The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - ODDBALL - Ja Morant and the Grizzlies Lose Their Head (Coach)

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Taylor Jenkins is no longer the head coach in Memphis! What's up with this timing, how much did Ja Morant have to do with the move, and who is the new guy? Get all your answers on Oddball, along with Izzy and Amin's takes on the Pistons and Timberwolves' brawl and a brand new edition of Hot Streak! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The Ford It's a Big Deal event is on. How's that? A little bigger. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Nice. Now the offer? Lease a 2025 Escape Active all-wheel drive from 198 bi-weekly at 1.99% APR for 36 months with $27.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca today. Welcome to Oddball. I'm Amino Hassan. That over there is Izzy Gutierrez. This is the show where we debate whether Cooper flag is going to be a bigger deal than Brawny James. Oh my God, all the clicks, all the clicks. Ah,

but seriously, this show is brought to you by DraftKings. DraftKings, the crown is yours. Izzy, we had big stuff happen. Go down this week. Big stuff. Taylor Jenkins, head coach of the Memphis Grizzlies got let go on Friday. It's only nine games left in the season. He's the all time winningest coach in Grizzlies history.

They had a big showdown with the Lakers with whom they're fighting for the four seed against. And they kicked them out. They told them to hit the pavement. Izzy, how surprised were you by the timing? I think him getting fired not as surprising as the timing. Definitely not. I think I was sort of still getting over the Lakers and Bulls just taking all the madness from March or themselves with the finish of that game. And then I'm sort of getting the Taylor Jenkins news. And it's just it's weird for a few

reasons. One you've seen over the course of these six years with this core of players, what they can be when they're healthy and they look good. Right. Like they're not a hundred percent healthy. Obviously John has missed like 30 games. Um, they have been significantly worse since the all star break. And I think when you've had a coach for as long as he's been there, when you've seen the ups, you've seen the downs, you kind of notice when it's not going to cycle back to be a, you know, a winning team again, to be at their peak.

And if you look at their top six guys, really their top seven guys, these days, if you include Scottie Pippen Jr. Every single one of them have only known one coach and that's Taylor Jenkins, except for triple J his first year. He had JB Bickerstaff, everybody else only Taylor Jenkins. So you kind of get the feeling of when, Hey, this might turn around. Maybe they'll turn it up right for the right before the playoffs. And when you think about, you know, John Moran reportedly not being in love with

the offense and seeing how they fallen off the last couple of weeks or a few weeks, especially defensively, which is the place where you look at mostly where guys are getting coached up. It's when you look at it, it kind of doesn't seem so crazy. Like you're going to an assistant coach that might have a different version of the offense you're already running. And maybe it'll be the best. Maybe it'll be the honeymoon period during the playoffs. And you, you know, you get the best of this team because it didn't seem like they were going to go

much further than they'd already gone with Taylor Jenkins. Yeah. Like, like is the case with a lot of these firings. You just gave a very compelling argument is as to why he got let go. And I'm saying, cool. Yeah, all that makes sense. My big takeaway is like, why now? Why so late in the season? It's funny. We got a a statement from Zach Kleinman who's the head of basketball decision-making over there and his statement was something along the lines of like Yeah, we're all about urgency around here

And I'm like where was this urgency at the all-star break urgency is a core principle of ours Where was urgency at the all-star break? What was urgency the first couple weeks after the All-Star break? Where was urgency pretty much any time to give your new head coach time to figure things out? Because to do it now, to drop a bomb in the middle of a heated race as we're going to a Western Conference playoffs, let's face it, it's not gonna be easy regardless of what seed you're in. Like I just don't understand why they didn't just let him play the season out. If you had brothers that, oh man, we could win a championship with the right coach, then where were those brothers earlier? Here's another urgency slash timing question for you, Izzy.

They fired their assistant coaches last off season. They brought in a whole new assistant coaching staff, which by the way, they did not consult Taylor Jenkins on, you know what we call that the old setting the table special. Okay. I'm going to get you up out of here. First things first, let me get rid of all your confidence. Let me hire a bunch of dudes that you don't know. But that also helps out with the timeline though.

I mean, right. Yeah. It's sort of explaining it, right? Cause it's like, Hey, here's your chance. We need to know what this is going to look like. And as they got further into the season, looked worse and worse. Like, I don't know from the outside looking in, I don't know necessarily who was a Taylor Jenkins guy and who wasn't.

