Zach Kleiman didn’t want to talk about Dillon Brooks Sunday. Nobody likes to talk about break ups.
“I’ll hit on DB another day,” is the quote everybody latched onto.
It came after the Memphis Grizzlies General Manager spent a good chunk of time conceding “self-created distractions” hurt the franchise during the playoffs and throughout the season. It came after he talked of the team’s plans to take a different approach to trash talk moving forward.
Everybody in the room could read between the lines.
So what Kleiman would say about Brooks, when asked later why he wouldn’t speak about him, sounded a lot like goodbye.
“There’s so much really good stuff that Dillon has brought to the table for a long time. He’s been someone who has worked as hard as anyone on this group,” Kleiman said. “He set the tone for what we’ve been about defensively. He’s a really good person. I think a lot of the storylines that have come up just don’t get what Dillon is like if you sit down with him, have dinner with him and see what he’s like as a human being. But that’s all I got on Dillon for today, though.”
Brooks is not going to be back with the Grizzlies, and the way it’s playing out only further underscores how difficult Kleiman’s job will be this offseason.
Tuesday’s report from The Athletic, which claimed the Grizzlies told Brooks they aren’t going to re-sign him “under any circumstances” during their exit interview, wasn’t shocking. Except for the words used.
No, the Grizzlies did not leak this to the national media, even though they indeed have no plans to re-sign Brooks.
“Under any circumstances” makes no sense for them to put out there. A sign-and-trade with Brooks, however unlikely it may have already seemed, is (was?) an option for them to make the sort of move Kleiman intimated when he said the team intends to be “very aggressive” after a first-round flop against the Lakers.
“Under any circumstances” is, frankly, just not how this front office has operated over the past four years.
Story continues
But “under any circumstances” exacerbates the issue facing Kleiman in…
..
