When Jaren Jackson Jr. heard about the Memphis Grizzlies’ new offense, he had some trepidation. It demanded that all five players move in concert, constantly working to maintain proper spacing, confuse help defenders and either create or maintain advantages. The whole thing sounded complicated.
“I thought it was difficult, actually,” Jackson, an All-Star big man, said. “It made a lot of sense, but I was like, ‘Damn.’ I felt like I was going to be thinking more than I was going to be playing.”
Scotty Pippen Jr. had concerns, too. The offense does not involve pick-and-rolls or dribble-handoffs, staples of the modern NBA. For a point guard like him, this seemed like a major adjustment.
“I would say at first I kind of didn’t think it would help me, honestly,” Pippen said. “I’m like, ‘I run a lot of pick-and-rolls, I’ve been doing that my whole career.'”
Pippen, who spent most of the offseason in Memphis, said the staff introduced it slowly over the summer.
“We had a couple film sessions,” Grizzlies guard Desmond Bane said. “I was away from the team a little bit, training in Texas, but yeah, I was watching film on it. I was like, ‘Hm, this is different.'” At the beginning of training camp, when the players were learning how they were supposed to cut and relocate, “it was a lot of thinking and thinking through and trying to find your spots or find what works for you,” Bane said. “But just like anything, it’s a process.”
Jackson hurt his hamstring on the first day of camp. His summertime workouts with assistant coach Erik Schmidt had been tailored to the new system — “I would just have a lot of people in them, so I’d know where people are cutting and passing,” he said — but, when he was finally supposed to be getting reps in with his teammates, he could only watch.
“I was just like in awe that they were remembering all the things we have to do,” Jackson said. “Because they’re so random. It’s situational.”
Ten years earlier, when Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr installed an offense that would give rise to a dynasty, players were initially “kicking the ball all over the gym,” according to then-GM Bob Myers, and “looking at Steve like he was out of his f—ing mind,” according to Draymond Green. In Memphis, the system is different — Green himself described it as “unconventional” and “weird” — but the goals are largely the same: to be more unpredictable, to relieve the stars from having to create against loaded-up defenses, to unleash the role players (as cutters, slashers and passers) and to generate more efficient shots. “What’s amazing to me,” TNT analyst Stan Van Gundy said, is that the Grizzlies have executed it well “pretty much from the get-go.” Forward John Konchar said it felt natural toward the end of training camp; Jackson found it relatively easy to fit in after his injury because his everybody else had it down.
Three-quarters of the way through the regular season, the Grizzlies have scored 118 points per 100 possessions, the sixth-best mark in the NBA. They’ve been crushing opponents on the boards and the break but, unlike recent iterations of the team, these strengths aren’t covering up glaring weaknesses. For the first time this era, the Grizzlies are making 3s at an above-average rate and, according to Cleaning The Glass, scoring at an above-average rate in the halfcourt.
“Everyone’s getting involved in the offense, everyone’s getting touches, everyone feels good,” Pippen said. “So it’s been working.”
‘We literally just cut out of the corner on every drive’
A few years ago, a YouTube video entitled “Why NBA Teams Should Study A School You’ve Never Heard Of” caught Van Gundy’s eye. He had, in fact, heard of the school.
“I recognized the gym,” Van Gundy said.
Before spending more than 20 years on NBA sidelines, Van Gundy coached at several small colleges. At Division III Castleton State in the 1980s, “one of our biggest rivals to go to the NAIA national tournament every year” was the school in the video: St. Joseph’s College of Maine.
The video, which is now nearing 2 million views, begins with an aerial shot of the Standish, Maine, campus on Sebago Lake, where kids go swimming in September and ice-fishing in January. Daniel Kawashima, who goes by Coach Daniel, tells viewers that this small, DIII college is “on the forefront of modern offensive basketball.”
Kawashima then cites stats from Synergy Sports: In 2018-19, St. Joe’s increased its offensive efficiency from 0.87 points per possession (40th percentile among DIII schools) the previous season to 1.06 per possession (99th percentile) without making major changes to its personnel. What changed, he explains, is that the Monks entirely ditched set plays, pick-and-rolls and DHOs. The new offense instead called for them to “operate on a wheel” — when one player drove or cut into space, every other player had to relocate.
In 2018, Rob Sanicola was heading into his 16th season as the head coach of St. Joe’s. In the previous decade, the Monks had experienced success, going 113-52 over a four-year stretch that included a conference championship, then fallen off, going 50-55 in the four years that followed. They were coming off a respectable season (16-10), but they’d been upset in the conference tournament. Sanicola felt it was time to do something different, so he conferred with Noah LaRoche, his former player.
