Author: Kevin Lipe

This week on the show, Kevin and Phil talk about:

• Monday afternoon’s unprecedented media summit with Marc Gasol
• Did Gasol do the right thing by talking to everyone? Is there a “right” thing for him to do?
• Why are fans starting to turn on Marc, and are they right?
• A long discussion of Kevin’s piece about everything Marc had to say
• Should the Grizzlies tank the rest of the season? Do they have a choice?
• How many more games will they lose before Mike Conley returns, and how much will that help?

The Beyond the Arc podcast is available on iTunes, so you can subscribe there! It’d be great if you could rate and review the show while you’re there. You can also find and listen to the show on Stitcher and on PlayerFM.

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You can download the show here or listen below:

Larry Kuzniewski

It was a weird circumstance, not something that’s ever happened to me in the time I’ve spent covering this basketball team: a summons from Marc Gasol to FedExForum. He wanted to talk to a group of us. It’s no secret that he’s been in a harsh spotlight since former Grizzlies head coach David Fizdale was sent packing the afternoon after benching Gasol during the fourth quarter of a Sunday evening loss to Brooklyn. But Gasol is not a guy known for manipulating the media, and usually (even while he holds court with reporters after games to break down what the Grizzlies could’ve done better) he doesn’t draw this kind of attention to himself.

So why now? What’s different? What did he say, and why were we all there? And, at the end of the day, what could Marc Gasol have said that would make everything better? What do we want from this guy?

Fizdale

Larry Kuzniewski

First things first: the first part of the conversation was spent re-litigating the removal of David Fizdale as the head coach of the Grizzlies. I’m not really one of them, but several of my Memphis media colleagues view the Fizdale sitatuation as something for which Gasol needed to explain himself.

You can tell that the “coach killer” label bothers the guy, even when he says it doesn’t. The first week after David Fizdale’s firing was dominated by a conversation about the instability of the Grizzlies as an organization and by the fact that Marc Gasol didn’t get along with his former coach. The fact that Fizdale had benched Gasol for a fourth quarter seemed, for all intents and purposes, to have been the thing that triggered his removal. While there’s no question that the Brooklyn incident was what set that chain of events in motion, what most of the national conversation missed (though the local conversation was pretty consistent) was that Fizdale and Gasol hadn’t been getting along for months, and that the lack of communication to Gasol while he was asking to be put back in that Brooklyn game was the real indicator of how far that relationship had deteriorated, not necessarily the benching itself.

[jump]

Yesterday Gasol laid out where things went wrong for the first time between them: a loss to the Utah Jazz almost exactly a year ago, after which he says Fizdale blamed the loss on Gasol and on Mike Conley (the two of whom combined to shoot 7 for 38 from the field in that game, though Tony Allen was the only Grizzly to top .500 FG% in that game), the middle of a three-game losing streak. He didn’t think that was the right thing to do, or the right way to handle that situation. From there, Gasol said, everything went downhill. The two of them grew farther and farther apart.

“I don’t have to like everybody I work with,” Gasol said, explaining that eventually the two of them agreed that they needed to be professional and try to work together despite their differences, but Gasol still never went into why that didn’t happen. It’s clear that he doesn’t want to discuss the specifics of his issues with Fizdale, but he also (apparently) felt pinned down enough that he needed to make it clear that he did have issues and that they weren’t necessarily basketball-related.

The Core Four

Another thing about which Gasol was pretty candid was the Grizzlies’ decision not to bring back Zach Randolph and Tony Allen. It was hard, he said, harder than those of us gathered around the table could realize, without those two guys around. He didn’t pretend that they were perfect players, and he certainly didn’t claim that he wasn’t frustrated by them at times, but you could tell that—in hindsight—Z-Bo and TA brought something to the table that Marc now misses. Gasol was candid about how much he and Tony argued about blown coverages (which was the main source of friction between the two of them last year, as Allen gambled more and stayed home on his man even less than before), but…

Larry Kuzniewski

He said something that was interesting about the roster changes: he doesn’t regret signing his max deal with the Grizzlies without even taking a meeting with any other team. That squares with something he told me back when I profiled him in 2015: he was going to decide whether to stay with the Grizzlies, and only consider other options if that one didn’t work out. But to what was he making a commitment? Yesterday, he said it was to the city, sure, but also to the team. To the guys he’d been playing with. To what the Grizzlies—the guys in uniform—had built together. Two years later and he doesn’t even have Mike Conley to play with. He’s all alone with a bunch of young guys who don’t really fit with any of the things he likes to do on the court, and he’s having to teach them instead of just playing with them. It doesn’t sound like what he signed up for, at all, and he said as much. “But my commitment hasn’t changed,” he said. But would it?

