Frank Murtaugh has a few thoughts on the Grizzlies’ post-season so far.
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Month: April 2013
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Grit & Grind Finds Its Groove
FedExForum will host an elimination game Friday night. It’s up to the Memphis Grizzlies and Los Angeles Clippers — playing Game 5 of their opening-round series Tuesday night in L.A. — to determine which team is teetering near the cliff of offseason blues. While the Grizzlies may have gained momentum by holding serve last week — tying the series at two games apiece — they’d do well to treat Tuesday night’s game with the kind of urgency normally reserved for a Game 7. I’d recommend an urgency just this side of desperation. Win and the Grindhouse may actually grow teeth Friday night. Chris Paul hasn’t seen hostile like he would at Third and Beale with his team’s season on the line. Lose and the Grindhouse will rock but only until the first, inevitable Clipper run. The Grizzlies want the reward of a Game 6 victory to be a second-round series, not a return to the Staples Center.
A few quick thoughts on the Grizzlies’ postseason to date:
• Much is made of the Clippers’ superior bench, and rightly so. There’s not a better quartet of guards in the NBA than Chris Paul, Chauncey Billups, Jamal Crawford, and Eric Bledsoe. Unspoken, though, in all the plaudits for L.A.’s pine brothers is the Grizzlies’ recipe for nullifying the advantage with their own starters’ play. And how. In Game 3, the Grizzlies’ starters outscored the Clippers’ starting five, 64-47 (and won the game by 12 points). Then Saturday in Game 4, the Griz starting five more than doubled the point total of their counterparts, 88-40. Give credit to a team’s bench when they outscore the starters, sure, but not when the result is a 21-point beat-down.
The Grizzlies have never had a playoff game with the trio of Zach Randolph (24 points, 9 rebounds), Marc Gasol (24 points, 13 rebounds), and Mike Conley (15 points, 13 assists) putting up the silly numbers they did last Saturday. If these totals are even approximated in Los Angeles, Memphis will come home with a 3-2 lead. And it won’t matter in the slightest how the Clipper bench performs.
• Familiarity and contempt. You know how this works. You probably feel the emotional cocktail every time Chris Paul has a conversation with an official. (In what other sport is a player allowed to put his arm around a game official and have a discussion?) But this year’s Griz-Clip series is compelling for how different the rosters actually are from those in last year’s seven-game tilt. Five Clippers who played at least 10 minutes in Game 4 this year did not play in Game 7 a year ago: Chauncey Billups, Jamal Crawford, Matt Barnes, Lamar Odom, and Ronny Turiaf. The same can be said of two Grizzlies: Tayshaun Prince and Darrell Arthur. (A third, Jerryd Bayless, was limited to 9:26 on the floor by the rather brilliant play of Conley.) The faces of the two franchises remain the same (Paul and Blake Griffin on one side, the Z-Bo/Gasol/Conley troika on the other). But this series is a rematch only on the surface.
• Hats off to Gasol for winning the Defensive Player of the Year award. There’s no such thing as a Memphis voting bloc when it comes to these trophies, so it feels especially gratifying to see one of the local team’s grinders get such national recognition. And check out this factoid, Griz Nation: Going back to the 2001-02 season, Memphis is the only NBA franchise that has featured a Rookie of the Year (Pau Gasol, 2002), Coach of the Year (Hubie Brown, 2004), Sixth Man Award (Mike Miller, 2006) and Defensive Player of the Year. Not a bad trophy case for a dozen years in downtown Memphis.
• Thomas Edison said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” I’m not going to guarantee that the winner of the Grizzlies-Clippers series is going to the NBA Finals. But I’ll say this: The Oklahoma City Thunder will not go to the Finals without Russell Westbrook. A new opportunity has presented itself with the season-ending injury to the Thunder’s All-NBA guard. So we get back to that sense of urgency (desperation?) for a Grizzlies team seeking a lengthy stay in these playoffs. Overalls would seem to go well with grit and grind, don’t you think?
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Beale Street Landing Looking for Restaurant
Score another one for Beale Street Landing and the Riverfront Development Corporation.
Last week, RDC director Benny Lendermon notified board members that restaurant operator Beale and Second Inc. “is no longer interested in pursuing the lease of the restaurant space at Beale Street Landing.” Beale and Second consists of Bud Chittom, Kevin Kane, and Charlie Ryan, who also own Blues City Cafe on Beale Street. The group was the only one to respond to an RDC request for restaurant proposals.
