Last summer, Memphis Grizzlies general manager Zach Kleiman revamped former head coach Taylor Jenkins' coaching staff. Included in the revamp was the addition of their current head coach, Tuomas Iisalo, whom the Grizzlies outbid the Washington Wizards for to bring him over from Paris Basketball.
His time coaching in Paris was so impressive that ESPN's Brian Windhorst mentioned on a recent episode of The Hoop Collective that an NBA assistant coach went on a college tour and found out that many were studying his offensive sets from Paris Basketball. That is high praise for a coach who has yet to prove his effectiveness on the NBA level.
Iisalo won the EuroCup championship and EuroCup Coach of the Year as head coach of Paris Basketball the season before coming to Memphis. His offensive rating of 126.8 with Paris Basketball was the greatest of all time in any league, including the NBA. Now, he is the head coach of a team in a transition period, and he might be the key to them taking that next step to championship contention.
Iisalo is the key to the Grizzlies' success
The ultimate X-Factor to the Grizzlies' season is the head coach, who will be tasked with unlocking the team's best players at the same time. Too often during the Taylor Jenkins era, it felt like Ja Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr. rarely had great games together. If Ja had it going, Jaren was ineffective and vice versa.
Iisalo already unlocked Ja Morant's effectiveness as he had his best stretch of the regular season after Taylor Jenkins was fired in late March. However, due to Iisalo not being able to fully install is offense to its full extent, Jaren Jackson Jr. felt like he was in no-man's land during the latter part of the season. His usage rate dropped slightly from 29.9% under Jenkins to 27.9% under Iisalo, but without Desmond Bane this season, that number figures to go back up.
The Grizzlies adopted some of the fast-paced tempo that Iisalo likes to run on offense throughout last season, but the lack of pick-and-roll wasn't a part of his system at all before he took over as head coach. Now the team will have a full training camp to adapt to his methods, which they hope will be the difference between being a play-in team and making some real noise at the top of the Western Conference standings.