Trade Demands

The fact is that Marc Gasol doesn’t have time to waste. He’s about to turn 33, he’s had a major foot injury that has ended the careers of other players his size, and he knows that the day when he has to quit playing basketball will come eventually. He’s watching his older brother play out some of the last years of his own career right now. That sense of basketball mortality clearly weighed on Gasol as he talked yesterday.

So what’s he going to do about being on a Grizzlies team that is struggling to keep its head above water? It sounds like, from the discussion yesterday, Gasol is still on board as long as the goal is to be good. He didn’t say it, but he didn’t not say it: he doesn’t want to stick around on a bad team. The Grizzlies, by all accounts, are a bad team right now, but that potential—that Conley could come back and they’d be right back in the hunt for a playoff spot—seems to be the thing that’s most prominently on his mind. If the playoffs were out of reach, and the Grizzlies decided to sit him so they could lose games and develop young guys, that would be burning time Gasol doesn’t have. He’s honest about that, and he’s also not wrong.

So right now he’s not going anywhere. But he was remarkably willing to be seen refusing to answer whether he’d ask for a trade if the situation changed. This is a guy who wants to play basketball. He’s obsessed with “doing his job” night in and night out, being a (major) cog in a basketball machine. He’s so Spursian that he even used the phrase “pounding the rock” yesterday. The thought of not playing when he has the chance to drives him crazy, which is why he’s played through abdominal tears, returned from an MCL sprain too soon, tried to rush back from a broken foot to play in the Olympics, and whatever else: this is a guy who cannot handle being left out of a basketball game. It’s why he was so deeply wounded by the Fizdale situation; that wasn’t fake bewilderment in the locker room that night. He couldn’t process why he hadn’t been allowed to do his job.

So what? Mike Conley’s injury status remains a mystery. The Grizzlies announced yesterday that there’d be another update in two weeks. (In late November they said they expected him back in two to three weeks, which is now off the table.) Brandan Wright and Wayne Selden are expected back soon. But is this team really going to be any good? Can they actually make the playoffs? In the only year where they might be able to score a lottery pick, should they make the playoffs?

These are all questions yet to be answered. But they’re weighing on Marc Gasol just as much as they’re weighing on the Grizzlies’ fans.

What Do We Want From Marc Gasol?

Marc Gasol has never been so controversial a figure. He pointed out yesterday that before he was a Grizzlies player, he was a Grizzlies fan. He talked about how hard it was for the team to fill the Pyramid when they were bad. He talked about how much it excited him to see the first playoff teams, and how the city got excited about them. What he most takes pride in is the way Memphis sees itself in the Grizzlies when things are going well. The way the team lifts up the whole city and says “We are playing for you.” Gasol, historically, has more Memphis ties than anybody else on the team. He’s not Zach Randolph, a symbol of the city himself, an adopted hero just like so many others, but he’s the guy who actually grew up here. He’s the former Tennessee “Mr. Basketball.” (Brandan Wright is, too, but I’m leaving Nashville out of this, as is right and proper.)

Marc Gasol, between high school in Memphis and the NBA in Memphis.

So what? What do we want from this man? What could Marc Gasol do to make the questions stop, to quiet the noise? He can’t go back in time and have a better relationship with David Fizdale. He’s not the guy who made this roster, and he emphatically refuses to even have a voice in those kinds of decisions. He’s not asking for a trade, and he’s been very open about the fact that he hasn’t been playing well, that he’s been in his own head, that he needs to develop patience, that he’s struggling to come to terms with how much the ground situation has changed around him over the last 24 months. We’re a long way from that “Memphian Of The Year” article. The 2015 Warriors series, in hindsight, was the last peak of the thing that we all (Memphis, the media, the world) thought would go on forever, even as we were writing about how it couldn’t.

After hearing Gasol empty his mind for an hour and nine minutes yesterday, and after sifting though the Rashomon-like differences in the takeaways from several people who were party to the same conversation, I’m still left with that question above all else. What do we want from this guy?

If he demands a trade because he doesn’t want to be on a bad team, he’ll become the bad guy, just like his brother was before. (Gasol artfully non-answered the question I asked him about what advice Pau has given him about how to handle this situation, with a Memphis press and Memphis fanbase slowly collecting pitchforks to be used at a later march on 191 Beale.) If he doesn’t demand a trade, it’s clear that he’s going to be stuck on a team that isn’t very good—at least for the rest of this season, if not for the next couple, and that seems like something that’s just as intolerable. He knows what this team means (or meant) to this city, and sounds genuinely bothered by the fact that that relationship is no longer what it was.

