Memphis Grizzlies wing Jeremy Jones watches the ball during a 2025 NBA Summer League basketball game against the Portland Trail Blazers on Saturday, Jul. 12, 2025, at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, Nev. (Tyler Tjomsland / The Spokesman-Review)
LAS VEGAS – While recently working through a scouting report at NBA Summer League, Jeremy Jones made the mistake of shifting his eyes to the column where the Boston Celtics listed player birth dates.
“Everyone was born in the 2000s,” Jones recalled. “They had no one born in the 1990s, so that was kind of fun. I was like, oh, sheesh, I’m definitely the old guy.”
A thorough scan of all 31 Summer League rosters confirms that Jones, 29, was the fifth-oldest player participating in the annual Las Vegas showcase last month. Only two players, New York’s Yudai Baba and Sacramento’s Jon Elmore, were born prior to 1996.
“I’ve got a 27-year-old and a 26-year-old with me, so that helps,” Jones said. “We’re the old guys on the team that kind of hold everything together and that kind of stuff.”
Opportunities at Summer League don’t normally materialize for players with Jones’ age and professional experience, but the former Gonzaga forward had a unique connection to the Memphis Grizzlies, making him an easy call for Tuomas Iisalo when the new coach was building out the roster to compete in Salt Lake City and Las Vegas.
After leaving Gonzaga in 2019, Jones’ second professional stint overseas came with Crailsheim Merlins, a German team competing in the Basketball Bundesliga. Iisalo, a former Memphis Grizzlies assistant who replaced Taylor Jenkins as the organization’s head coach, was entering his final season as Crailsheim’s coach when the club signed Jones in 2020-21.
Five years later, Iisalo thought Jones’ background knowledge of the coach’s playing style and understanding of the culture he wanted to establish could be valuable for a younger crop of players who’d be suiting up and playing key roles for the Grizzlies in the regular season.
“Well, Jeremy Jones is one of the guys who’s actually played for me,” Iisalo said. “… He’s somebody who understands what we want to build culturally but he’s also a connector. Connector, I mean that in the sense that on the court he plays a role where he connects different actions to one another and he’s been very valuable in also teaching the young guys what we do in this situation and have that leadership. We felt like it was a great option for us.”
Jones recently signed a contract reuniting with Nagoya Fighting Eagles, a Japanese club he spent three seasons with before returning to his home state of Texas last season to play with the G League’s Rio Grande Valley Spurs.
Jones’ time with Memphis was ultimately short, but still meaningful for a variety of reasons. In the spring, Jeremy and wife Elle Tinkle Jones, a former GU women’s standout who now works and lives in Portland, gave birth to their first child, Jozey Jones.
Jozey was 3 months old when she traveled to Nevada to watch live basketball for the first time, catching Memphis’ Summer League opener against Boston and another game against the Portland Trail Blazers.
In a fortunate turn of events for the Jones family, Elle’s older sister Joslyn, a former Stanford player, recently took a coaching job with UNLV’s women’s basketball team after spending the 2024-25 season on Pepperdine’s staff. Joslyn gladly handled babysitting duties during Vegas Summer League when Jones needed extra rest on game nights.
“It’s been amazing,” Jones said. “Nothing like being a dad, for sure.”
Entering its seventh season, Jones’ professional basketball career has now traversed three continents and four countries. The forward averaged 14.7 points and 5.1 rebounds during his first stop with Bosco Bulls of the Austrian Basketball Superliga, but encountered some turbulence when he arrived in Germany to play for Iisalo and Crailsheim.
“Coming from Gonzaga, initially I thought that was the only right way to do things,” Jones said, “but when I played for him over there I learned a new way and didn’t realize there was multiple right ways to kind of play basketball and be successful.”
It was an eye-opening experience but equally rewarding one for Jones, who averaged 9.1 ppg but shot 43.1% from behind the arc – still his highest 3-point percentage as a pro.
“It’s just a completely new system,” Jones said. “Obviously at Gonzaga, I played with a lot of NBA players. I think I counted one time and it was like 12 to 13 NBA players, so opportunities on the floor were kind of limited there. But just still growing as a player that season and like I said, learning a completely new brand of basketball and kind of throwing my old rules and my old map away and just learning something new.”
To complicate matters, Jones was also grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic in a country he was unfamiliar with and simultaneously dealing with personal matters involving family members back home in the U.S.
“Going there and playing for him was like getting thrown into the deep end and you’re kind of drowning, but you’re getting the answers to the test while you’re drowning,” Jones said. “If you just listen and kind of work through it, then you start treading the water a little bit and next thing you know you’re swimming. I would say that was my favorite year, just because it was so tough and was beautiful.”
Jones averaged 3.4 ppg and 2.0 rpg in 14.1 mpg at Vegas Summer League, but put on an impressive outside shooting display in Salt Lake City, where the forward made 4 of 6 shots from the field and scored 12 points against the Philadelphia 76ers.
“I definitely have to stay level-headed because I have that game then I was 0 for 6 today, I was like 0 for 4, 0 for 5 from 3,” he said. “So just keep shooting and doing other things on the floor like defensively, rebounding, those kinds of stuff that don’t show up in the stat sheet.”
Jones’ leadership skills didn’t go unnoticed by his younger Memphis teammates.
“He’s a vet, man. In every sense of the word,” said guard Jahmai Mashack, a former Tennessee player selected by the Grizzlies in the second round of the 2025 Draft. “He’s really somebody who’s going to tell you what it is and whether it’s bad or whether it’s good, he’s going to play hard. He knows how to shoot the ball, which is great and helps the offense, but he really knows how to put guys in different areas.
“When he’s sitting on the bench or if he’s talking to somebody on the court, he knows how to kind of keep guys in certain areas. So shout out to him, he’s doing a great job, especially in the locker room.”
Jones still keeps in touch with most of his college teammates and keeps tabs on the Zags from afar. Johnathan Williams flew into Las Vegas to watch one of Jones’ games and the forward met up with Nigel Williams-Goss, a Vegas native, for dinner during his stay at Summer League.
The former Zag’s older brother, Christian, lives in Spokane and manages the 4AM clothing store that relocated to a new space inside River Park Square last year.
“We’re always supporting those guys, wishing them the best and just rooting for them,” Jones said. “It’s great to see, whether it’s successful or whether they’re going through hard times, as long as they’re playing Zag basketball we love it.”
Jones said there were no friendly wagers between himself between he and his wife when Gonzaga played Oregon State twice during WCC play. Elle was an All-WCC player at Gonzaga, but her father Wayne, a Ferris High graduate, has been the Beavers’ coach since 2014. The Zags and Beavers split their matchups in 2024-25, with OSU winning a 97-89 overtime thriller in Corvallis and GU winning 98-60 during a rematch in Spokane.
“I got some family ties now so I try to stay neutral, stay in my lane,” Jones laughed.
As for the odds that now four-month-old Jozey Jones will eventually follow in her parents’ footsteps – err, basketball sneakers?
“There will be a lot of pressure on her,” Jones said, “there will be a lot of pressure on her for sure.”