The Memphis Grizzlies completed their long climb back to .500 last night with a convincing 107-93 victory over the visiting Washington Wizards. The win moved the team to 24-24 and only 1.5 games out of the final playoff slot. Chris Herrington was on the scene, and files a report at Beyond the Arc.
The Tigers’ four-game winning streak came to an abrupt end last night.
Frank Murtaugh has the details on the Tigers’ 85-70 loss to the Marshall Thundering Herd in Tiger Blue.
Now playing: Blue Valentine
The Lead: The Grizzlies completed their long march back to .500 with a rather thorough pounding of a Washington Wizards team that is now 0-23 on the road.
The Griz have been making a habit of blowing double-digit leads of late — I know, “of late” — most recently against the Toronto Raptors and New Jersey Nets last week. But not tonight. The Wizards held a two-point lead for a few seconds midway through the first quarter, amid five early ties, but then the Grizzlies built a multi-possession lead on a flurry of buckets from Darrell Arthur and Zach Randolph and never really let the Wizards back into the game.
After a 9-2 Wizards run cut the Grizzlies’ game-high 21-point lead to 14 early in the fourth quarter, instead of letting the momentum completely turn, the Grizzlies responded with run-stopping buckets from Sam Young and Marc Gasol and never let the Wizards get within single digits.
The Grizzlies got double-digit scoring from six players in a strong team-wide effort, that number not including O.J. Mayo, missing the second of 10 games to league suspension for violating the NBA’s drug policy, or Rudy Gay, who struggled through foul trouble and general ineffectiveness en route to season-low four points on 2-11 shooting.
“It’s nice to be back at .500,” Lionel Hollins said after the game. “We’ve been scratching and clawing. Stuttering and starting and stuttering.” The team was last at .500 back on November 8th, when a home win over the Phoenix Suns put the Grizzlies at 4-4. The team followed that game with a five-game losing streak that the culminated in a road loss to this same Washington Wizards team. Since then, the team had gotten to within two games of .500 six times without closing the deal. Now after winning five of its past six games to get back to even the team gets something of a clean slate, as Zach Randolph put it after the game, and a chance to build on this momentum and make a legitimate playoff push in the season’s final three months.
The Tigers’ four-game winning streak came to an abrupt end tonight in Huntington, West Virginia. The Marshall Thundering Herd — a team Memphis beat by 16 at FedExForum on January 15th — took a 17-point lead before halftime and the Tigers never got closer than five points in the second half. The loss drops the Tigers to 16-5, and 5-2 in Conference USA play. It was only Marshall’s second win in six C-USA games.
DeAndre Kane led the Herd with 20 points, while both Damier Pitts and Tirrell Baines had 17.
The Tigers missed 15 of 19 attempts from three-point range (with three of the field goals by Drew Barham). Will Barton led the Tigers with 20 points, followed by Tarik Black with 14.
Memphis returns to FedExForum Wednesday night to face Tulsa. Tip-off is at 6 p.m.
Once scheduled to be razed, the C&I bank building downtown will be the site of a groundbreaking for the Visible School on February 1st.
Lindsay Jones reports on the school’s plans in Fly-By.
Cortona, a contemporary Italian restaurant, is coming to Cooper-Young.
While looking through the dusty scrapbooks piled here and there in the Lauderdale Mansion, I chanced upon this grainy old photograph that was taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s, I believe, showing one of our family’s many trips to Maywood.
Of course, we had our own Olympic-sized pool at the Mansion, but sometimes we hopped in the gleaming new Hispano-Suiza (shown here) and journeyed down “old” Highway 78, to spend the day at “The Beach Within Reach.” I so clearly remember the gleaming white sand, the ice-cold water, and the adoring crowds that would surround our car as soon as we pulled up, hoping we would toss baskets of money their way.
As you can see, the Lauderdales were actually allowed to park on the beach itself, so we wouldn’t have to push our way through the regular folks to get to our reserved spot.
I can’t believe that woman in the foreground had the nerve to actually touch the Lauderdale limo, leaving her smeary fingerprints all over our chrome bumper! And look at the bold fellow in the back (a possible assassin, no doubt) reaching through the back window! It’s a good thing the chauffeur didn’t see these ruffians, or they would’ve been tossed into jail.
Oh, such happy, happy times!
During a tour of the Sharp solar-panel factory yesterday, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize winning U.S. Secretary of Energy, said innovation in technological manufacturing, “to use an expression,” is what we need “get back Americas groove.”
Chu concluded the Thursday afternoon address by raising the specter of a “Sputnik Moment,” a definitive Cold War image appropriated by President Obama in his State of the Union address. The U.S. has lost the lead in some key areas, he said, and in order to “get it back” we need many things, including a “nuclear renaissance.” He also said that to see solar power proliferate manufacturers have to reduce the price of their products by a factor of four.
The Sharp solar panel factory has added 300 jobs since 2007. This kind of manufacturing, Chu said, would be necessary to put Americans back to work in “well-paying jobs.”
The notion that black or white people will and should vote a certain way on charter surrender is simplistic, stupid, and wrong and these panelists know it.
Read more on Thursday night’s pro-schools-merger rally in John Branston’s City Beat.
And there’s video from Jackson Baker.