Memphis Grizzlies: 5 goals for Mike Conley in 2017-18
By Greg Cassoli
4. Embrace playing off-ball
The Grizzlies don’t have a lot of sure things on the perimeter entering into next year. Chandler Parsons is a massive injury question mark. James Ennis is interesting, but has a long way to go before he can be considered anything but that. Troy Daniels can shoot threes, but not much else. Ben McLemore is young, but has been mostly bad for his entire career.
That leaves Memphis with Tyreke Evans as possibly the team’s second-best perimeter player. Evans has a discomforting history of injuries of his own, but he’s more likely to be healthy than Parsons, and a good deal more talented than Ennis or McLemore has shown to date. That could mean he warrants major minutes.
Memphis Grizzlies
Evans is a flawed player in many regards, but as a general rule of thumb, he’s difficult to stay in front of. If the Grizzlies want to maximize his skill-set, they need to let him function as a primary ball handler, and that will mean sliding Conley to an off-ball spot when the two share the floor. There’s a good case to stagger minutes between the two, but at some point they’ll on the court together, and in those minutes Conley will be far more valuable as a shooter than Evans could ever dream of.
Conley’s spot-up numbers were magnificent last year. He averaged 1.19 points per possession with an effective field goal percentage of 60.1, both of which were best on the team, and among the best in the entire league, per NBA.com.
To find a way to get Conley a few more catch-and-shoot looks won’t just be leveraging Evans’ strengths, but taking advantage of one of Conley’s best skills as well, and if it means one or two less drives to the hoop, where injuries are far more likely to occur, that’s all the better. It’s a win-win-win, but it will require Conley to give up control of the offense in a way that he’s never really had to before.
There isn’t a clear-cut metric for what that might look like, but we’ll use spot-up possessions per game as a proxy. Let’s shoot for something relatively modest, and aim for two more per game than last year, or 4.2 total.