But just based on the quotes, seemed like Jaren Jackson, Jr. was definitely one. But John Moran certainly was not seemed like he got out of bed. It's like he was in bed, saw the quote, huh? Surprised me. That's pretty much with the extent of his quote, not, hey, I really love that guy. So this is this is the part where it gets really complicated, right? Because part of what they did to him, Taylor Jenkins,

and giving him this new stab, they also told the new staff, Hey, you guys are going to come up with the offense. Wait, what? Like, okay. So your head coach isn't even going to get to call what offense we're running. To me, this is NBA cowardice at its best. Just fire the guy. You don't like them. You don't like the offense. He runs. You think you could do fire him. Why are you going to wait? Why are you going wait? Why you'll wait this long it happens so many times where I see these teams Hemmin Hall It's like when when another firing Hall of Famer when the Suns fired Earl Watson two weeks into the season

I said you had all offseason where you had the draft you had free agency You had the offseason you had before we went to camp in Formos We had all a camp at no point where you like I don't think this is the guy Yeah, you figured that out two weeks in same thing here. You had whatever inkling you had when you fired as assistants Then you let him go this whole time. You're like, I don't know Maybe you could turn it around but now you figure out he can't turn it around in time in time for what? For y'all to have the same result anyway, if it's the same result anyway, have them have the dignity of finishing what he started. And like I said, I'll go back to if you think he's good enough to be your coach, let him pick his assistance.

And if the result is it right, then you fire him then you fire all of them. Let me say this though, whoever came up with the offense, I believe it was one of the coaches he was fired with just now. It came up, he came up with it as a, like a model after a division three school. Listen, man, if you're telling me, if I'm an NBA front office decision maker, and you are telling me you're going to devise an office, an offense based on something that you saw with division three something rather? No thank you man. I don't want any of that. Not only do I not think it's going to work, but you're going to tell your players that and they're going to be like, why do we need some division three gimmicky offense? And just to answer your last question there in terms of like,

what does it mean? Like if they get the best out of their team with this new assistant code or with this new coach, what's that going to mean? Is that going to be title contention? Not necessarily. But if they make a Western Conference finals, if they, you know, go to a game seven in a second round, as opposed to flaming out in the first round, which a lot of people assume they might've done under Taylor Jenkins, that's enough confirmation for them that they made the right move. I'm not saying that that's what's going to happen,

but this isn't one of those championship or bust type of scenarios. It's let's just see in these playoffs because we know what it looked like under Taylor. Let's see what it looks like with this guy. So, okay. So let's talk a little bit about this guy, right? This guy being the new head coach, uh, Tuomas Isalo. He's Finnish. This was his first year in the NBA on an NBA bench in any capacity, right? This year here. He's been a successful coach in Europe, albeit tempered success. And what I mean by that

is he's never coached in like one of the elite leagues like Spain or Turkey, and he's never won one of those. He's he or in the Euro League. He's been a Euro Cup champion, which is the second division behind Euro League as far as past the continent. He's been a Champions League champion, which is very different from Euro League. But my point is the guy comes with very limited with zero NBA history on the season and very limited high level international experience. And what I mean by that is when players see a co are with a coach for the first time and this guy hasn't been around the league. Right. So guys will do a lot of, yo, you know, this guy, Oh, I see coach in France. Did you,

were you playing in France with them? Uh, and so that's a lot, a lot of word of mouth goes there. Again, I'm not knocking the guy as a coach. I really don't know much other than looking at his resume. But what I'm telling you is historically, NBA players don't trust outsiders. They don't. If you are an outsider, you better have a like a laundry list of connects and people who know you who can vouch for you, where they'd be like,'d be like oh no man I he was my assistant down in San Antonio that dudes great he knows his stuff he's always whatever oh man that was my guy Milwaukee man he used to work out any time a night I would call him he'd come out work out and this guy was always coming with film and stuff like that like or yeah I played against

him in such-and-such or such-and-such when you are someone who doesn't have any of those things and then you come in and you say guys I've got this new offense for you it's based on a division three school oh by the way all those pick and rolls you love to run John Morant we're not running them no more which is again an ongoing storyline this is a quote from Misalo after he got the job it was a big surprise in the last 24 hours has been quite a scramble here trying to get myself and everybody organized. Izzy, if it's one thing I know about the NBA, they never fire a coach without having an idea who the next guy is going to be. And the next guy, it's going to be rarely. I won't say never rarely has zero clue what's about to happen. Ladies and gentlemen, might I introduce you to the dagger?