It’s the same on the court. Do we want him to be the dominant player who dropped 21 points in a quarter against the Celtics, and couldn’t even sit for two minutes without costing the Grizzlies a game? Do we want him to be the facilitating, assisting guy who makes his teammates better? Do we expect him to be the Defensive Player of the Year on a team without any good perimeter defenders in front of him? Because that’s now how he’s ever been good before. If we want him to take over Zach Randolph’s low post duties, how can he do that when he’s not playing with anybody who can make a clean post entry pass? What role do we want him to fill as a leader, and what is he supposed to say when he doesn’t play well? What is he supposed to do to keep people happy? What is this idealized version of Marc Gasol who has never existed before that people expect to materialize how that he’s stuck trying to carry a roster of unproven and/or inadequate rotation players to a playoff berth without a starting-quality point guard? 

Is there a coach that Gasol would get along with, who isn’t some kind of Euroleague dictatorial type? Is that what he wants? (It sounds like it is.) Why didn’t he just sign with the Spurs in 2015? Is that a question he asks himself every time he hits the showers after another punishing loss? He says it’s not, but we all have questions we’ll never admit we ask, things that we wonder about, all of us ultimately unknowable. Marc Gasol is even more unknowable than the rest. And maybe that’s what it comes down to: there is nothing he can do that would satisfy what’s now growing, the discontent with the team and its front office and its ownership—whoever that’s going to be—and its legacy of ashes, of taking the best thing that ever happened to them and running it so long and so hard that it dropped dead like a punched-out horse in Blazing Saddles. Grizzlies fans are looking for something to save them.

As Gasol said yesterday about how he feels about the roster, “there is no one else coming to help us.” It’s true of the roster, it’s true of the fans, it’s true of the incessant questioning of his motives and motivations, and in 2017, it’s probably true of the whole dang city. There is no one else coming to help us, and Marc Gasol cannot do it himself, and I’m not sure it would be for the best if he could. He’s in an impossible situation faced with contradictory demands and very few paths forward that don’t lead downward before the turn back up towards the light. Until the ownership situation settles, the Grizzlies seem like a body without a head. The same is true on the court with Conley out. Whatever hard choices have yet to be made, by Gasol or by the apparent lame ducks at the top of the Grizzlies’ org chart, no one could possibly satisfy the roar that’s building outside the gates. 

It seems like no matter what Marc Gasol does, it won’t be the thing that Memphis wants from him, because it doesn’t seem like Memphis much knows what it wants, not really.

Larry Kuzniewski

This one’s going to be brief, because while there was a lot going on in the Grizzlies’ 102-93 loss to the Boston Celtics last night, none of it is particularly complicated. The Celtics came into town as the best team in the Eastern Conference, albeit one which was struggling a little, having dropped a game in Utah the night before. The Grizzlies found themselves in a big hole in the first half after posting a first quarter in which they only scored 12 points while allowing Boston to score 31. It seemed like Boston was trying to run up a big lead so they could catch their breath and coast the rest of the way using their young guys.

And then. Down only 48-40 at halftime, the Griz uncorked one of their best third quarters of the year, featuring a 21 point outburst from Marc Gasol (including 4-5 from 3 point range) and some of the best defensive sequences the Grizzlies have put forward in months (since they were, y’know, good). Headed into the final frame the Griz had a 2 point lead, but they had to rest Gasol, who had played the entire 3rd and needed to sit for a minute before closing things out…

…and that was all it took. The Celtics opened the 4th quarter on a big run with Gasol on the bench, and the Grizzlies never caught up again. That was the ballgame. There were plenty of things to be encouraged by, but none of them really connected when the game was slipping away. Boston is an elite team, and there’s a reason for that. A week ago I’m not sure the home team would’ve been able to weather the first blow the Celtics delivered, but last night they got it together and challenged. The truth of the matter is that there are moral victories for a team that has struggled this badly. It matters that they almost won. But it doesn’t help the playoff standings.

Five Thoughts

★ Marc Gasol’s third quarter was reassuring. He can still be dominant when he wants to/gets going. Gasol’s mental state is always precarious, but lately it’s been clear that he’s in his own head, that he’s not letting the game come to him. The Grizzlies Twitter responses to Gasol’s quarter ranged from “why can’t he do this all the time” to “trade him while he can still be this good” to “he’s doing this because he wants to be traded to Boston” and… that’s why Twitter is bad. It’s OK to enjoy things. I enjoyed Gasol’s third quarter, a truly dominant display. He can’t/won’t do it often, but when he does, Gasol’s still an absolute force in games like this.

Larry Kuzniewski

★ Jarell Martin wasn’t horrible, for the second night in a row. Jarell has been drifting all season, since his first couple of games as a starter way back in October. At times it looked like the Grizzlies made a mistake in keeping him and cutting Rade Zagorac—not because Rade was good but because Jarell’s looked so lost. But last night, building on a decent second half against the Hawks, we saw a little bit of what Jarell can be at the NBA level: everywhere, all the time, using his speed and athleticism, which are crazy for a guy his size, to make plays. His defense still isn’t good, but it’s not so bad he’s unplayable.

