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The first domino in the point guard market fell on Wednesday when Trae Young was traded. The second now appears to be wobbling. According to ESPN, the Memphis Grizzlies are now seriously considering trading former All-Star Ja Morant, a stark change in their stance from earlier this season and last year, when general manager Zach Kleiman stated emphatically "we are not trading Ja."

A Morant trade comes with many of the same complications that the Young trade did. The NBA is moving away from small, expensive and defensively deficient point guards. At least Young had only one year left on his contract. Morant has two. Young's off-ball effort has been minimal, but he at least makes some 3-pointers. Morant is shooting 20.8% from 3-point range this season, and on a career-high 1.9 mid-range looks per game, he's hitting just 37.1% of his shots. Couple that with his declining rim frequency and rim field goal percentage, his always problematic defense and the many off-court issues he's had and his trade value is at an all-time low.

But is it as low as Young's was? Atlanta was forced to trade its big-name point guard for nothing more than cap relief. That was a function of his market. The Wizards were the only team known to be interested in Young. According to ESPN, multiple teams are pursuing Morant in a trade. With a wider market, the Grizzlies will at least have some negotiating power. They won't get a haul back for Morant, but for now at least, it seems as though they'll be able to drum up some positive value.

So what would a deal look like? Let's put some mock deals together to try to find out.

Ja Morant next team odds: Which teams are favored to land star Grizzlies guard in possible trade?
Brandon Gustafson
Ja Morant next team odds: Which teams are favored to land star Grizzlies guard in possible trade?

Morant to the Wolves

The core difficulty in getting Morant to Minnesota is that one of their three primary big men has to be in the deal for financial purposes. Rudy Gobert is playing at a Defensive Player of the Year level, and Minnesota's defense falls off of a cliff whenever he rests. They simply aren't a viable contender without him. Julius Randle is five years older than Naz Reid and about $9 million more expensive this season, so he'd be far harder to trade. That makes Reid the likeliest trade piece of the three, but between Jaren Jackson Jr. and Santi Aldama, the Grizzlies are set when it comes to shooting big men. We're going to need to loop in a third team.

How about Indiana? The Pacers want a shooting big man to replace Myles Turner. In Bennedict Mathurin, they have an up-and-coming scoring wing who's headed for restricted free agency and may want more money than they are in a position to give him. So in this deal, the Pacers find their shooting big in exchange for a player they may not be able to keep anyway, and get four more years of cost control in the process. They need to take back Bones Hyland for the deal to work financially for Minnesota, and that would take them over the tax line, but that's solvable problem. Just pay someone else to take Hyland or make a follow-up trade elsewhere.

Minnesota also has a young scorer to send Memphis in Rob Dillingham. He's struggled to find traction with the contending Wolves, but a rebuilding Memphis team would be able to give him more consistent minutes and shots. A Mike Conley homecoming is just the cherry on top here.

So we have a basic deal construct. The question then becomes, should Minnesota pull the trigger? The Timberwolves already rank seventh in offense. Their rim offense is right around where it usually falls: good, not great. Maybe Morant could get them to great. He'd also probably disturb their spacing, especially with Reid gone. He wouldn't help their defense, but it's not as though they'd be giving up core defenders to make this deal work. Minnesota has been linked to every big-name point guard on the market. There's clearly a need for a bit more playmaking. If nothing else, it would be nice to have another ball-handler to help address some of their late-game misadventures. 

Tim Connelly loves high-risk, high-reward trades. How many general managers would give up Karl-Anthony Towns after the best season in franchise history? If this trade goes south, it may well kill the Anthony Edwards era in Minnesota. Reid and Dillingham are young enough to be long-term fixtures in Minnesota. Without them and the draft picks they've traded to build this team, the Timberwolves would be painfully limited in their ability to retool if they ever needed to. But they also weren't especially close to the Thunder in last year's Western Conference finals. The Spurs and Rockets are coming on now, and it's only a matter of time before Luka Dončić has the sort of supporting cast he needs to terrify them as he did in the Western Conference finals.

