The number that ought to sting in Memphis isn't the 22 next to the Grizzlies in ESPN's new three-year future power rankings. It's 87. That's how many games Zach Edey has missed since Memphis took him ninth overall in 2024, and any honest Memphis Grizzlies injury news conversation has to start there, because a lottery big who can't stay on the floor doesn't only cost you his minutes. He costs you the information.

That's the part people skip. A rebuilding team's most valuable asset isn't cap space or a future first. It's knowing what you have. Two years in, Memphis still doesn't fully know.

Why has Zach Edey missed 87 games?

The count is the count: 87 games gone since draft night 2024. That's more than a full season of basketball evaporated from a player the Grizzlies invested a top-ten pick in, and it's the specific reason a national projection of where this franchise sits three years from now put Memphis 22nd instead of somewhere in the playoff-adjacent middle.

Understand what made the pick make sense in the first place. Edey came out of Purdue as a 7-foot-4 back-to-back national player of the year who dragged the Boilermakers to the 2024 national title game. Nobody questioned the production. The question was always whether that body would translate to an NBA schedule of 82 games, back-to-backs, and switch-everything defenses that force a giant to move sideways for 30 minutes a night. Availability was the swing variable on the entire projection. The swing variable swung.

checked the almanac: greg oden went first overall in 2007 and lost his entire rookie season to knee surgery, and portland spent years arguing about a player they'd barely seen. the arguing is the injury too.

What ESPN's three-year future power rankings say about Memphis

These lists are a read on direction, not on last season's record. They weigh roster, age curve, contracts, front office, ownership. Landing 22nd is a quiet way of saying the evaluators don't yet believe the retool has a second act, and when one of your two most recent high picks has spent more time in rehab than in rotations, it's hard to argue the point with anything except optimism.

I'd push back on one thing, though. Ranking a team's three-year outlook is a forecast dressed as a verdict, and forecasts about big men who arrive late are the single noisiest category in the sport. Edey is still young for a project of his particular size. A healthy training camp and 60 clean games rewrite this entire paragraph, and everybody who wrote him off gets to pretend they didn't. That's how it always goes.

I don't have the current medical picture in front of me, and I'm not going to invent one. What I have is 87.

What comes next for the Grizzlies

The thing worth tracking isn't the ranking. Rankings are weather. What matters is whether Edey gets a normal camp, a normal preseason, and a normal minutes ramp, because the Grizzlies have never actually had that with him. Every evaluation of his defense in space, his rim protection against real NBA speed, his stamina in a fourth quarter, all of it has been gathered in fragments between absences. You can't build a frontcourt plan on fragments.

Watch the ramp, not the hype. If he opens camp on a normal workload and Memphis isn't managing his nights out of the gate, the franchise gets back something it hasn't had in two years: a clean look at its own player. If the minutes are capped again, the 22 stops looking harsh and starts looking generous.

That's the whole story. One number, 87, doing more damage to a rebuild than any scouting report could.