Well, I'm trying to run this off. I've given him the offense because he just don't like it or he don't know how to run it the way I draw it. I mean, if I drew it up, I mean, I was calling the shots. I would have called this the different lineups. I would have done like, and then it's like, hey, we fired head coach. We want you to be me. I was just taking hypotheticals.

I didn't know anything. Oh my gosh. Oh, I got to get organized. Well, what is this? My handy dandy book of plays that I've already all thought out of. Well, and the other thing is, is like the, the idea, you're right. The idea of that offense was they weren't running as many pick and rolls. Um, even though like somebody like Zach, he'd, he drafted number nine.

He says out loud, Hey, I love pick and roll offense and they do less of it. Right. And you know, the idea is that they draft him so they can punish small ball teams instead of that, they just take them out and do the traditional thing. It doesn't seem like they were aligned on a lot of things. And so I wonder if it was something of, you know, they were just waiting for this opportunity, right? Because they've been, you know, they've been up and down all season long.

They've been dancing around the two seat for a while. Maybe it's now they're just like, all right, we've seen enough. It was never going to work. You're not doing what we asked you to do anyway. Let's use this assistant coach. He might put a couple new wrinkles in the offense. And so people won't complain as much, but yeah, you weren't doing what we asked anyway.

We've got the new wrinkles, it's his offense. He's the mastermind, him and the other dude. By the way, there's an assistant who got fired. That's the funny thing is like, I just got here. How's this my fault? Again, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not arguing for against any of these individuals. I'm just saying when you are an NBA organization, there is a way there's a protocol you follow when you make these kinds of

changes in power. And when you don't follow them, you might think like you're doing people are a, uh, uh, a solid, but it's the opposite. You put them in quite the awkward predicament where they got to answer a bunch of questions that they may not necessarily have answers to. Quick question before we move on off of this is what do you think this means for Ja long-term? Remember Howard Beck wrote this thing about Ja might be the next superstar on the move and the Grizzlies came out with a very flowery statement about,

oh my God, everyone hates us because we're Memphis, but that's not going to happen. And nothing's going to da da da. And here they are showing their ass in the most small market country, bumpkin ass kind of way. So what does all this mean for Jayazi? I don't think this puts him in like the coach killer category, because again, you've had six years with Taylor. I think if anything was going to sort of force them out of Memphis, it was last year and it was

everything around that. And so I don't know if this in itself is that telling. I do. I will say that in the games that he missed, they were basically hovering above 500. And so I don't think that is very encouraging if you're the Grizzlies and say, Hey, we can move on from John whenever we want. I still think they consider him and, and triple J as franchise cornerstone. All right, let's take a quick break. When we come back. Are the bad boys coming back to play? This is a message from sponsor Intuit Turbo tax guys,

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It's happening now at BHP, a future resources company. Welcome back to Oddball. All right, Sunday night we had a matchup between Minnesota and Detroit that ended in fisticuffs. That's right, we don't see that too often. Guys, old fashioned manhandling each other, grabbing each other, shoving each other, getting each other's faces. It was Nas Reed, followed by Ron Holland, and then Dante DiVincenzo jumped in and it all turned into a scuffle, a brouhaha, a skirmish

or as Izzy heard from someone a squirmish. Yeah, let's get this out of the way real quick because somebody on the reels today I saw called it a squirmish and I said to myself, oh, wait a second, it's always called a skirmish, but is it spelled squirmish SQ UI? And so I did all the looking up and it was like, no, people just sometimes people do spell it squirmish, but pronounced and skirmish. And apparently that's allowed because it's like a nonce word or something. I don't know. But just, just know it's pronounced skirmish no matter how you spell it.

