Grading Justise Winslow’s Memphis Grizzlies debut

Offensive grade: C-

When looking at the stat sheet, a “C-” as an overall offensive grade might actually be generous. But considering how long he has been sitting out of basketball, I figured we could excuse some early bricks. As I said before, he shot really, really poorly in the first half. I don’t want to type out the number again, so you’ll have to go back to the last slide if you want to see his shooting digits. Basically, he couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat.

His 3-point attempts were missing, his layups were missing, and each attempt looked even worse than the previous. But after he got past his initial nerves, he started to look more capable in a Grizzlies uniform.

He had a team-worst +/- of -23, but he was playing aggressively out on the court. After that rough first half, he would actually shoot the ball pretty well in the second, knocking down 3 of his next 5 attempts from the field, including a 3-pointer.

One part of his game that was not showcased on Saturday was the playmaking ability that we saw toward the end of his career with the Miami Heat. In his last two seasons in Miami, he averaged 4.3 and 4.0 assists respectively, giving us the idea that he could be a strong secondary ball handler for Ja Morant.

He finished the Saturday’s game with zero assists. This doesn’t mean that we didn’t see any strong passes, though. There were a few occasions where he rifled some balls through to his teammates, they just didn’t lead to buckets. Right now, there’s no reason to be worried, but this is a part of his game that everybody should be keeping a close eye on.