A point guard at St. Joe’s in Sanicola’s first season as head coach, LaRoche was splitting his time between Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he’d founded Integrity Hoops, his basketball training and consulting company, and Los Angeles, where he prepped Wasserman’s draft prospects and worked with pros. He was already teaching his clients the concepts that would become the foundation of the St. Joe’s offense. In the fall, he stopped by some practices in Standish to help Sanicola teach the team a new way to play.
“It’s a motion offense that’s predicated on ball movement and player movement and this set of principles that they came up with,” William Armishaw, then an assistant coach at St. Joe’s, said.
It sounds preposterously simple: Drive left, move left; drive right, move right. The idea is, when one player penetrates the basket, he is taking the space in front of him and creating space behind him. If you think of the team as one organism, then this means its other players must move so it can maintain its shape.
St. Joe’s hunted layups and catch-and-shoot 3s, but not the way the Houston Rockets were doing it with James Harden handling the ball. “When you do this offense right, it’s like eight or nine passes with maybe three dribbles, but you get a layup out of it,” Armishaw said. After catching the ball, there was no stopping to survey the floor and size up your defender as the defense resets. This wasn’t natural to every player, but buy-in came quickly because shooters were getting clean looks and drivers were getting uncontested layups. After shooting 34.3% from deep the previous season, the Monks shot 43% (No. 1 in the nation among DIII schools), and after averaging 15.7 assists per game, they’d raised that figure to 22.2 (No. 2).
The offense “makes people think quicker,” Armishaw said. If you receive a kickout pass, you can either shoot the ball or swing it, but not drive (because the initial driver needs time to relocate) — whenever there were back-to-back drives in practice, a coach would blow the whistle and call the play dead. If you’re in the corner and a ballhandler dribbles toward you, it’s not a cue to move toward him for a DHO, but to cut to the basket, where you might find an easy two points.
“For our league, we weren’t overly big, we weren’t overly athletic,” Armishaw said, but in one game against Johnson & Wales, St. Joe’s scored 70 points in the paint. “We literally just cut out of the corner on every drive. It was unreal.”
‘An invasion sport’
Kawashima, who interned for Integrity Hoops in L.A. and assisted LaRoche with workouts in 2018 and 2019, published his video making the case that NBA teams should study St. Joe’s in September 2019. It was not immediately clear, though, that any actually would.
“It wasn’t like Stan Van Gundy made that video and was the one talking on it,” Armishaw said. “Had it ended up on ESPN or something, you might be like, ‘Wow, this is crazy.'”
Over time, though, the offense traveled. “I know some people sought out Noah at different levels,” Armishaw said, adding that he remembers Roger Williams University coach Mike Tully complimenting Sanicola at an early-season tournament in 2018. Tully spent time with LaRoche the following offseason, and Roger Williams has been running it ever since. In 2020-21, the University of Virginia experimented with it. Last summer, the Grizzlies hired LaRoche as an assistant coach and then hired Sanicola as an assistant coach with the Hustle, their G League affiliate.
For Memphis, it all started last spring, according to coach Taylor Jenkins. Injuries had forced the team to go through what he called a “development season” and, rather than waiting until the offseason to think about where the Grizzlies were going next, he wanted to get a head start. “We really wanted to take a look at basketball in general,” Jenkins said. Like Sanicola in Standish six years earlier, he was open to anything that could take his team to another level.
“We started thinking about other sports, and I started talking to other coaches,” Jenkins said. “I’ve probably been quoted talking about soccer and hockey. You just see the constant movement.”
Within the first two minutes of LaRoche’s February 2024 appearance on the “Slappin’ Glass” podcast, he describes basketball an “invasion sport” and says that, for all of the game’s complexities, “everything is about managing space, chasing space.” Later, he holds up the 2021 book “Football’s Five Principles of Play” and explains how the fundamental principles of soccer apply to basketball just the same.
“If you ask me, one thing that could enhance a team instantly, just one little quantum leap, is if they just pounded relocations,” LaRoche, whom the Grizzlies declined to make available for an interview for this story, says on the podcast. “When we get an advantage, no matter how we get it — off a screen, a cut or a drive — don’t stand. Chase space, relocate.”
As well as bringing in LaRoche and Sanicola, whom the Hustle declined to make available for an interview, Memphis hired Tuomas Iisalo, who taught similar concepts when coaching Paris Basketball last season, and Johnny Carpenter, who was on UVA’s staff when it tried the offense out. The team also hired Jack Hostetler, who led that 2018-19 St. Joe’s team in 3-point percentage (51.1%), as a Hustle assistant, reuniting him with his college coach.
“As I talked to new coaches that are on our staff, I think we unlocked a lot,” Jenkins said. “It seems complex, but to us it’s very simple. We’re going to have our pick-and-rolls built in there to create the advantage, but we’re always about, ‘How do we create our advantages? Speed of play, movement of play and just identifying where the space is.’ Because if you can take that space, the defense naturally has to react, and when they do, then we know where the other space is.”
