Player card
- Team/status: Memphis standard-roster core.
- Position: official roster label F; SG/SF eligibility varies by platform.
- Age/experience: 23 during the season; entering NBA Year 3.
- Depth role: projected starting wing, 24-minute base role.
- Medical: tendon avulsion fracture of the right great toe at Atlanta on 23 March 2026; season-ending stabilization surgery announced 29 March. Reported successful with a full recovery expected for the start of 2026-27, but no July clearance statement was recovered. Second consecutive season ended by a fracture. Hoops Rumors, 2026-03
- 2025-26: 69 GP/69 starts, 26.4 MPG; .431 FG, .784 FT, 1.9 3PM, 12.5 PTS, 3.2 REB, 1.6 AST, 0.9 STL, 0.1 BLK, 1.1 TO. ESPN stats, accessed 2026-07-18
2026-27 base projection
| GP | MPG | FG% (FGA) | FT% (FTA) | 3PM | PTS | REB | AST | STL | BLK | TO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 68 | 24 | .432 (9.3) | .790 (2.0) | 1.8 | 11.4 | 3.1 | 1.6 | 0.8 | 0.1 | 1.0 |
Correction 2026-07-18 Cut from 72 games at 26 minutes to 68 at 24. The prior line gave Wells the team's second-highest games total while carrying no medical discount at all, which was inconsistent with the toe surgery documented later in this same dossier. He has now had two consecutive seasons ended by fracture, and a great-toe tendon avulsion specifically compromises push-off and landing — the mechanical basis of both his three-point rhythm and his closeout defense. The minutes trim also reflects Clayton entering the base rotation. Full recovery is still the reported expectation; this is a haircut, not a downgrade of the role.
Nine-category: top 145-195 per game, usable for threes/steals without turnover damage. Points: lower ceiling because rebounds and assists remain modest. Dynasty: hold in deep leagues; a stable 3-and-D role is more likely than a high-usage breakout.
Range, strengths and risks
- Strengths: threes, wing steals, low turnovers and durable starting baseline.
- Liabilities: low assists, virtually no blocks and FG% risk on meaningful volume.
- Floor: Coward/Grant/Prosper compress the wing rotation and Wells becomes an 18-minute specialist.
- Base: repeats his starting workload and nearly identical counting line.
- Ceiling: shoots 38% from three, reaches 15 points and 1.2 steals in 30 minutes.
- Injury/transaction branches: a Grant trade or February buyout adds shots and minutes; a retained KCP or Murray would reduce secure minutes; a slow toe recovery costs him the first weeks of the season.
No current specialist projection with a defensible full 2026-27 line was recovered by the cut. The model therefore leans heavily on Wells's 69-start NBA baseline and treats any sophomore-to-junior leap as upside, not the median.
Confidence
| Component | Label | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Roster | High | Developmental starter on the official roster. |
| Minutes | Medium-high | 69 starts support continuity, but roster is crowded. |
| Rate | High | Large recent NBA sample and stable low-usage role. |
| Availability | Medium-low | Two consecutive seasons ended by fracture; season-ending toe surgery in March 2026 with no July clearance recovered. |
Sources
- Official Memphis roster — accessed 2026-07-18.
- Official Grizzlies season notes — 2025-26 team context.
Career record
Pre-NBA: three college seasons across two levels. Sonoma State (NCAA Division II, CCAA) for 2021-22 and 2022-23 — 12.6 points in 25 games as a freshman, then 22.4 points in 30 games as a sophomore, which won him CCAA Player of the Year. He transferred up to Washington State for 2023-24 and started 20 of 34 games at small forward, averaging 12.6 points, 4.6 rebounds, 1.2 assists and 0.5 steals on .436 from the field and .417 from three, earning All-Pac-12 honorable mention. The Division II-to-Pac-12 jump without an efficiency drop is the reason he was drafted at all. Sonoma State shooting splits are not verified here. Draft: 2024, second round, 39th overall, Memphis. Not traded on draft night; signed with the Grizzlies on July 6, 2024.
| Season | Age | Team | GP | MPG | PTS | REB | AST | STL | BLK | 3PM | FG% | FT% | TO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-25 | 21 | MEM | 79 | 25.9 | 10.4 | 3.4 | 1.7 | 0.6 | 0.1 | 1.7 | .425 | .822 | 0.9 |
| 2025-26 | 22 | MEM | 69 | 26.4 | 12.5 | 3.2 | 1.6 | 0.9 | 0.1 | 1.9 | .431 | .784 | 1.1 |
| Career | 148 | 26.1 | 11.4 | 3.3 | 1.7 | 0.7 | 0.1 | 1.8 | .428 | .801 | 1.0 |
He started 74 of 79 games as a rookie and all 69 in 2025-26. Three-point percentage was .352 in 2024-25 and .353 in 2025-26. NBA All-Rookie First Team in 2025, plus a Western Conference Rookie of the Month award during that season.
Fantasy history: only two seasons exist and neither produced a publicly verifiable season-end 9-category rank, so none is asserted here. The category shape is legible without one. Both years are the same player: roughly two threes, a useful wing steal rate that improved from 0.6 to 0.9, turnovers around 1.0 that actively help, and three columns — assists, blocks, field-goal percentage — that range from empty to slightly negative. That is a late-round category profile, not a standard-league one, and it belongs in the top-150-to-top-200 conversation rather than higher in 12-team formats. Points leagues treat him worse than categories do, because the low turnovers that earn him value in 9-cat are worth little there and he has no rebounding or playmaking volume to compensate. His only genuine fantasy edge is that he plays starter minutes on a low-usage line, which makes him a stable roster-filler rather than an upside bet.
Durability: GP by season — 79, 69. Both seasons ended early with a fracture. As a rookie he broke his right wrist in an April 8, 2025 game against Charlotte after a hard fall, which closed the season; he had already banked 79 games by then, so the injury cost him little statistically. 2025-26 is the one that matters: he sustained a tendon avulsion fracture in his right big toe in the March 23, 2026 game at Atlanta, and on March 29 Memphis announced season-ending surgery to stabilize the toe. The procedure was reported as successful and he was expected back for the start of 2026-27, but no timeline was published at the time and I found no July 2026 clearance statement. The 69-game season was not injury-free; it was truncated by surgery, and the availability grade and games projection above are set accordingly.
Trajectory: Two seasons is a short arc, and what it shows is consolidation rather than a leap. Minutes barely moved, 25.9 to 26.4, and the scoring gain from 10.4 to 12.5 came almost entirely from a modest usage bump rather than efficiency: field-goal percentage rose six-tenths of a point and three-point percentage was flat at .352 then .353. The real year-two improvement was defensive, with the steal rate climbing by half a steal per 36, which is consistent with a second-round rookie who arrived as a shooter and learned the scheme. Free-throw percentage fell from .822 to .784 on small volume, which is noise. At 23 he is young enough that a real leap remains available, but nothing in the per-36 trend has happened yet, and Memphis added wings — Coward, Grant, Prosper — who compete for exactly his minutes. The toe surgery is the live variable: a big-toe tendon avulsion affects push-off and landing, which is the mechanical basis of both his three-point rhythm and his closeout defense, and returning players from that specific injury frequently need a month of in-season shooting recalibration. Project the 2025-26 line as the median, treat the leap as upside, and discount the first few weeks of 2026-27.
Career sources: ESPN career stats, Wikipedia, Hoops Rumors on the toe surgery, March 2026, Washington State athletics profile
Open questions
- Does Wells start beside Coward, or become the first wing reserve?
- Can his FG% rise without losing three-point volume?