After the game I asked interim coach JB Bickerstaff what Martin’s doing differently in these games where he’s playing well. “He’s got to play at that speed the whole time he’s on the floor,” Bickerstaff said. And when he does, obviously, he can contribute against even the best teams in the league.

★ Mario Chalmers and James Ennis played a lot and didn’t do very much. Ennis was a big part of the rotation before Fizdale moved him out of the starting lineup for Chandler Parsons. Since then, he’s been inconsistent. He didn’t play at all against Atlanta, and last night, in 12 minutes, he just didn’t get anything going. If Ennis has to start to play well, maybe he should just start and never play more than what he did last night.

Chalmers was more concerning. He’s struggled all year, but last night his shot selection was poor, and his passing was just as inconsistent as it’s been all year. At some point, he’s going to become unplayable, and that point may come sooner rather than later, but with Kobi Simmons on a two-way deal, there’s not really anybody else to throw into the backup spot with Conley out. Not anybody currently on the roster, anyway. I’m just not sure “savvy vet” is ever going to be Chalmers’ role. I don’t think that’s who he is, and I don’t think he’s wired to play that way.

★ Ben McLemore was atrocious. Single game plus/minus is mostly useless because it’s so dependent on lineups. That McLemore was -12 in five minutes feels right even though the stat is unreliable. This guy just isn’t very good, and I don’t think he’ll be better if he goes through a training camp next year. It’s a bad signing and a black hole in the Grizzlies’ wing rotation. He’s making more money than Tyreke Evans. There is no fairness in this world. He’s a nice guy, and he seems well-liked, but he just doesn’t have the court awareness to make the right play.

Larry Kuzniewski

Deyonta Davis, taking the best shot available to him

★ The Grizzlies have to be willing to take the best shot available. That’s a direct quote from Bickerstaff in the postgame. Guys are passing up shots they should take and taking shots they should pass up. The offense, however long after the Fizdale firing, is still mostly a mess. Guys aren’t moving enough, they’re not sure where to do, and they’re not sure how to play together. Over the last week—since the OKC game, excluding the 4th quarter against Miami—the Griz have started to find a little bit of cohesion on the defensive end, but it’s still not there offensively. One thing at a time, I guess.

Tweet of the Night

Speaking of Jarell Martin’s athleticism, he dunked over (literally over) two dudes last night. This replay doesn’t really do justice to how awesome this was, but you still get a sense for it. He has the tools to be Mr. Putback:

Absolutely FILTHY. pic.twitter.com/oa5NzriyHd

— Memphis Grizzlies (@memgrizz) December 17, 2017

Celtics 102, Grizzlies 93: Five Thoughts

Up Next

The Grizzlies don’t play again until Wednesday, and when they do, it’s… the Warriors. On the road. Should be fine.

Larry Kuzniewski

I know we’re all tired of hearing and talking about Fake News. This isn’t that. It’s actually a real thing that happened and I saw and I took notes and everything: the Grizzlies, last night, Friday, December 15th, AD 2017, won a game.

I know you might be reluctant to believe it. “How can I be sure you’re not one of them Facebook guys that sells all the powders that make me have power ape mind concentration strength?” you might ask. Or, “Are you sure you’re not an Op being pulled off by the FSB or some other apparatus of the Russian intelligence services, some sort of dezinformatsiya operation designed to trick us into acting against our own self-interest and supporting a team that didn’t actually defeat the Atlanta Hawks, 96-94, in a down-to-the-wire comeback the likes of which the Grizzlies haven’t seen at home in literally months?”

We don’t need a thirty-seven tweet thread to talk through the details of this because (1) that’s what blogs are for, you dummies, we’ve had them for like almost twenty years now and—hear me out—you can post things that are longer than 140 or even 280 characters there but really more importantly (2) it’s that simple. Despite trailing and having to mount several comeback attempts before one took, the Grizzlies scored more points than the Hawks. They won.

The Grizzlies have improved to 9-20 on the season, and as bad as that sounds (and hooboy has it been bad) it’s so much better than the alternative. It’s possible that a loss tonight, to the 6-win Hawks, especially in another close game scenario, could have broken the backs of this team, and killed whatever fighting spirit they still had left. The Miami game proved that spirit was hanging on by the thinnest of threads. They needed this win tonight, and they needed it badly. There’s room for improvement all around, but the one thing they haven’t done since Monday night when they let the Heat roll over them in the fourth quarter is quit, and that’s to their credit.