Pippen, who is enjoying a breakout season, said that the offense has allowed him to find driving lanes, open 3s and opportunities to catch the ball against a defense that has already been compromised. “Now that we’re all on the same page,” he said, he knows instinctively where his teammates are going to be. At one point, he recalled, LaRoche approached him and said, “‘Look how well you’re playing, and you haven’t even added pick-and-rolls.'”
Konchar and forward Santi Aldama both attributed Memphis’ improved 3-point accuracy (it’s up to 38.4% on catch-and-shoot attempts after five consecutive seasons between 35.7% and 36.6%) to the system producing better looks. “Every player has benefited from it,” Konchar said. No one, perhaps, more than Jackson, who has been virtually unstoppable as a driver and, before spraining his ankle on Monday, looked like a lock to make his first All-NBA team.
The offense has allowed “Jaren to get his,” Grizzlies star Ja Morant said. “A lot of people normally try to sit in the paint, sit in the gaps with us. When everybody continues to move, it normally takes the help away. And that’s why he’s been one of the best iso scorers, as he has been this year, outside of the work he’s put in and who he is as a player. It’s just putting him in easier positions to go deliver.”
Jenkins praised Jackson’s “spatial awareness,” adding that the 25-year-old has “been at the forefront” of the team’s collective development. “We talk about being an invasion sport,” he said, and Jackson has gotten extremely comfortable chasing space.
The magic trick
No one is suggesting that the offense that went from Standish to Memphis is about to conquer the world and destroy pick-and-roll basketball forever. When the Grizzlies started running it, though, it was at least novel enough to catch opponents off guard.
“Early in the year it definitely was throwing teams off,” Pippen said. “We were getting a lot of wide-open backdoor layups.”
Konchar described it as “unorthodox,” given that most teams in the NBA “are dependent on screens, essentially,” to create their advantages. “It’s definitely different. No one’s really seen it before, I don’t think.”
Back at St. Joe’s, though, when Sanicola initially put the offense in, he’d show players clips of NBA players executing elements of it. Look, it seems crazy, he’d say, but Jayson Tatum made this read last night. The Boston Celtics were not running the whole offense, but if the Monks could see Tatum catching a swing pass, ripping away for a drive, then passing to a teammate filling the space behind him for a wide-open 3, they could see that their concepts worked at the highest level.
“The concepts themselves are not revolutionary,” Van Gundy said. Other teams have spacing and cutting rules, and it is not unusual to see a player cut and another player fill behind during an NBA game. Typically, though, “you’ll see that movement one time in a possession,” he said, whereas the Grizzlies will get “multiple drives, multiple cuts, multiple relocations on a possession,” which “breaks down the defense over time and creates bigger and bigger gaps to drive the ball into.” This is what’s “different than what everybody else is doing in the league.”
In 2007, Van Gundy famously turned the Orlando Magic into a title contender by starting Rashard Lewis at the 4 and maximizing their spacing around Dwight Howard, then the league’s most unstoppable roll man. “I was a pick-and-roll guy, so we had the guys spotted up in the corner and the whole thing,” he said. “And the biggest complaint I ran into with players — and I totally understand it — is, ‘Hey, I’m not worried about how many shots I get, but I want to be involved offensively. I don’t want to just stand around, I want to move, I want the ball to come to me.'”
Van Gundy empathized, but, generally speaking, spacing the floor was the priority. “One of the hardest things to do, designing an offense, is to get a combination of spacing and movement,” he said. “Movement makes it harder in some ways to keep the floor spaced because, you know, you’re running into each other.” Memphis has pulled a magic trick: By having everybody move, it does not have to sacrifice one for the other.
“They maintain their spacing while still getting movement,” Van Gundy said. “They’re not just standing around. That’s not an easy thing to achieve. I mean, it’s relatively easy to get good spacing if you’ve got two guys involved in the action and three guys’ job is basically to stand where they are. You can get that. And you can get movement if you’re not as concerned about spacing. But they’ve done both.”
To Grizzlies center Jay Huff, the offense is “radical in its simplicity.” Huff is the one player on the roster who had experience with it before the season, as he was at UVA when Tony Bennett’s staff dipped its toe in. Back then, Huff liked it and thought it suited his game, but “it wasn’t our system, per se,” he said. “Here, it’s our system — that’s what we do here.” This, he believes, is “the way to get the most out of it,” with allowances for “maybe the occasional screen-and-roll.”
Once you’ve internalized the system’s principles and the reads that are available to you, you’re “just playing basketball,” Huff said. The offense should appeal to purists, since, at its core, it’s five players working together, reading and reacting.
