Why the Grizzlies need Steven Adams healthy for the NBA Playoffs

The Memphis Grizzlies have looked different without Steven Adams. His screening and offensive rebounding could be key to a deep playoff run.

NBA role players are often best appreciated in their absence. The basic skills that make teams function, the gaps that seem to get filled on their own, can be hard to notice until it becomes glaringly obvious that something’s missing. When Steven Adams suffered a regular-season-ending right knee sprain in late January, it may not have struck most NBA fans as a devastating blow, but the Grizzlies have felt his absence in ways even they might not have imagined over the last two months.

When Adams went down on January 22, the Grizz were neck-and-neck with Denver for first place in the West, with the best defense, seventh-best offense and second-best net rating in the NBA. Even after finding its footing recently, Memphis is just 19-15 since then, with a borderline top-10 point differential and below-average offense. That isn’t entirely due to Adams’ injury — the Grizzlies have dealt with several forms of adversity this season — but losing him has visibly destabilized what was once a rock-solid foundation and revealed just how critical the veteran center is to a potential championship contender.

Burly, physical centers with lackluster scoring numbers tend to derive most of their value on defense, but it’s been the other end of the floor where Memphis has missed its big man most. Adams averages under nine points per game on below-average efficiency, doesn’t pose even a token threat as a floor-spacer, and creates close to none of his own shots; yet the Grizzlies scored over 120 points per 100 possessions — a rate that would tie the Kings for the best offense in the NBA — with Adams on the floor this season, and outscored teams by over 10 points per 100 in Adams’ minutes. Those figures partially reflect the fact that Adams gets to share the court with Ja Morant, Desmond Bane, and Jaren Jackson Jr., but he also drives a meaningful share of that success.

Despite his underwhelming individual numbers and team-dependent game, Adams subtly and consistently creates little advantages that collectively make a meaningful difference. Usually, he does this as a screener.

Steven Adams does all the little things to help the Grizzlies thrive on offense

Adams has ranked second in the NBA in screen assists each of the last two seasons, but even that doesn’t adequately capture his value in that role. Memphis’ offense is primarily designed to spring its guards open with on- and off-ball screens, which means the Grizzlies depend on Adams to help create space and collapse defenses. If an offensive possession is like a row of increasingly large dominoes and a shot attempt is the last one to fall, then screens are the small pieces that set the sequence into motion. A solid pick forces the defense a step or two out of position, which the offense can then leverage into a bigger advantage, which pulls the defense even further out of position, and so on, until an open shot materializes:

Adams gets no statistical credit for his work on that play, nor even touches the ball, yet he’s arguably as integral to its success as any other Grizzly. And while screening may be a more replaceable skill set than shooting, passing or ball-handling, only the NBA’s most rugged yeomen are willing to do the thankless work of absorbing contact, over and over, with no promise of individual gain. Adams often lays multiple battering picks on the same possession, each creating some critical opening for a teammate.

Adams isn’t quite the vertical threat he used to be in the pick-and-roll, but he can still punish defenses with floaters and, crucially, offensive rebounds. By setting hard screens and rolling to the front of the rim, Adams can stake out position on the offensive glass, where he inhales missed shots like a black hole.

His 20 percent offensive rebound rate would be the third-highest of all time for a single season, and as a team the Grizz pull in a whopping 37 percent of their own misses with him on the floor — well clear of Houston’s league-leading mark. But Memphis’ dominance on the offensive boards goes beyond Adams’ own rebounding numbers; he creates rebounding opportunities simply from the attention he attracts. In the same way great shooters create space by pulling defenders toward them, Adams’ gravitational pull on the boards often creates opportunities for his teammates to swoop in for second chances:

Those offensive boards earn the Grizzlies almost six additional second-chance points per 100 possessions with Adams on the court, which is particularly important for a team whose halfcourt offense tends to bog down against quality defenses.

Adams has also quietly developed into a savvy high-post facilitator, working clever handoff actions with shooters and slipping smooth backdoor passes to cutters as they flow around him:

Adams’ mini-renaissance in Memphis underscores a recent paradigm shift in the NBA. Whether it’s a stylistic market correction to the late 2010s or simply a reflection of the fact that more of the league’s best players are centers, the NBA landscape has become more accommodating to the “traditional” big man since the height of the spread pick-and-roll era.

Five years ago, this version of Adams would have been a borderline — if not outright — offensive liability; 3-point shooting had revolutionized the sport, and players who couldn’t create with the ball in their hands or space the floor could often be ignored. But as ball and player movement have become more central to modern offense and more teams have turned back toward offensive rebounding, conventional bigs like Adams, Kevon Looney and others now have more viable lanes in which to work.

Across the NBA, non-shooters are using passing, cutting, screening, ball-handling and decision-making to compensate for their weaknesses, and the decline of mismatch-hunting and isolations in the regular season generally gives role players more to do than just space the floor. No longer do teams allow defenders to sag off poor shooters without consequence; now, they take advantage of the space opponents give them.

Draymond Green, for instance, pioneered the now-common tactic of initiating dribble-handoffs when defenders ignored him, and most teams have weaponized the dunker spot as a safe haven for non-shooters. Centers facilitate from the middle of the floor and set screens away from the ball to keep defenses occupied, while athletic, non-shooting guards carve out niches as screener-cutters around shooters.

In many ways, Adams serves as a model of how lumbering centers can still succeed, even if their roles have changed drastically in recent decades. Those sorts of players may always leak some of their value in the postseason, when opponents more aggressively target slow defenders and exploit non-shooters, but they can still be vital in helping their teams get there.

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