Larry Kuzniewski
Mike Conley has not been himself all season.
Well, that was certainly an interesting way to end a basketball game. Last night against the Pistons, after grabbing a rebound and heading back the other way, Matt Barnes—with 1.1 seconds left on the clock, and a timeout or two left—did this:
OK. Sure. pic.twitter.com/iSMzLXBdex
— Hardwood Paroxysm (@HPbasketball) December 10, 2015
and it went in. It worked. The Grizzlies defended the ensuing Detroit possession and ran out the clock, and it worked. They won.
Now.
Was it lucky? Sure. Was it more than a little dangerous, and would everyone on earth probably still be ridiculing him if he’d missed it? It’s Matt Barnes. Of Course. But it went in. And the Grizzlies won. And have now won 2 out of their last 4 games (against the Suns and Pistons) on a last-second lob dunk and a half-court shot. The other two games, against the Spurs and Thunder, have been 20+ point blowouts. It’s a weird place to be.
Five Thoughts
★ What is going on with Mike Conley? He ended last night with 11 points and 8 assists, but that 11 points came on 4 of 13 shooting, he missed some wide open 3’s he usually hits, his defense of Reggie Jackson usually struggles but last night he got roasted more than once, and… it all adds up to a picture of a Conley who is struggling greatly as of late.
The Grizzlies have always gone as Conley and Marc Gasol have gone, and neither of them have been up to their usual standard—and now Gasol has an ankle injury to add to mobility problems he’s been having all season long—but the funk in which Conley has found himself in the first quarter of the season is far and away the worst he’s had in years. Makes one wonder whether the “contract year” stuff is getting to him—the same way it got to Gasol a little, even though he’d probably never admit to that—or whether there’s an undisclosed injury he’s struggling with, in much the same way that Courtney Lee was terrible for a month last year before everyone found out he was playing with a serious hand injury. Either way, it’s worth keeping an eye on.
[jump]
Larry Kuzniewski
Should Matt Barnes be getting Jeff Green’s minutes?
★ Game winning heroics aside, Matt Barnes should be in Jeff Green’s spot in the rotation. He’s a better player, period. He may not be as athletic, and may not get to the free throw line as much, but he’s a better outside shooter, plays better with the starters (which is to say, he knows how to contribute on both ends even when there are already two bigs on the floor), he’s a much better defender—and actually knows where he’s supposed to stand most of the time—and most importantly he fits in.
Lest I be accused of blind Jeff Green hatred—which I doubt is a real thing to begin with—I think Green has a place on this team and can contribute. I just think that place is “power forward with the smaller bench unit” and not “starting small forward,” and I think that’s borne out by the sample set of games we have going all the way back to the trade last year. Barnes is a better with with Lee and with Tony Allen. Give him Jeff Green’s minutes.
★ We were due for a Z-Bo game. Zach Randolph had 21 points and 16 rebounds, and shot 10-18 from the floor. Down the stretch, he was able to score seemingly at will, and even though the Grizzlies gave up some 3’s on the other end and struggled to close the gap until Barnes’ long bomb, just having Z-Bo on the floor doing what he does was a comfort. He might be aging, and his role might be diminishing, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still a jackin’ dude.
★ The Grizzlies “should” be on a four-game losing streak. They executed an ATO play perfectly to get the Jeff Green lob dunk that won them the Phoenix game on Sunday, and Matt Barnes hit a half court shot that 99 times out of 100 he shouldn’t have even taken to steal the win in Detroit last night. These are lucky plays that happened to work. Sometimes you need luck to go your way in the NBA season. If they hadn’t been able to grab these two games at the last second—literally the last second—the vibes around the team would be worse than they already are, inside the locker room and out. Sometimes luck is important.
★ Tony Allen had a better game. The last two games, really—OKC and Detroit—he’s been more active, and made some better plays, but he still just seems a little disengaged from what’s going on. Chris Vernon, yesterday on Twitter, promulgated the tried-and-true “play TA 25 minutes, win more games” axiom that’s been the case for the last five seasons, and it’s true that there’s a strong correlation between Allen’s minutes and the Grizzlies’ successes in seasons past, but…
Taken into account with the Grizzlies’ second-half collapse last year from the All-Star break until now, these kinds of games have been more the norm than the exception. Obviously he got up for the matchup against Golden State and dominated those games until he couldn’t run anymore because of an injury. But I’m not sure the “25 minute TA rule” still holds. I’m just not sure you can play him more than 25 minutes a night in the NBA anymore, not since people stopped guarding him altogether. So even when he has a better game last night—which he did, I wouldn’t deny that—you still have to wonder how the situation there is going to resolve itself. I honestly don’t know.
Clearly, if Conley isn’t playing well and Gasol isn’t moving well, and Jeff Green is out here with a net rating of -31.2 in Grizzlies’ losses—yes, he actually has a net rating of -31.2 in losses—Tony Allen is not the big issue limiting this team’s effectiveness. I’m interested to see whether Allen can turn a couple of good games into a foundation on which to build a decent stretch of season. That will be the test, I think. Can he get back to First Team All-Defense form?
Tweet of the Night
Presented without comment, after Barnes’ half-court prayer:
— Chase Lucas (@deepfriedcouch) December 10, 2015
Up Next
The Hornets, who are currently the #2 team in the improved Eastern Conference. They’re good. If there’s good news for the Grizzlies, it’s that Charlotte’s Al Jefferson just got handed a five-game suspension for violating the league’s substance policy (translation: he got in trouble for getting caught smoking pot three times), which means one of the toughest interior matchups of the year for them is now off the books. We’ll see which of these “second tier” teams the Grizzlies can beat and which ones they can’t, I guess.