And Izzy, these are the same people who brought you loser L O O S E R. Looser. Yes. Yes. All right. Seven people got ejected by players, the two coaches. Let's get to the nitty gritty of all of this. The real stuff, which is does this signify anything for the Pistons that they're not going to take from anybody? They already were this team. And I'll tell you, it's just because of Isaiah Stewart, in my opinion,

beef stew, as they call him, because if you remember back when they played the Warriors recently, he actually got Steph Curry to do like a double take like and stare down. Call the Tigers. Right. Right. There's not that many people that can do that. They can say the right things to Steph Curry or even want to, you know, poke the bear, if you will. And this one, it wasn't even his fight, really. He just came in. And if you show that that image of him, like he left the floor, like pointing at his

Detroit Jersey, like saying, this is us, like, do not mess with us. And I do think that this whole idea that they are this, you know, young, lovable team. That's great. But this is a spirit tells me that they're tough and maybe the bad boys. No, no, no. Why? Yeah. Why are you, why are you stopping short of what you said earlier? Off camera, all of it. Oh, same thing. They could be a contender in the Eastern conference. Like they could be young, the combination of young and dumb enough

and tough enough to surprise somebody. Because let's think about it for a second. You're the Boston Celtics, right? What did the Boston Celtics really beat in the Eastern Conference last year? I'll help you out. No body. OK, nobody. So if they run into a tough opponent in the second round that's pushing back on them and can score the way this piston seems can score. I don't know. I think they got shot.

No, yeah, I can't believe contenders. Can you make it to the conference finals? Right? Can you be in the NBA's final four in the East? You got to be one or two teams to get to their conference finals, the cabs or the Celtics. There's no way you can avoid it. Barring everybody getting like, you know, malaria or something and missing time. And as a result, you waltz through kind of like the Celticsics last year. So I, this team is nowhere near able to compete with either of those teams. What's missing and what's missing. How about being to the playoffs before just experience. Okay. Yeah. Like you got to trust Tim Hardaway Jr and Malik Beasley, Tobias Harris, to be like the leaders of this thing. Come with me guys that have never been anywhere near meaningful basketball

before. I'll show you the way that's not reminds me of the team of the Dwayne Wade's rookie year where he was the star, um, even though they didn't really know it as much. Um, the K is leading the way and it's just a quality group around him that can, you know, play today's basketball and that he team losing the first round, second round, second round to the Pacers in six games. And that was a Pacers team that was supposed to go far in those playoffs. I'm not saying that that team was a contender necessarily. I'm just saying it reminds me of that team.

And if they would have beat the Pacers, wouldn't have been that crazy. Oh, and they would have beat the Pacers. Okay. What I could have should have. Is what we're doing over here. Uh, okay. So if I gave you, which team in the East has the best chance of knocking off one of the top two? I mean, if they're completely healthy, I'm going to say the Knicks because as you're, as you said, they've been there, we've seen it happen, but Pistons are right there. If not overtaking them, if you just look at the last half of the season,

Nick Spacer's bucks, I had them all better than the pistons in terms of playoff, but the pistons are getting there. They're getting there. Okay. All right. Let's do this. Let's play a little game called Centelle or central. Let's start with a sound bite and I'll explain. I was brushing my teeth and all my friends called me and they was like, yo, is this real? Is this real? It was like, uh, Coach Jenkins got fired. And my first time I was like, they probably saw like NBA sentel or something. All right. So that was G.G. Jackson of the Memphis Grizzlies. Izzy, uh, he's explaining

to the people who don't know that uh there's a parody site there's that hold on there's an aggregator site called nba central all they do is follow all the newsbreakers and then they repurpose their stuff into their own tweets well in the last year or so there's this web this uh thread called nba sentel so it's a misspelling of central and they do parodies of these kind of missives and for some reason people fall for it every single time even though because they do a great job with it because I've got no several times. Okay all right whatever all right so we played this before so what we'll do is we show a real tweet that's been posted by either Sun Central or Centelle

let's play. All right. First one up. What do we got? Says report Draymond green called Isaiah Stewart and advised him to try and direct his energy toward the wolves center. Next time is he, is this central or central? I mean, anything that involves Draymond green as a possibility, it feels like

central next time, cause I don't think he is purposely this time. Cause I don't think he is purposely going after a Rudy Gobert by proxy at this point. So yeah, I'm going to go sental on this one. The moment I said he called Isaiah Stewart, I knew it was sental. Give me, give it to me. What is it? Yeah. Come on guys. Come on. People falling for stuff like this. Incredible. All right. Second one we got here. Doc Rivers says he doesn't get enough credit for winning three games in the playoff series where he blew three one lead saying quote, no one tells a real story and I'm fine with that.

