Tom Haberstroh Contributing writer Wed, October 28, 2026 at 2:22 PM UTC · 10 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Go ahead and build out your top-10 players in the league. You could start with scoring champs like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant. Perhaps dominant bigs suit your fancy like Nikola Jokić, Victor Wembanyama and Joel Embiid. Maybe go with chess grandmasters like LeBron James, Luka Dončić and Giannis Antetokounmpo. That's even before we get to ruthless bucket-getters like Jalen Brunson, Tyrese Maxey and Jayson Tatum.
That's 12. You can bet a host of other All-Stars would like a word, too.
But a name that you probably didn't submit is one that many advanced metrics loudly claim absolutely belongs in that top-10 conversation:
Ahead of the season — before the NBA announced Jerome as the Western Conference Player of the Week — Estimated Plus-Minus pegged the 29-year-old as the ninth-best offensive player in the league . DARKO was bullish too, ranking him 14th, ahead of future Hall of Famers like Durant and Antetokounmpo. This, despite Jerome not even ranking in the Top 100 lists for ESPN , The Ringer and CBS Sports . Surely, the calculators were glitching, right?
The Western Conference Player of the Week, Ty Jerome is averaging 29.8 points, 6.3 assists and just 1.8 turnovers for the 4-0 Grizzlies. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)
And then the season started. In Memphis' dominant opening night win over the Utah Jazz, Jerome scored 45 points , the most the franchise had ever seen in a season opener — a performance so captivating that he generated M-V-P chants from the FedEx Forum faithful.
Meet the most underrated player in the NBA who is leading the 4-0 Grizzlies and simultaneously pressure-testing the predictive value of all-in-one metrics.
Jerome doesn't look like your typical 30-point scorer. He can't dunk. At least he has never dunked in an NBA game. Or, it seems, at college. There was once a Reddit forum from his time with the Virginia Cavaliers that asked, "Have you ever seen Ty Jerome dunk?" It turned up … nothing.
His ground-bound 6-foot-5 frame hardly looks carved out of marble. He's not winning any foot races either.
And yet: no one can seem to stop him. Through four games, all wins, Jerome is averaging 29.8 points, 6.3 assists and just 1.8 turnovers. He is fully in his bag, slaloming through defenses with unpredictable deceleration and his signature impeccable touch.
There are scorers who sprinkle in floaters, and then there is Jerome. According to Sportradar tracking, Jerome has an NBA-high 29 floaters or "runners" this season, 10 more than the next-highest guy. When Jerome comes off a screen, he waits for the big man defender to retreat to the rim and wall off a lob to Jerome's big. That's when he poofs the ball into the air, and usually sees it fall into the cup. These are layups for him. He has made 59% of these floaters, which, actually, is a couple percentage ticks higher than your average NBA layup.
Jerome is driving defenses mad with his stop-and-go speed toggling. He is averaging 8.3 free throws per game, more than twice as many as he did last season. If you get your hand caught in the cookie jar, he'll draw a foul. Off balance and lean too much on him? Whistle.
In Monday's win over the Jazz, he got to the line "only" seven times and scored 15 points, a third of what Jerome dropped on opening night against the same team. After losing to Memphis a second time, Utah coach Will Hardy praised his team's defense on Jerome. Meanwhile, the Grizzlies scored 121 points per 100 possessions with Jerome on the floor — a rate on par with the best offense in the league. On a Jerome off night, the offense is still elite.
Taylor Snarr did. Guys like Jerome keep the former Utah Jazz analytics guru up at night.
The proprietor behind the DunksAndThrees.com analytics hub, Snarr designed his flagship metric Estimated Plus-Minus following his four-year stint with the Jazz as a way to help accurately predict NBA games ( it has shown to be the sharpest among the top advanced metrics) . Simply put, it blends a player's box score numbers with on-court/off-court data with fancy adjustments to account for teammate quality, injuries, substitutions and opponent quality while peppering in player-tracking data. It has been a go-to metric for analytically inclined writers and data-driven front offices who need a handy guide for player value.
Jerome has long been an outlier for EPM, the Salt Lake City-based data scientist says. The list of top weapons is a crowd of future Hall of Famers, and then there's Jerome, who has bounced around the league more than the basketball itself.
The former No. 24 pick in the 2019 draft was rerouted twice during the draft process, first from Philly to Boston and then eventually to Phoenix, where he lasted for only his rookie season. Traded in the Chris Paul deal of 2021, the Oklahoma City Thunder gave him a shot where he shuttled back and forth from OKC's G League team. In 2022, he was traded to the Houston Rockets and waived almost immediately. The Golden State Warriors picked him up and he played about half the season.
Jerome found what he thought was a trusty home in Cleveland. At the start of the 2024-25 season, his offensive output was rated in the 42nd percentile, or just below average. But then he took off. Unsustainably so. In fact, at the time, Snarr used Jerome as an example of the difference between EPM's two metrics, one that was backward looking ( how good has this player been? ) vs. one that had an eye to the future ( how good is this player going forward? ).