Huff and his father, a longtime high school coach, have “had many conversations about this: Basketball in its purest form can be the best team sport there is because everybody does everything,” he said. “It’s not like one person stays on offense, one person stays on defense or anything like that. You all have to run up and down the court.” And in this particular offense, everybody has to be in sync.
Initially, the challenge for Memphis was “just trusting each other to be in the right spots,” guard Luke Kennard said. For the offense to work, no one, including Kennard, who is leading the NBA in 3-point percentage (45.6%), can be stationary. “You kind of have to realize, ‘Oh, when something happens, I have to move,'” Huff said. “And it doesn’t always mean that you’re going to be the person that’s open. But you’re going to get somebody else open just by movement.”
‘You can’t really scout it’
In a way, the Grizzlies’ new style is represents an evolution, not a revolution. “They’ve always been an attacking team: Attack, attack, attack, attack, attack,” Van Gundy said. Now, in addition to running and offensive rebounding with ferocity, they’re cutting and relocating in the halfcourt with the same force.
“They’re going to get middle,” Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick told reporters earlier this season. “And they’re going to get into the wheel concept. And they’re going to mess you up when they get middle. And those guys just do it over and over again, on multiple times in a possession, multiple possessions in a row.”
Memphis’ commitment to its system can be seen as an extension of its commitment to being, in Jenkins’ words, the NBA’s “most intense-playing team” and “fastest-playing team.” Deemphasizing set plays and pick-and-rolls is a way to avoid slowing the game down. Moving in the halfcourt generally helps on the offensive glass, as it makes it tougher for opponents to box out. (The Grizzlies have also implemented Iisalo’s “tagging up” concept, which simultaneously allows them to send more players to the boards, prevent leak-outs and apply full-court pressure.)
After watching a play-call edit of Memphis’ 135-119 win against Brooklyn in December, Redick told reporters it was “literally transition, transition, random, transition, transition, random. They play a very specific way and it’s simultaneously predictable and unpredictable.” The downside of giving the players this much freedom, though, is that only five teams have a higher turnover rate than the Grizzlies. Pregame at Madison Square Garden in late January, Aldama said that they’d “struggled against some teams that have been more physical.” Then, against the New York Knicks’ physical defense, they proceeded to turn the ball over 26 times in a blowout loss, their sloppiest performance of the season.
“One of the reasons they’re a high-turnover team is you’re letting a lot of guys play with the ball in their hands and attack and make decisions,” Van Gundy said. “It’s not as easy as just saying, ‘My best player has the ball and he’s gonna make all the decisions and the other guys’ job is just to finish a play.'”
By running fewer pick-and-rolls and DHOs than any other team, Memphis has made it difficult for opponents to put two defenders on the ball against Morant and Jackson. The flip side, though, is that it means the Grizzlies might be missing opportunities to hunt favorable matchups. In their 132-130 loss against the Atlanta Hawks on Monday, they scored with elite efficiency despite Morant, Jackson and Aldama being on the shelf. Bane finished with 35 points and the first triple-double of his career, but, in the final seconds, lost the ball trying to drive against Dyson Daniels. The turnover, Bane’s fifth, led directly to Caris LeVert’s game-winning layup on the other end. It was Memphis’ third straight loss, all of them by two points or fewer.
At 38-23, the Grizzlies are now fourth in the West, two games behind the second-place Lakers in the loss column, and Jackson is considered “week-to-week.” In theory, though, their offense makes them more able to absorb absences to key players — Redick likened them to “vintage” San Antonio Spurs teams in this respect — and counter playoff defenses.
The beauty of the offense, Aldama said, is that “if I don’t know what I’m going to do, then you for sure won’t know and you can’t really scout it.” He added that he has “seen teams send us baseline, teams send us middle, teams overshift, teams not shift. I’ve seen teams try all different stuff.” Defenses can try to help against drives, but Memphis has spent all season making them pay with cuts and 3s.
Van Gundy said that the system is “made to have playoff success.” He added that, given that Memphis won 56 games and made it to the second round a few years ago, Jenkins deserves credit for changing things up. It takes “great humility,” Van Gundy said, “to say, ‘I like what this guy is doing, he knows that system better than I do, I’m bringing them in and letting them teach me and our team to run it.'”
Armishaw, now at UMass Boston in his 11th year as a DIII assistant coach, has never met Jenkins but, having seen Sanicola take a chance on this offense at St. Joe’s, he’s invested in its success and admires that Jenkins was willing to try it on a far bigger stage. Around Christmas, he and his fiancée sat on the couch and watched a Hustle game. For his birthday, his future mother-in-law gave him a Grizzlies hoodie.
“I’ll see a clip every now and then from one of the Memphis Hustle games, and I’ll pull it off Twitter and send it to Rob and I’ll be like, ‘Hey man, that looks familiar,'” Armishaw said. “And he’ll laugh.”