The offense is mostly still a disaster; it’s different from when Fizdale was the coach but not really better. One notable difference in how the Grizzlies approached the game was the disappearance of the uneven-but-mostly-good James Ennis III from the rotation entirely. Jarell Martin seemed to soak up some of the minutes left behind in his absence, along with a “The Youngs” lineup of Andrew Harrison, Ben McLemore, Dillon Brooks, Martin, and Deyonta Davis that featured prominently in spots where there’s usually at least one veteran on the floor. The rotational changes didn’t help much with execution, but they did help the Grizzlies stay in touch in a game that could have gotten out of hand at several points (and as much as you hate having to admit that about a game against the abysmal Hawks, it is what is is. To quote Le Petit Prince, “on ne sait jamais”).

The defense was uneven through the course of the evening but came through when it mattered, letting the Griz string together several good possessions down the stretch of the third quarter and regain a lead when it looked like before the game might have been slipping away. It’s still not good enough, but given the abysmal defensive awareness from some of the lineups the Grizzlies have to play to have a rotation right now, it’ll do.

So what do we make of this? Did the Grizzlies really win? Was there some sort of designer hallucinogen in my pregame Pepsi that made me trip my way into believing a circumstance which the universe simply will not allow to come to pass? Or is Atlanta just really bad?

I know which one I think it is, even though the former has at times felt much more plausible than the latter. But ultimately, you have to look at the news and decide for yourself whether you think it’s been reported credibly.

Tweet of the Night

In the first quarter, it looked like it really was going to be this bad (or worse) all night.

I am seriously at this game with a kidney stone and I’m about to go to the bathroom and try to pass it, because that would be more fun than watching this.

— William Kemp (@MemphisKemp) December 16, 2017

THE GRIZZLIES WON A BASKETBALL GAME

Fortunately for @MemphisKemp it didn’t stay that bad. All things must pass, that’s George Harrison, right?

Up Next

The best team in the East, the Boston Celtics, fresh off a loss tonight to the Utah Jazz, and who will probably roll into FedExForum tomorrow night out for whatever sort of revenge they can get way with extracting. I don’t expect a win, but who knows—now that they’ve got another win under their belts, maybe the Grizzlies can pull off an improbable upset instead of waiting for the right bad team to roll into town. We shall see.

Joe Murphy (NBAE/Getty Images)

Chandler Parsons

Last night’s game between the Grizzlies and Heat was a close one until the fourth quarter, when things really got out of hand. During the final twelve minutes of action, the Grizzlies managed to give up 37 points to Miami, including 8 of 9 from 3-point range. It was an abysmal performance to cap what had been an uneven (but not terrible) game to that point, with the Grizzlies starting out on top before slowly surrendering the lead to the Heat and then very slowly losing ground right up until they hit the breaking point at which they apparently decided they wouldn’t win and throw in the towel.

I usually have five thoughts after games this season, but honestly, there’s not much to say about what happened last night. Interim head coach JB Bickerstaff already said it in the postgame presser: the effort wasn’t there. For a team with a long and storied history of winning close games at a pace that statistical analysis could never quite figure out, last night was a kind of opposite, the bizarro reflection of a beloved playoff team caving in on itself on a Monday night in a building that was 2/3 full.

One Thought

★ The Grizzlies are bad. They just are. At this point, it doesn’t matter when Conley comes back, because—even though there’s no doubt that he will make the team better, and more cohesive—the damage has already been done. Not necessarily to the season. New Orleans and Oklahoma City both lost last night; even as bad as they’ve been the Griz aren’t really out of the playoff hunt yet. But they’ve been exposed.

They have a lot of players that just aren’t very good. A team that has to rely on Mario Chalmers and Ben McLemore to soak up major minutes at the guard spots will not win basketball games. A team that has to rely on Jarell Martin’s defense to make it through stretches of bench play will not win basketball games. A team that has to rely on Marc Gasol to do everything everywhere and somehow keep his faith in his teammates intact will not win basketball games. To refer back to the OKC game, a team with three guys who miss a collective four free throws, each of which could’ve won them the game, will not win basketball games.

There’s not much in the way of analysis that hasn’t already been done at this point. The Grizzlies are bad.

Why?

That’s the fun part: we already know why. That part has already been discussed to death here and elsewhere on the basketball intertubes. They don’t have enough good players. Since moment one of the regular season, they’ve been missing at least one projected starter, and with Conley missing as much time as he has, it’s usually been at least two.

The late lamented David Fizdale’s rotations didn’t make a whole lot of sense once Conley went down. But while Bickerstaff’s are different, he’s facing the same fundamental problem: the depth that a lot of us, myself included, talked ourselves into during the preseason simply isn’t there. This team isn’t good enough to play 11 guys when Conley and Selden are both out; they simply don’t have enough real NBA players to pull off that long of a rotation. Mario Chalmers, Ben McLemore, and Jarell Martin shouldn’t be playing at all, and yet, through necessity and, in McLemore’s case, the desire to get something out of him and prove he was worth the bad contract to which the Grizzlies signed him, they’re playing. (Important to note here that Martin was only in for the final 1:52 last night, after playing a bigger role in the OKC game and getting a DNP-CD in the Toronto game. His spot, at least, seems to be vanishing out from under him as he continues to fail to distinguish himself as a player with any NBA skill.)

