Not trading Tyreke Evans will hurt the Memphis Grizzlies

Other than everything that happened in Cleveland, the most surprising move of the day was one that didn’t happen: Tyreke Evans is still a member of the Memphis Grizzlies, for reasons that aren’t totally clear.

Rumor has it that Memphis was asking for a first-round pick all the way up to and through the buzzer and since first-rounders are like gold in this salary cap environment, no team was willing to give one up for Evans, who would just be a rental for the rest of the season. When talks deteriorated to the point where a first-round pick was no longer on the table, Memphis pulled out, leaving them with Evans on essentially the same rental other teams would have paid a second-round pick to obtain.

For this season, the Grizzlies find themselves in an interesting position. Shutting down their veterans and chasing a top draft pick to pair with their core of Mike Conley and Marc Gasol is the most prudent move for the long-term health of the franchise, but Evans’ career year has slightly impeded that vision. The race to the bottom is very tight among more than a half dozen teams and the extra value Evans brings isn’t just useless for Memphis, it’s actively harmful for where they need to be this year. Whether the Grizzlies wanted to stick to their guns on their demands or not is irrelevant now that nobody has acquiesced to those demands and they’re stuck with Evans for the remainder of the year.

Usually when a bad team decides against trading an expiring player having a good year, it’s because they have hopes of re-signing him over the summer. Evans signed a one-year contract last summer, which gives very little flexibility to Memphis to re-sign him this summer without dipping into their mid-level exception, which plenty of other teams will have and doesn’t give them any inside edge to bring him back. With Conley, Gasol, and Chandler Parsons on the books, they’re not getting far enough under the cap to spend cap space on Evans, so they’re stuck offering the same contract everybody else is offering, only their situation is far worse than what a handful of contenders may offer.

So, any present value the Grizzlies are getting is actually hurting them long-term and they won’t get any future value because of Evans’ unique contract situation. ESPN’s Zach Lowe reported less than an hour after the deadline that Denver was willing to give up Emmanuel Mudiay and a second-rounder or an expiring contract and two second-rounders, but Memphis was unwilling to budge off their position that Evans was worth a first-round pick.

Hopefully it was worth it for Memphis, because now they’re going to get nothing for him in the offseason and he may wind up costing them a spot or two in the lottery order.

Evans got his chance to shine in Memphis due to injuries to their two highest-paid players, but when it came time to cash in on his great season, the Grizzlies didn’t get it done and cost themselves multiple draft picks as a result, with no future value to speak of this summer. Whether the Grizzlies have visions of contending next year or want to trigger a rebuild, those two extra picks they didn’t take from Denver are absolutely going to be more valuable to them than whatever Evans gives them over the next two months.

Next: The Encyclopedia of Modern Moves

A contender needs cheap talent to fill out the back end of the roster and a rebuilding team wants as many bites at the draft apple as they can get in order to find the one or two second-rounders who shine each year. Just ask their potential trading partner, who unearthed Nikola Jokic in the second round and are well on their way to Western Conference contention with a team built around him. Memphis won’t have two extra bites at that apple because they held out for too much for a guy who is walking at the end of the season anyway.