The Portland Trail Blazers went star hunting, and somehow came back with Ja Morant.
In a move that came out of nowhere, Portland has acquired the Memphis Grizzlies guard in exchange for Jerami Grant and Kris Murray, ESPN’s Shams Charania reports. It’s the kind of blockbuster that makes you stop and reread it, because it feels like a gamble built on upside more than fit.
That’s the real issue here. Portland’s front office appears to be treating this as a low-risk swing at a high-end talent, a way to chip at the star power gap in the Western Conference. But the basketball fit raises immediate questions.
The Blazers spent the offseason trying to fix their shooting, and that need was made obvious in their playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs. GM Joe Cronin had pointed to floor spacing as a priority, and moving off Kris Murray fits that line of thinking. Swapping Grant for Morant, though, pushes the roster in the opposite direction.
Grant had been one of Portland’s steadiest spacing options during the rebuild, knocking down 38.9 percent of his three-pointers this past season. Morant, by contrast, is coming off the worst shooting year of his career, hitting just 23.5 percent from deep.
Age is not the problem here. Morant is 26, which lines up with Portland’s timeline.
The bigger concern is everything else. Injuries have wrecked his availability, and he has not played more than 50 games in any of the last three seasons.
The Blazers are clearly hoping a change of scenery can put his career back on track, but betting on a guard whose game leans so heavily on athleticism and whose body has already let him down is a risky play.
There are defensive concerns, too. Cronin had finally started to build a defensive identity in Portland, and that vision got reinforced last summer when the team moved on from the offense-first Anfernee Simons for the more versatile Jrue Holiday. Now the Blazers are talking about rolling out a backcourt of Damian Lillard and Ja Morant?
That’s where the confusion really sets in. Portland already had a roster that made it tough to see the final shape of the plan, and this summer could have gone in a number of different directions given all the flexibility the team had.
Morant doesn’t clarify the picture. He makes it murkier.
At the end of the day, it’s a trade of one bad contract for another. But Grant at least made more sense for this roster, and he had one less year left on his deal.
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