How Steven Adams’s Season-Ending Injury Impacts the Grizzlies’ Title Hopes

The veteran center was ruled out for the entire season with a knee injury, putting a serious dent in Memphis’s hopes of making a run to the NBA Finals.

Things were already set to be interesting for the Grizzlies, who will be without suspended star Ja Morant for 25 games to begin the season. Then, on Sunday, the club released a bit of news that legitimately might knock Memphis from contender status: Starting center Steven Adams, who missed the back half of last season with a right knee injury, will miss the entire 2023–24 season.

That might sound like an overreaction for a talented group like the Grizz, who still have reigning Defensive Player of the Year Jaren Jackson Jr., the ’21-22 Defensive Player of the Year in Marcus Smart and sharpshooter Desmond Bane. Memphis still managed to finish with 51 victories—second-best in the West after Denver—last season despite having Adams missing 40 regular-season games and Morant sitting out 21 contests.

It’s easy enough to assume that little will be lost by simply sliding Jackson over into Adams’s role. But the structure of how Memphis goes about rebounding often looks wholly different depending on whether Adams is on the floor, particularly on offense.

The club’s offensive rebounding percentage last season with Adams on the floor was a whopping 36.7%, a rate that would easily rank as best in the league if it were the Grizzlies’ overall number. (Memphis has long thrived off the Kobe assists—short-range misses that are grabbed as offensive boards and put back for scores almost immediately—due to the overwhelming attention Morant receives around the hoop, and Adams has long been the best at converting those.)

Adams (left) averaged 8.6 points and a career-high 11.5 rebounds per game last season.  :: John Bazemore/AP

Without Adams, the team’s offensive rebounding percentage fell to 25.8%, which would have equated to one of the NBA’s five lowest marks. Some of that is due to the fact that Jackson plays as a floor-spacing big and isn’t always deep in the paint when the team’s shots go up. But even on the defensive end, Jackson isn’t necessarily the strongest rebounder, as we saw during the FIBA World Cup, where opposing teams took advantage of his inability to secure the ball.

Adams, more than most bigs in the league, truly does the dirty work on both ends of the floor. His physical nature through screening opens space on offense. It doesn’t help, either, that another big body in power forward Brandon Clarke—who tore his Achilles late last season—doesn’t have a timetable to return yet.

With Morant’s suspension, Adams and Clarke being out, Tyus Jones and Dillon Brooks being with different clubs, and Smart and Derrick Rose being newcomers, this season figures to be a bit of a whirlwind for the Grizzlies. 

Given that all these things in the flux and Adams is slated to miss the entirety of the campaign, it’s a bit more challenging now to see the Grizzlies truly contending for an NBA crown this season—even if they have managed to hang near the top of the standings with key injuries and off-court issues in the past couple of seasons.