Three head coaching hires have been made this week, with none executing a coaching search outside of the team's building. The Sacramento Kings promoted interim head coach Doug Christie to head coach on May 1st, and the San Antonio Spurs and Memphis Grizzlies followed suit with their hirings of Mitch Johnson and Tuomas Iisalo, respectively.
With coaches like Mike Malone and Mike Brown available after being fired this season, the Grizzlies had options outside of the building to at least interview for their opening. However, the writing was on the wall for Memphis to promote Iisalo after general manager Zach Kleiman personally added him to former coach Taylor Jenkins' staff.
While the promotion wasn't a surprise internally, especially after an endorsement from Ja Morant at the team's exit interviews, the fanbase took to social media to vent their frustrations with the Grizzlies after not attempting a coaching search.
The Grizzlies didn't win over the fanbase with the Iisalo hire
The truth is, after ending the season falling from a top-two seed to the eighth seed, that was followed by a sweep in the first round of the playoffs, not much was going to excite Grizzlies fans at this time. However, the hiring of Iisalo brought a lot of backlash, with most wanting the team to bring in an experienced head coach.
Iisalo only coached nine regular season games and 15 games overall, including the play-in tournament and playoffs. After losing his first three games as the interim head coach, he finished the season winning four of their last six games at the helm before their 1-5 total postseason record between the play-in and playoff games.
Ja Morant's injuries in both their first play-in game against the Golden State Warriors and Game 3 in their first round playoff series against the Oklahoma City Thunder hampered Iisalo's first impression as a head coach of the team. Also, only having a limited amount of time with a team that was already sliding and had other injuries made it tough not to give him a chance going forward.
The fanbase's frustration mostly stems from Zach Kleiman's decision to add Iisalo to Jenkins' staff last summer with what seemed to be a plan to make him the head coach at some point. Grizzlies fans feel like he wasted a season with that decision and isn't doing due diligence with a full process to potentially add another coach.
While their frustrations are warranted, Tuomas Iisalo quickly gained the respect of the Grizzlies' best player and with his future set in Memphis, the fit made the most sense for the team at this point in time.