The Memphis Grizzlies dropped their first game of the season on Monday night, falling to the New Orleans Pelicans, but the result was almost secondary to what Ty Jerome did in it. The point guard poured in 40 points on 64% shooting, hitting five of his six attempts from 3-point range and seven of his eight free throws.
Jerome nearly dragged Memphis all the way back by himself. With the Grizzlies down 124-115 and 1:43 left in regulation, he produced a personal 9-0 run to force overtime before Memphis ultimately came up short.
The performance continued a stunning start to the season. Jerome scored 45 points against the Utah Jazz on opening night less than two weeks ago, and he is now averaging 28.3 points per game on 50/42/88 shooting splits, making him the league's sixth-leading scorer. It is far too early for any serious MVP conversation, but if one were held, Jerome would belong in it.
The obvious question is how a player who spent time in the G League is doing this. That chapter of his career, however, closed five years ago, and those paying attention have watched Jerome make steady leaps as his opportunities have grown. Nobody could have predicted a scoring explosion of this size, but the warning signs were there.
After spending his first four seasons moving between the Suns, Thunder and Warriors, Jerome broke through with Cleveland in the 2024-25 campaign. He averaged 12.5 points per game on 51/44 shooting splits, finished third in Sixth Man of the Year voting and emerged as a genuine go-to scorer in the playoffs. In the Cavaliers' first-round sweep of Miami, he averaged more than 16 points per game, made 10 of his 20 3-pointers and shot 51% overall, and in Game 1 he scored 16 of his 28 points in the fourth quarter on 6-of-7 shooting.
The deeper numbers from that season were even more revealing. Jerome averaged 22.7 points per 36 minutes, a better rate than Jamal Murray, Tyrese Haliburton and Jimmy Butler, among others. The only thing keeping him from being a 20-point scorer was his 19.9 minutes per night on a Cleveland roster that had Donovan Mitchell and Darius Garland ahead of him.
Memphis noticed, signing Jerome to a three-year, $28 million contract in the summer of 2025, a deal that now looks like the biggest non-rookie bargain in the league. A calf strain cost him the first three-plus months of last season and limited him to 15 games, but he scored 20 points in 20 minutes in his Grizzlies debut, then averaged 0.87 points per minute over the next six weeks. That matched Kawhi Leonard and ranked fourth in the league among players with at least 10 games.
This season, with his playing time up to 30 minutes per night and a 31.3% usage rate equal to Jalen Brunson's, Jerome is scoring 0.91 points per minute, the fourth-best mark in the league among players with at least 100 minutes. Per Synergy, he has ranked above the 90th percentile as both a pick-and-roll and isolation scorer going back to his Cleveland days. His current pace probably will not last, but it did not appear out of thin air. Jerome has always been extraordinarily skilled and a world-class shooter off the catch and off the dribble, and he is simply doing what he has always done, only now with far more minutes to do it.