The problem now, as illuminated last night by the team’s total collapse down the stretch of a very winnable game, is that they look like they know they’re not very good. They folded last night, and it was obvious. Bickerstaff conceded as much after the game. But that doesn’t help Gasol’s mental state, it doesn’t help the young guys gain the confidence they need to play through these sorts of stretches (which are bound to happen to every team in every season, if not to this degree), and it doesn’t change the fact that this was a mediocre team this year even if everything went right. Everything has not gone right. So while I’m not sure it makes sense to lament the possibilities of the 2017-18 Grizzlies, who were probably bound for a seven or eight seed and a first-round exit in the best case scenario, it’s certainly true that they weren’t supposed to be this.

This is the worst Grizzlies team since 2008-09, minus the promise of Rudy Gay, Mike Conley, OJ Mayo, and Marc Gasol maybe becoming something someday. It’s a dead end right now. There are young guys who could be good in a couple of years, but there’s no future core being established, no Three Year Plan. They’re just bad right now. And they know it. And that’s why they folded last night. I don’t see any reason to expect anything different from them, if that’s how it’s going to go.

Tweet of the Night

Mario Chalmers is, indeed, washed.

Let's take a live look at Mario Chalmers pic.twitter.com/YqtsPodTjv

— Joe Mullinax (@JoeMullinax) December 12, 2017

Heat 107, Grizzlies 82: One Thought

Up Next

Misery. Suffering. The rending of garments. Weeping and gnashing of teeth. Having been cast into outer darkness.

Larry Kuzniewski

The Grizzlies lost in spectacular fashion on Saturday night after leading by as many as 20 points, before turning in a 9-point third quarter and one of the most mystifyingly mindless fourth quarters I’ve ever seen from a Memphis team. Then, after Marc Gasol, Tyreke Evans, and JaMychal Green each missed at least one free throw, the game went to overtime, where the Grizzlies again played bad basketball—and make no mistake, the Thunder were every bit as bad, if not worse—and lost in overtime.

Defensively, the Thunder are very good this year—second in the NBA coming into last night. That’s certainly part of why the Grizzlies struggled so mightily on offense, but it’s not the whole story. As ever, the Grizzlies made things hard for themselves as much or more than the opponent did, and so yet again they lost a game they should’ve won. Dallas, Brooklyn, and now this; when they miss the playoff by three wins, this particular encounter will seem even more frustrating than it did as it happened.

But I have five thoughts on what happened, which is all I could think to do in response.

Five Thoughts

★ It doesn’t matter who the coach is if the players make dumb plays. At some level, a lot of the Grizzlies’ mistakes last night Have to do with low basketball IQ. Making a bad pass. Shooting bad shots. Making poor decisions in the flow of the offense. Some of this is coaching: guys have to know the scheme so they can fall back on it when times get tough. The coaching flux has made some of that harder than it should be, but it’s not the whole explanation. You only have to look as far as Ben McLemore’s abysmal missed 360 dunk against Toronto: it’s one thing if he’s wide open on a break and tries that and misses, but there were two (2) Toronto defenders closing in on him. He didn’t even have time to attempt that dunk in the first place. That’s a sign of a player who makes bad decisions.

The Grizzlies are a young team, and most of that youth is made up of guys who weren’t highly-ranked first round guys. They’re guys the Grizzlies have taken a flier on, and while they all seem to show some sort of promise, they’re not players who are great at improvising on the fly, falling back on the scheme or the system to know what to do. When things go wrong, they improvise, and they’re just not good at it. That’s not a good sign for the Grizzlies going forward, because these guys need to play in a more cohesive way, but they’re learning it all on the fly without any time to practice under a new coach. Unless they start playing both smarter and harder, they’re still not going to win many more games, especially against teams able to take away the first and second options of the pretty simplistic offensive sets they’re running right now.

Larry Kuzniewski

★ Tyreke Evans is a good starting point guard. Part of this is a comparison to the other alternatives on the Grizzlies. But the other part is Evans stepping up to a challenge. After being a ball-stopper when he was coming off the bench, Evans has actually passed the ball well upon being moved to the starting lineup. Last night he finished with 29 points, 13 rebounds, and 5 assists. I think he’ll probably get a triple double at some point this season. Evans is a massively talented player when things are going right for him. And while I still think he could do more to get other guys more involved, his transition into being the facilitator the Grizzlies need him to be at this point in the season has been encouraging, and if he can keep growing into the role and developing his chemistry with Gasol (we saw some of this in their two-man game in overtime), he may end up putting up exactly the same kinds of numbers Mike Conley would.

