The Lead: Even when the Grizzlies were a three-time playoff team, you rarely got the sense that the team had won a game through sheer talent disparity. But that was the case tonight. Even without Zach Randolph and on the night after a draining road victory against the Dallas Mavericks, the Grizzlies simply overwhelmed the Minnesota Timberwolves to start this game. With clear talent advantage at four of five positions (Kevin Love/Darrell Arthur the exception), the Grizzlies jumped out to a 25-5 lead eight minutes into the game, every point coming from the paint, the free-throw line, or beyond the arc.
Whenever the team’s core starters were on the floor and decided to focus, the Grizzlies hammered the Wolves tonight. Look at these plus/minus numbers for the game: Rudy Gay (+30), Marc Gasol (+31), O.J. Mayo (+26), Mike Conley (+27).
The downside was that the team, never really feeling threatened, seemed to grow complacent whenever the lead would grow close to 20. After that 25-5 start, the Wolves went on a 7-0 run to cut it to 13, rookie Nikola Pekovic doing most of the damage. The lead seesawed between 10 and 17 most the rest of the way. The Grizzlies didn’t get up to +20 again until midway through the fourth quarter, when they finally put the game away. A byproduct of allowing the Wolves a sliver of hope most of the game and still — especially with Arthur in the starting lineup — searching for consistent help off the bench was that the starters played an awful lot of minutes for a home “blowout” over a bad team: Gay played 44 minutes (after playing 44 against Dallas the previous night), Mayo 40, Conley 38. And after playing only 10 minutes in the first half due to foul trouble, Gasol played 21 straight in the second half.
A statistical indicator that the team probably got a little too comfortable tonight: The Grizzlies had more three-point attempts (20, although they did make 8 of them) than free-throw attempts (18). Did that ever happen last season?
