- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- Rudy Gay
Non-Griz deadlines on Tuesday necessitates a briefer-than-usual notebook:
The Lead: Let’s be honest, both of these teams were due for this. The Grizzlies hadn’t lost a regular-season home game since March. The Nuggets are a good team who got off to a rougher than expected start. Regression to the mean collided at FedExForum tonight.
With the Grizzlies playing their third game in four nights, the Nuggets younger legs and superior depth made this a game. For the first time all season for the Grizzlies, the outcome came down in final-minutes execution, which did not go well for the Grizzlies.
For starters, after having big vs. small match-ups go their way in multiple games last week, lineup imbalance worked against the Grizzlies tonight. The Nuggets played starting small forward Danilo Gallinari as a stretch four for most of the fourth quarters while the Grizzlies played small and Gallinari was able to drive and shoot his way to 9 points in the quarter. After the game, Lionel Hollins second-guessed the decision to stay big.
And the Grizzlies twice committed turnovers coming out of timeouts in the last minute. The most galling of these came with the Grizzlies down 93-92 and 46 seconds left in the game. Despite having a size mismatch on the post — and, admittedly, Marc Gasol had turned the ball over on an offensive foul on the previous possession — the Grizzlies chose to isolate Rudy Gay, who was being covered by Andre Iguodala, one of the two or three best perimeter defenders in the league. Gay was bottled up, picked up his dribble, and lost it trying to pass out.