Larry Kuzniewski

★ Speaking of point guards, Mario Chalmers is really bad. It comes from a good place—he’s trying to help the team win—but Chalmers’ play has been disastrous. He’s taking bad shots, he’s not running pick and roll cleanly, he’s making bad passes, he’s not finishing at the rim at all, he’s not defending, and he shows no signs of getting better at any of those things. He’s been struggling all year long, and Fizdale no doubt felt a special connection to Chalmers because of the time the two of them spent together in Miami, but… it’s bad. Several people said this to me on Twitter last night and I agree: Toney Douglas last year was better. That’s not a typo: Toney Douglas.

★ The Grizzlies’ third quarter struggles are mystifying. It’s like they’ve yet to make a halftime adjustment all season, while the other team always makes the right one. Last night, the Thunder held the Griz to NINE POINTS in the entire third quarter. The whole time, the Grizzlies had no answers, no options. They’d been totally strangled by the Thunder’s halftime adjustment. It happens every game. No lead is too big for the Grizzlies to choke away in the third quarter by coming out of the break totally lax and unfocused. I don’t know if they all need to be rendered to some kind of intelligence agency black site and deafened by heavy metal music until they’ve been reprogrammed to play hard after halftime, or what. If I were Robert Pera, that option would be on the table.

★ As bad as both of these teams are, neither is really out of the hunt yet. The second half of last night’s game was one of the dumbest, worst things I’ve seen in all my time covering the Grizzlies. Both teams tried to choke away the game on several occasions, and neither team could manage to lose until the very, very end of overtime. But. As crappy as it looked, both of these teams could still make the West playoffs. It’s less likely for the Grizzlies than it is for Oklahoma City, but both of these teams have gotten off to significantly worse starts than expected, and such is the state of the Western Conference that neither has fallen so far that the season can’t be salvaged. Give the Grizzlies another couple of weeks, and my 44-win prediction for the season may become totally impossible to reach instead of just very unlikely. But for two potential playoff teams, the Grizzlies and Thunder sure both looked like two lottery teams last night.

Tweet of the Night

It’s probably not the solution to the Grizzlies’ backup point guard problem, but it’s hard to imagine he’d be worse, and they’ve barely put a dent in the number of days he can be called up to the big club, so I fully endorse this hashtag from Caleb McNiece:

#freekobisimmons

— Caleb McNiece (@cmcniece) December 10, 2017

Thunder 102, Grizzlies 101: Five Extremely Dumb Overtime Thoughts

Up Next

The Heat are here on Monday, they travel to DC to play the Wizards on Wednesday, and then it’s another Friday/Saturday home back to back against the Hawks and Celtics. At this point, I’d call the Hawks game the only one they should win, but “should” is mostly meaningless in the context of this year’s Grizzlies. They’ve only won one game since breaking an 11-game losing streak, and they’ve got a new 3-game streak going. I’m not to “tank the season” territory yet, because I’m not sure what that even looks like on a team with Conley and Gasol on it, but it would appear that they’re tanking the season quite by accident all on their own.

This week on the show, Kevin and Phil talk about:

• The Grizzlies’ win over the Timberwolves—they won a basketball game!
• Phil was in attendance when the Grizzlies almost won against the Cavs.
• What if David Fizdale wasn’t as good as we thought he was?
• The resurgence of Andrew Harrison under JB Bickerstaff
• Gasol’s much-improved communication with his teammates over the last four games
• Ben McLemore still isn’t very good and it doesn’t seem likely that he’ll get better
• Deyonta Davis has played really well in Brandan Wright’s absence
• Should the Grizzlies trade Mike Conley and re-sign Tyreke Evans this summer?
• Can the Grizzlies get a win over the Knicks on Wednesday night?
• A home back-to-back this weekend against the Raptors and Thunder.

The Beyond the Arc podcast is available on iTunes, so you can subscribe there! It’d be great if you could rate and review the show while you’re there. You can also find and listen to the show on Stitcher and on PlayerFM.

You can call our Google Voice number and leave us a voicemail, and we might talk about your question on the next show: 234-738-3394

You can download the show here or listen below:

Larry Kuzniewski

Andrew Harrison came up big when the Grizzlies needed him to.

It finally happened on Monday night: the Memphis Grizzlies won a regular season basketball game for the first time after losing 11 straight. Their last win was on the road at Portland on November 7, and their last home win was October 28 against the Houston Rockets. To say it’s been a while is to undersell the depth of the pit into which the Grizzlies fell over the last few weeks.