It comes down to this: do the Timberwolves believe that they are capable of winning the championship as currently constructed? If the answer is yes, they stand pat. If they think they need another talent infusion, something like this is worth consideration. It would either be the trade that got Edwards to the Finals or the one that drove him to his second team. There's really not much of an in-between.

Morant to the Kings

  • Kings get: Ja Morant, Ty Jerome
  • Grizzlies get: DeMar DeRozan, Malik Monk, Devin Carter, 2027 first-round pick (top-8 protected in 2027, top-4 protected in 2028, unprotected in 2030)

The Kings are one of the teams that reportedly had interest in Morant earlier in the season. Has their thinking changed? At that point, they were potentially trying to salvage this season. Now they're 8-29. They made it known through the press that they weren't interested in Trae Young, but that might have had more to do with him as a player than their situation at large. Any logical observer would suggest the Kings should focus on rebuilding slowly. "Logical" is a word we rarely attach to the Kings.

Most of Sacramento's outgoing money is, frankly, bad. DeRozan is partially guaranteed for next season, but the Grizzlies aren't going to want to pay him. The Kings canvassed the league over the summer trying to move Malik Monk and failed. With two more guaranteed years on a contract out of line with where the league is going on his archetype of all-offense sixth men, the Grizzlies likely wouldn't be all that eager to take him either. Devin Carter is a nice enticement. Ask Tyrese Haliburton about the upside of trading for a recent Kings lottery pick. But he's not enough. Memphis would need a reasonably valuable first-round pick to consider this.

Sacramento's ultra-valuable 2026 first-round pick is a nonstarter. Aside from the Pelicans-Bucks pick that's owed to Atlanta this year, you could argue Sacramento's 2026 pick is the single most valuable existing draft pick in basketball. They aren't giving up their chance at this year's top prospects, and there's no protection formula that makes much sense given where the Kings are. Besides, the Grizzlies already have two 2026 first-round picks. They can wait.

So here's the compromise we'll come to. The Kings will send their 2027 first-round pick to the Grizzlies. That pick will carry a top-eight protection. If the Kings are good, as they'd surely hope to be with Morant, that pick will convey next June and that will be the end of it. If the Kings... well... continue to King... they'll keep their pick in 2027, but the protection gets cut in half in 2028 and disappears completely in 2029. In other words, the Kings would be betting on their own competence. The Grizzlies would be betting against it. History has smiled on teams that have shorted the Kings of the past few decades, but between Morant, the players still left in the building and that incoming high 2026 pick, there's just enough reason for optimism here to hope this wouldn't end catastrophically for the Kings.

Morant to the Raptors

This is, functionally, a challenge trade. Quickley makes slightly less money, but has one more year on his contract. He has never been an All-Star like Morant, but he does all of the things that Morant doesn't. He's a competent defender. He makes 3s consistently. He's a generally low-maintenance player. Both sides would be betting that the player they're acquiring is more valuable than the one they're giving up, and it would take a few years to figure out who was right.

The fit, in both cases, raises questions. Toronto already ranks 24th in the NBA in 3-point attempt rate and 22nd in 3-point percentage. A guard who can't shoot isn't exactly an ideal fit on a roster with Scottie Barnes, whose shooting has swung wildly throughout his career, and Jakob Poeltl, a center who has attempted seven 3s in his entire career. Toronto's No. 3-ranked defense could integrate Morant comfortably enough, but its pass-heavy, egalitarian offense is a more questionable fit. Having Morant as a secondary creator for bench lineups wouldn't mean all that much either. The Raptors already have one of the NBA's best benches.

Meanwhile, the Grizzlies would be signing up for purgatory. Quickley is good enough to keep them competitive in the short term, but with Jaren Jackson Jr. having a down year, there's no one of the current roster even in the All-Star conversation. You couldn't tank. You couldn't rebuild. You'd just be waiting around hoping that one of the young guys or a yet-to-be-determined draft pick pops. That's not a crazy bet for the Grizzlies, specifically. Few teams draft as well as they do. Cedric Coward and Zach Edey have both flashed significant upside. But when the Hawks traded Young, they did it with a clear plan to clear money they could redirect in the near future. 