"Ty Jerome has shot 55% from 3, 66% from midrange this season--impressive! Will it continue? Not at those rates. He ranks 8 in Season EPM so far and 77 in EPM (up from 309!). EPM is optimized to measure real improvement."
In other words, Snarr's model wasn't totally convinced that Jerome's ultra hot start in 2024-25 was sustainable. But then he kept it up and then some. Jerome averaged a career-high 12.5 points off the bench for the top-seeded Cavs and finished third in the Sixth Man of the Year race.
Snarr was stunned at the results. Jerome began the season as a fringe player in the NBA. By the end of it, Snarr's model saw Jerome become an offensive weapon that ranked in the 95th percentile, among names like Anthony Edwards, LeBron James and James Harden. That was forward-looking, not just in the rear-view mirror.
Ty Jerome, a superstar offensive player? When I asked Snarr if he was worried about being wrong about Jerome he said, "Yes, absolutely," and admits he has lost sleep over the surging Memphis point guard. From time to time, outliers like Jerome have given Snarr the stare-at-the-ceiling treatment, causing him to question whether the algorithm needed to be tweaked. Snarr wondered if the model was missing something, as if Jerome's unique game was an illusory siren that EPM couldn't resist.
Snarr decided not to tinker with the model. That summer, the Grizzlies signed Jerome to a three-year, $27 million deal. A good deal for Jerome, who had struggled to catch on, but the salary was on par with someone who is a rotation player, not a singular offensive engine like Snarr's model had envisioned. Snarr was hopeful that Jerome could break out again even on a team that still had Ja Morant.
At the start of the 2025-26 season, Jerome suffered a severe calf injury that sidelined him until late January. But once he got back on the floor, Jerome was spectacular — as predicted. Grizzlies coach Tuomas Iisalo gushed about Jerome's game.
Jerome "doesn't look like the most explosive guy, but he gets to his spots on the floor because he reads so well the body language of not only his own defender but also the helping defenders," Iisalo said in February. "He's actually so good that he can manipulate [defenders] to get out of the space that he wants to create or get into the space that he wants to create for someone else."
On a languishing team, Jerome registered a whopping 31.3 points and 9 assists per 36 minutes. That was relief for Snarr; the EPM model seemed to be calibrated properly as Jerome was truly elite. A little too elite, perhaps, in the eyes of Memphis, which had already fallen 10 games below .500 by the time Jerome returned. Whether it was ping-pong optimization or injury management, Jerome went on to start 15 games last season, but never played more than 25 minutes and almost never played in consecutive games. With visions of the No. 1 pick in sight, the Grizzlies shut down Jerome with 11 games to go.
When Morant got traded this offseason, another Jerome test would finally come. The big one. He'd finally get to start and show what he can do running an NBA team, a role EPM had envisioned.
In the opening week of this season, Jerome has been every bit the offensive engine that Snarr's model had predicted over a year ago. According to Snarr, Jerome is a darling of EPM because he blends self-created, frequent and efficient scoring with the ability to make plays for teammates with low turnovers. "This," Snarr says, "is the typical statistical profile of offensive stars in EPM."
In Snarr's view, Jerome's analytical story reminds him of LaMelo Ball, who was rated as a superstar offensive player over the years by EPM although the wins didn't quite take off until halfway through last season. Snarr also believes Jerome echoes the early days of Nikola Jokić in Denver (though Snarr isn't predicting multiple MVPs for Jerome, who is almost 30 years old).
The advanced metrics saw Jokić in his rookie season as a future star, with EPM predecessors like box plus-minus and real plus-minus ranking Jokić among the most impactful players in the league. Yet Jokić fought for minutes with JJ Hickson and Jusuf Nurkić. We know how that story ended. The numbers were clairvoyant in their belief in Jokić's game.
Jerome has enjoyed a soft schedule with opponents like Utah (twice), Golden State and Sacramento. On Thursday, the Grizzlies will face a tougher test against a Portland team that is 3-0. But after years of futility and controversy in Memphis, Jerome has made Grizzlies fans believers again.
Leading one of the only three 4-0 teams in the NBA, Jerome has ascended higher than even EPM's rosy preseason projections. Jerome has now become the fifth -highest-rated offensive weapon in the game, vaulting past Kawhi Leonard, Tyrese Haliburton and, yes, LaMelo Ball. Overall, Snarr's predictive EPM places Jerome as the ninth-best player in the league with his defense taken into account — a guy major media outlets didn't have in their Top 100 weeks ago. With Western Conference Player of the Week honors to start the season, the accolades are finally coming in. If the numbers are to be trusted, the Ty Jerome experience is just getting started.
Source: Sports
0 Comments