 41% from the field last season before shutting down with an elbow injury, and they finally just… needed out. At any cost. And apparently any cost was zero picks.
The generous read is different. Memphis didn’t panic. They made a calculated decision that Morant’s career could only be salvaged somewhere the weight of the last three years doesn’t walk into the building with him every morning. Portland makes a weird kind of sense for that. They just traded away everyone. They’re running Scoot Henderson, Shaedon Sharpe, Donovan Clingan — a rebuilding team with zero playoff pressure and no reason to rush anything. The Portland Trail Blazers aren’t asking Morant to save their season. They’re asking him to show up healthy and remind people he still exists.
That is genuinely the best possible environment for what Morant needs. No stakes. No expectations. No Memphis, where every practice carries the ghost of everything that went wrong.
The complicating part: head coach Micah Nori was asked about Morant after they met, and he said the intent in Morant’s face, the way he carried himself, was enough to leave him “beyond encouraged.” That’s not nothing. Coaches who’ve seen the full range of broken and fixable guys can usually tell the difference. Portland’s staff genuinely believes in this. I don’t think they’re lying.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: the thing that might be the best-case scenario is also the thing that scares me. No pressure is great for healing. No pressure also removes the exact thing that some guys need to stay dialed in. Morant has played 79 games in three seasons. The elbow is real. The suspension history is real. And now he’s on a team where the next Scoot Henderson moment will get ten times the coverage he does. What happens to Ja Morant’s focus when he’s no longer the most important thing in the room?
Memphis also completed the full tear-down — Morant gone, Desmond Bane gone, Jaren Jackson Jr. gone — all since getting swept by OKC last year. That front office decided they’d rather blow it up and start over than try to build around a guy with $87 million left and a complicated relationship with showing up.
Portland has nothing to lose. That’s the trade. For our NBA coverage this summer, this might be the weirdest and most interesting storyline running.
https://x.com/trailblazers/status/2071760708233212327
If it works, it’s the best comeback story of the year. If it doesn’t, Memphis gave away a former All-Star for a 32-year-old and got clowned for it in every group chat from here to Hoboken. My sister already texted me about this and she doesn’t even watch basketball.