This move would be the opposite of that. It would only work if the Grizzlies actually wanted Quickley, and it's not clear why they would unless they're absolutely determined to move off of Morant and have no other options. As badly as the Raptors need a talent boost, there are just more sensible ways to go about it than this. Don't count the Raptors as especially likely, but until they actually make their big swing, whatever it is, they're going to be linked to trades like this.

Morant to the Bucks

I cannot stress this enough: the Milwaukee Bucks should not trade for Ja Morant. Even at his best he addresses none of Milwaukee's actual flaws. They have Giannis Antetokounmpo! They don't need more rim pressure. They don't even need more scoring. They rank second in the NBA in effective field goal percentage. They're bad because they can't get stops and they can't rebound. They never get to the line, so maybe Morant could help there, and they obviously lack star power when Giannis is out, but there's way too much LeBron James-Russell Westbrook potential here for this sort of deal to make sense. Antetokounmpo is at his best with the ball in his hands and Morant can't function without it. Antetokounmpo laid out his vision for what he thinks the Bucks should be to Sam Amick recently, and the players he described didn't exactly sound like Morant.

But desperation makes strange bedfellows. The Bucks are 16-21 and need to take a big swing if they're going to have any hope of salvaging this season. They've been linked to a number of big names on the market. Zach LaVine. Michael Porter Jr. Virtually every bad contract under the sun. It's at least possible that they sense a buy-low opportunity with Morant and try to pounce.

Their future first-round picks are off of the table here. Those are untouchable until Antetokounmpo has actually signed a contract extension. They could potentially offer a swap involving their 2026 first-rounder as an enticement, but the Grizzlies and Bucks have the same record right now and Memphis would probably hope to get worse after making a trade like this, so there's not much there. That means the value for Memphis has to come from a player. The player with the most trade value on their roster outside of Antetokounmpo right now is Rollins, who is not only in the middle of a breakout season, but is locked up next year for only $4 million. He'd be a very nice get for Memphis.

Where would this leave the Bucks? Likely with a starting five of Morant, Kevin Porter Jr., A.J. Green, Antetokounmpo and Myles Turner. They would have three big salaries on their books and essentially no money leftover to use on depth thanks to the $20 million in dead money Damian Lillard left on their books for the next four-and-a-half years. They'll have three tradable first-round picks this offseason, but unless Morant or Turner is in the deal or they're trading for someone on a rookie deal, they'd have little matching salary available to swing for another big fish. So is that a team worth building? Probably not. But teams do strange things when they're backed into a corner. That's where the Bucks are right now.

Morant to the Suns

Does Phoenix want to take another ride on the superstar carousel in the middle of its feel-good season? It's slightly more palatable for them now than you'd suspect. Remember, Green has barely played this season. Richards and Hayes-Davis were just candidates to be dumped in order to duck the tax. If you can get Ja Morant without touching your actual rotation, it's worth considering. Phoenix has ranked 25th or lower in points in the paint for four consecutive seasons. If Morant can get to the basket in a new environment, that would actually address a real flaw here. 

Dillon Brooks played with him for years and would likely have some useful intel for the Suns on how he'd fit into their locker room. You'd hate to move breakout point guard Collin Gillespie to the bench, but there would still be plenty of backcourt minutes available. That's especially true if the Suns try to move Grayson Allen's contract in the near future. Given the tax crunch they were facing next summer with new deals looming for Gillespie, Mark Williams and Jordan Goodwin, that might have happened anyway. Making this deal now would make it harder for the Suns to duck this year's tax, as Richards and Hayes-Davis are their obvious candidates to be moved in order to do so. But this deal gets the Suns around $1.1 million below the line with 12 roster spots filled. Maybe a follow-up move could create enough wiggle room for them to fill out their roster while staying below the line.

The Memphis side of the equation is straightforward: are they interested in Jalen Green? If the answer is no, then there's no deal here. The Suns don't have tradable first-round picks and they've emphasized youth and athleticism enough that giving up their cheaper role players probably doesn't make sense. But Green is a former No. 2 overall pick. He played badly in the playoffs for Houston last year, but he's still a career 20-point scorer and one of the NBA's best athletes. Memphis has one of the best track records for player development in the NBA. Maybe they see something in him the rest of the league hasn't.