- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- Man of the Match: Reserve shooter Wayne Ellington
The Lead: How good are the Griz? That’s a question the entire National Basketball Association will be asking tomorrow. The Grizzlies led from buzzer to buzzer — by 27 when Lionel Hollins emptied his bench with 3:30 left to play — in dispatching the defending NBA champions in front of the season’s first sellout crowd.
The win moved the Grizzlies to 5-1, the second-best record and best point differential (+9.0) in the Western Conference. All those “power rankings” columns tomorrow morning should be a fun read for Grizzlies fans.
The Heat were showing signs of making a run in the fourth quarter, cutting what had been a 16-point Grizzlies lead early in the second half down to single digits when the Sequence of the Game ended their momentum: Jerryd Bayless streaked downcourt in transition to block a Ray Allen dunk attempt at the rim. Six seconds later, Rudy Gay, who corralled the rebound, sent a long pass to Wayne Ellington, who drained his sixth three-pointer of the night. The Heat called a timeout, the Gap Band blasted out of the arena speakers, and the game was never again in doubt.
This game promised to be a fascinating battle of radically different styles — the league’s fastest-flying, floor-spacing-est small-ball team versus one of the league’s biggest, baddest, most traditionally post-oriented attacks.
But that’s not what we got. With Heat bigs successfully fronting Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph, the Grizzlies could never get their inside game going consistently. Randolph again had a double-double (18 and 12) and Gasol got the team’s high-low action going enough to notch 6 assists, but overall Griz bigs managed only 24 points on 10-28 shooting.