“Based on this discovery, Beale and Second Inc. should cease and desist all actives (sic) on the Beale Street Landing premises other than specific catering services that RDC may contract with you to perform,” the memo says.
“You should turn in the keys to the premises to our manager Jimmy Ogle. Any access to the premises to remove equipment or supplies belonging to you should be coordinated with Mr. Ogle. We are disappointed that this didn’t work out but certainly understand that you have to protect your financial interests.”
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“The Germane”
Work by Jared Small at David Lusk Gallery through May 16th.
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Dylan in Memphis
Read about Bob Dylan’s upcoming appearance in Memphis and other local music scoop at the Flyer‘s Local Beat.
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Southern Hot Wing Festival
Head downtown Sunday to enjoy the annual Southern Hot Wings Festival.
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Grizzlies Beat Clippers 104-83, Even Series
The Memphis Grizzlies, led by frontcourt stars Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol, beat the Los Angeles Clippers handily at FedExForum Saturday afternoon, evening their first-round playoff series at two games each and securing a Game 6 back in Memphis Friday night. Chris Herrington was on the scene.
- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- The Grizzlies evened up the series behind a dominant performance from their frontcourt stars.
The big trains from Memphis kept rumbling along Saturday afternoon at FedExForum, as Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol combined for 48 points and 22 rebounds on 61 percent shooting to lead the Grizzlies to a 104-83 victory over the Clippers that sends this series back to Los Angles tied at two games apiece.
Fitting their city’s pro wrestling heritage, this was a classic tag-team affair.
Randolph got it going early — in more ways than one. Randolph’s 16 points on 8-11 shooting in the first half came with 10 attempts at the rim. How has Randolph’s game transformed since his middling production in Los Angeles? Randolph credits the home-court eruption to “getting the ball in the right spots, being aggressive, going a little faster instead of waiting for the double team.”
Gasol echoed this, saying the team had to get Randolph the ball in the right spots instead of getting it to him in isolation situations and asking Randolph to simply go get shots.
In the second half, the team made a clear choice to emphasize Gasol, and he responded with 18 points and 6 rebounds on 7-9 shooting in the half, all of his second-half shots, in contrast to Randolph, coming on short or mid-range jumpers. Gasol’s three quick makes early in the third quarter helped keep the Clippers from building any kind of lead, and Gasol hit a couple of back-breakers later in the quarter: A 23-foot catch-and-shoot make off a Tayshaun Prince in-bounds pass, with .6 seconds on the shot clock, to tie the game at 60, and then a 13-foot baseline jumper off a Tony Wroten feed with .2 seconds on the clock to end the quarter and give the Grizzlies a two-possession lead going into the fourth. What does Gasol present to opposing defenders?, Randolph was asked later. “Trouble,” he responded.
And it wasn’t just Randolph and Gasol’s scoring. They combined for more offensive rebounds (seven) than the Clippers’ entire team (five). The most important sequence in the game might have come midway through the fourth, when Gasol contested Blake Griffin at the rim, forcing a miss, securing the defensive rebound, and starting a fastbreak that ended with a drop-down assist from Randolph to Tony Allen, who finished at the basket despite a Griffin foul and hit again from the line. The Grizzlies were up 10 at the time and the sequence made it a 13-point game with 7:14 to play instead of the 8-point game it might have been if Griffin had converted over Gasol. From that moment, the Grizzlies blew the game open.
The Grizzlies have now outscored the Clippers 380-370 through four games, but the series is tied and the Clippers maintain a homecourt advantage. For the Grizzlies, this may be a painful reminder of last spring, when the Grizzlies outscored the Clippers across seven games but were sent packing because of the failure to close out the close ones. Though Chris Paul’s fourth-quarter magic from Game 2 still has the series even, the Clippers have to be concerned about their downward trend. From their perspective, here’s how the series has gone: +21, +2, -12, -21.
“We haven’t accomplished anything yet,” Gasol said after the game. “But we’ve gotten a little bit better every game, and we have to continue to do that.”
Hannah Sayle has the news on the Corked Carrot, a new cupcake and wine bar, as well as Frost Bake Shop, set to open this summer.