It's unfair in some ways. I don't get enough credit for getting the three wins. I get credit for losing. I always say what have we lost to Houston in six? No one cares. One of the things I'm proud of is we've never been swept. All the coaches have been swept in the playoffs. My team's achieved a lot of them overachieve.

And I'm very proud of that. Is he is this a real quote or is it sent out? It feels like it should be fake. But I've heard Doc Rivers say this or seen him say this now, not once, but twice, which is, I mean, it's odd that he's going to hang up a banner that says never been swept. I think that was that's something that probably should look into when he retires. But man, like the, I guess, just inability, the lack of awareness here to say this again,

not just once, but twice, because he's been, he's talked about this before. Um, it's, it's a little embarrassing and yeah, I think if you go into Doc Rivers' impression, it's probably the best way to answer this. Yeah, it's crazy because I did say this years ago when I was in Philly when we blew a 3-1 lead there today. In order to pull a 3-1 lead, you got to be good enough to get a 3-1 lead and I agree with them. But yes, this is a real quote, said it multiple times.

And here's another tell if you're wondering whether it's Centelle or Central. Centelle never has that much text. That's true. Wait to it. All right. Did I tell you which one? You know, the first one I got got with right, which is a quote from Anthony Edwards. It said, it feels like Julius Randers, Julius Randall's playing in jeans.

Yeah. That one seemed pretty real. I got got on that one. All right. Let's get another one up here. It says, Bronny James on why LeBron James should win MVP. I grew up in an era where the MVP always goes to the best player in the NBA. Now this ladies and gentlemen, this is a tough one because everything in me is he says there's no chance Bronnie would even

chime in on this, but if he were to chime in, I think that's what he would say. What do you think is he? I mean, he's if he were to chime in, and he did say that he would be probably lying, right? Because he grew up when his dad was winning MVP. And there's a couple of them that people think a couple more that people think should have gone to him and shouldn't have gone to somebody else like Derek Rose. And so yeah, he didn't grow up in an era where the best player got the MVP.

So I'm going to say this is sent tell I think Brian would have been all over the place if he said, yeah. Yeah, if it's not going crazy viral, you probably didn't have when it's trying to be doing the Will Ferrell meme or he's super pumped but not doing it very well I need to be a rogue. It's time to play Hot streak hot streak is presented by draft Kings draft Kings. The crown is yours This is the game where me and is he picked which game and the line off of the draft King sportsbook? And we try to figure out how many in the world we can get now

We had a nice little streak and then it got broken off But last week we picked the Clippers plus three and adverse to the Knicks. Well, the Clippers won by 13 points. That was a great pick by that means we're back on one and oh, we got to start somewhere with the streak. So let's stay hot. Here are some of the games we could choose from. We've got Rockets at Lakers. The Rockets are three games ahead of the Lakers in the standings. Lakers are five and five in their last 10. Rockets are coming off of a collecting of the suns. Yeah. We've got Celtics minus five at Grizzlies.

The Grizzlies are fresh off of firing their coach and they lost on Saturday against the Lakers. The Grizz also need every win they can to stay out of the play and didn't think that was an issue, but now it is. And we've got Bulls at Thunder. Thunder are 15 point favorites. Bulls have been red hot for the months of March, which is nine and five. Not really red hot, but red hot for them. Thunder have already clinched the number one seat out West.

Izzy, I give you all those games. Which one intrigues you the most? I like two teams. I like the Bulls. And I think I like the Rockets. But shocking. The Bulls, I think, just staying close within 15, even if they're getting blown out, might be able to score some points and just kind of keep it close. I think Rockets Lakers, I know the Rockets are on a back to back here and the Lakers

are desperate, but the Rockets have just been cleaning up and the defense has been spectacular. I don't see the Lakers doing much with that defense. I'm looking at Thunder Bulls. The Bulls have been a lot better. The Thunder have had some close ones. Now I know Jalen Williams and it's at home. We've missed a couple of those games, but the combination of they have it locked in and the Bulls playing well and plus 15 is so big.

I feel like you got to go Bulls here, right? All right. Let's put our money on the Chicago Bulls. All right. I've never said that before. Well, it's a new day ever since the banners got damaged. That's going to do it for us here at our ball. Izzy Michael Jordan called. He said, I'm still the greatest player of all time.

Lies.