Ryan Saunders spent a few years in Denver, where he won a championship as part of Michael Malone’s Nuggets staff — but he was ousted in David Adelman’s postseason shake-up and now lands with the Memphis Grizzlies.
Saunders has been hired as the new lead assistant coach in Memphis, The Commercial Appeal reports. The 39-year-old will work for another coach who took over after a late-season firing and secured the full-time gig this summer, Tuomas Iisalo. The Finnish man is thought to be one of the best young minds in basketball. Iisalo and Saunders will work to take Ja Morant and the Grizz back to the top of the West, where they had been for a few years.
Memphis and Denver have had some strong battles over the last few years, and now the Grizzlies get a splash of championship experience from the Nuggets this offseason with the addition of Saunders and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who came over from Orlando in the Desmond Bane deal.
In Denver, Adelman has built out his first staff by changing things up quite a bit. He chose not to retain Saunders, Popeye Jones, Charles Klask and Stephen Graham, who all worked with him last year as assistants under Malone. Adelman has added Jared Dudley, J.J. Barea and Rodney Billups to the team — who either have deep ties to recent success in Dallas or to Colorado.
Saunders has a strong NBA lineage. He’s the son of former NBA coach Flip Saunders. Already, he’s been a member of three NBA teams as an assistant and, like his father, spent time as the head coach of Minnesota.
There were only a select few over the last decade who left town after having a behind-the-scenes look at how Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets did things. Denver’s staff had a remarkable amount of stability. That is no longer the case, with many in Nuggets Nation calling for this change. We’ll see if any of Joker’s tricks are more easily solvable by other teams now that some of them boast Denver’s best minds from the past few seasons.
