NBA Daily: A Chilling Reminder In New Orleans & Memphis

The Utah Jazz have to feel good about themselves. Even through all the adversity and all their struggles early on this season, they’ve established a good culture for their team. They currently have one of the most promising young scorers in the league as well as the league’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year – not to mention this year’s biggest All-Star snub.

Having Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert is all well and good, but what’s most important for the Jazz is that they have surrounded those two with glue guys who know their roles and help the team win. Joe Ingles, Ricky Rubio, Derrick Favors, Jae Crowder and Kyle Korver among others form a more-than-solid foundation that should give Utah a bright future.

It should only get better from here for Utah for two specific reasons

1. They have the assets to get better from here with their cap situation, which they might take advantage of before the trade deadline.
2. Mitchell and Gobert are embracing the culture in Salt Lake City, a town that has the obvious disadvantage of being in a small market compared to its counterparts.

The Jazz should feel fortunate because teams in small markets can pay a hefty price if they don’t surround their star talent with players who can help them win.

Just ask the New Orleans Pelicans.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past week and don’t have a clue of what’s been going on, Anthony Davis has alerted the Pelicans that he will not be signing an extension this summer and has requested a trade.

Nobody should blame Davis for this. In the almost seven years he’s been in New Orleans, the team has made the playoffs only twice, and have exactly one playoff series win despite Davis evolving into one of the league’s most fearsome players in that time.

The conclusion to draw from this was that the Pelicans failed to build a good team around Davis. Upon further review, this is true albeit only to a certain extent.

New Orleans definitely made some moves that look pretty boneheaded in hindsight. Drafting Austin Rivers, trading a first-round pick for Omer Asik then re-signing him to an albatross contract and overpaying Solomon Hill on a long-term deal did not work in their favor.

Even if those moves failed, it’s not like the Pelicans surrounded Davis with complete scrubs. They brought in Eric Gordon, Tyreke Evans, Jrue Holiday, DeMarcus Cousins and Rajon Rondo to name a few players with respectable reputations to put it lightly.

Emphasis needs to be put on Gordon. Once upon a time, Eric Gordon was one of the most promising young guards in the league. As the centerpiece of the return that New Orleans received for Chris Paul, Gordon was supposed to be Davis’ partner-in-crime. Then, persistent injuries plagued Gordon for most of his tenure. By the time he moved past them, he never got his old self back.

His fall from grace and his eventual redemption in Houston are two stories that don’t get talked about enough around NBA interwebs, but this writer digresses. Point being, Gordon on paper was supposed to be Davis’ No. 2. Injuries sadly derailed his All-Star potential.

Guys getting hurt also just seemed to be a running theme in the Big Easy. Gordon, Holiday and Evans all spent a good portion of their time on the team on the shelf because they were nursing injuries. Cousins had to be the most tragic out of the bunch, as his Achilles injury leaves fans wondering what could have been. The team may have managed just fine without him, but a player with his profile leaves so much to the imagination.

New Orleans didn’t do a perfect job surrounding Davis with talent, but they made more good moves than bad. The fact that they didn’t have much success may be more of a result of injuries than ineptitude.

It doesn’t matter though because, in the end, if you’re a small market team with an all-time talent on the roster, you have a limited timeframe to create a winning team until you potentially face a trade request. In Davis’ case, everyone kept their eyes peeled on him and the Pelicans until it finally happened. Saddest of all, this is deja vu for New Orleans.

They faced this same crisis when Chris Paul asked for a trade back in 2011. What’s worse is that Davis was supposed to be the segue away from the CP3 era. Instead, it’s just lather, rinse, repeat for them.

Getting back to the Jazz, Utah has built a good enough that they most likely won’t have to deal with the same situation that the Pelicans currently have with “The Brow”. However, just because they’ve formed a good foundation does not promise glory at the highest level. What’s worse is that small market teams like them that have built good-not-great teams really can struggle to tear them down if things don’t work out.

Just ask the Memphis Grizzlies.

The Grizz are another team that should be in the trade rumor mill for the next couple of days. This season hasn’t gone as well as planned for Memphis. They’re 21-33 and have fallen further and further away from the playoff race. Mike Conley Jr. and Marc Gasol are now available in trade talks and rebuilding appears to be the only option now.

Grit-and-Grind is nearing its end, and many are asking why it took the Grizzlies until now to trade their franchise cornerstones when trading them years earlier would have fetched them more value.

The answer is pretty simple: Because building a good team in Memphis is not easy to do. To get where they were in Memphis required a lot of savvy moves. People fault the Pelicans for trading all of their picks for win-now players, but the Grizzlies provide a perfect counterpoint to that. While they were building the Grit-and-Grind era, the Grizzlies had four top-eight picks in the NBA draft from 2006-2009, and they whiffed on three of them.

Mike Conley Jr proved to be the only success story coming out of the draft for Memphis, while Rudy Gay, OJ Mayo and Hasheem Thabeet all flopped. Gay and Mayo weren’t bad players. It’s just that the Grizzlies played at their peak after those two departed.

Besides Conley, the Grizzlies made some savvy moves to get where they were. They acquired Marc Gasol’s draft rights when they traded Pau to the Lakers. At the time, Gasol was mid-second round pick who wasn’t really known for anything besides being Pau’s brother. They then acquired Zach Randolph in what was basically a salary dump trade. At the time, Randolph’s value was at its absolute lowest and many questioned if he was a winning player. They then signed Tony Allen in free agency. At the time, Allen was a backup wing who had just found his niche in the NBA.

Because the quartet of Conley, Gasol, Randolph and Allen worked out so much better than anyone could have anticipated, together they created the best basketball the Grizzlies franchise had ever seen.

Everything gradually went sour over time. Randolph and Allen got old. Gasol and Conley suffered serious recurring injuries. The team bet on the wrong horse both in trades – Jeff Green – and in free agency – Chandler Parsons – in their search for that last piece. The last time Memphis did damage in the playoffs was in 2015 when they battled the Warriors in the second round. They haven’t come close to that since.

Getting that team together took time and it took some crafty moves. Tearing that all down is tough because lottery picks are no guarantee – You don’t get a Jaren Jackson Jr. type every year – and marquee free agents aren’t lining up to go to small markets unless the team in that small market has a good product by its name.

When and if the Grizzlies rebuild, it’s probably going to take a long while to get back to where they were, which is exactly why they’ve avoided that route until they had no other choice.

Utah’s done well for themselves because they’ve risen above some of the limitations of being a small market team. That does not mean that they are out of the woods. If the supporting cast around Mitchell and Gobert falters, that could lead to some trouble. It doesn’t look that way at the moment at all, but even if they become a Western Conference contender, there’s no telling if they can manage to get over the hump. If they don’t, they may not know when to pull the plug.

The public usually loves to root for the little guy, but the little guy always has its disadvantages. All in all, what’s happening to both the Pelicans and the Grizzlies is another chilling reminder that being in a small market can be the pits.