And when the smoke cleared, and the buzzer sounded on last night’s 95-92 win over an underperforming Minnesota team, it was like they’d won a playoff series. Players spontaneously embraced, the crowd erupted, and it felt like some great dark cloud had finally lifted. Enough that Marc Gasol let one slip on live television:

“We won. F-ck it.” pic.twitter.com/EKKcZnfN63

— Gary Parrish (@GaryParrishCBS) December 5, 2017

Grizzlies 95, Timberwolves 92: Five Thoughts

It wasn’t a pretty win by any means. The Grizzlies had to fight through some of the same struggles they’ve seen throughout the string of losses, and they finally caught a break by being able to beat a team having its own set of issues (much like the games they should’ve won against Brooklyn and Dallas). But, alas, a win is a win, and I have five thoughts about it:

Five Thoughts

Larry Kuzniewski

JB Bickerstaff got his first win as Grizzlies interim head coach.

★ Last night was Tyreke Evans’ best game as a passer in a Grizzlies uniform. Evans started at the point, and even though his Grizzlies tenure has seen him be a bit of a ball-stopper (which is not to say that’s a new development; that’s been his game since he was a Memphis Tiger), last night he was very good, better than the box score indicates. Evans had 16 points, 9 assists, and 5 rebounds—a very “Conley” stat line, to be sure—but that number doesn’t account for hockey assists, or great passes to a guy who missed the shot. Evans facilitated the Grizzlies’ transition offense really well last night, and it made a big difference. They’re still not a good half-court team in Conley’s absence, but if Tyreke’s going to facilitate like that and still score in the high teens or low twenties, it may not matter.

★ Marc Gasol was Marc Gasol, and sometimes that’s all that matters. Gasol was active on defense, constantly talking, and even though the offense seemed to stagnate in the halfcourt with him on the floor, he was still good for 21 points, 5 assists, and 7 rebounds, a very “Marc Gasol” stat line. He was good when it mattered, and so was the rest of the team, and… frankly, if he’d been even 80% this good over the last month they probably win at least three games out of the losing streak. With some of the other players and lineups starting to come around, the Grizzlies don’t need Gasol to play at an MVP level; they just need him to play like Marc Gasol. Last night against the Wolves, that was enough.

★ The young guys stepped up in a big way last night. None of them were perfect, but Dillon Brooks, Andrew Harrison, and Deyonta Davis all played crucial minutes in the win last night—exactly the kind of minutes you want to see from young players you’re hoping to develop. Brooks defended well on some tough assignments, played within himself, limited the number of dumb mistakes he made, and contributed on both ends.

Harrison, with the ball in his hands, steadied the defense, made some heady plays on offense and put himself in a position to succeed. Harrison was abysmal as a shooting guard, but since the coaching change, JB Bickerstaff has kept Harrison on the ball, and that’s been all the difference. He’s still too slow to make decisions on offense, but he makes up for it on defense and by using his size and his intellect to make plays no other point guard on the roster can (or will, anyway) make. With Mario Chalmers struggling to get much done, Harrison might be the Grizzlies’ best shot at a stable backup who won’t cost them possessions, for better or for worse.

Davis played great defense to end the third and start the fourth quarters, and with Gasol on the bench and the Griz down 5, it turned the game around. If he’d been bad, the Grizzlies would’ve lost. Instead, he got a great putback, made a five-or-so-footer that he would’ve missed last year, altered shots, grabbed some rebounds, and generally steadied the frontcourt while the starting tandem of Green and Gasol got a rest. Davis has really stepped up in Brandan Wright’s absence. After the game Bickerstaff said he’s been encouraging Davis to play to his strengths—the shotblocking, rebounding, his transition play—and so far, it’s working (and, to be fair, worked under Fizdale too). He might be on his way to making Wright expendable.

Larry Kuzniewski

Mario Chalmers struggled to get anything done last night.

★ Mario Chalmers looks cooked. He’s not running the offense well, he’s taking bad shots that he thinks he should be able to make, and he’s trying to play with “veteran savvy” when really he’s not that kind of player. I’m not sure what exactly is going on with Chalmers. It’s clear that he’s lost some speed and isn’t comfortable finishing at the rim, but he’s also lost confidence in his ability to make the right play. Instead he freezes up, always picks up his dribble after coming around a screen, and generally makes poor decisions that lead to wasted possessions. Chalmers may have played well enough in camp to stay on the roster, or maybe Wade Baldwin was just that useless, but either way, it’s been clear from the jump that Chalmers isn’t what he was in 2015-16. That’s not necessarily his fault—though I do think he could be playing better with his diminished skill set—but it’s got the Grizzlies in familiar dire straits with respect to the backup PG spot.

★ Ben McLemore was bad. He made some good plays in the Spurs game at home—he’s good for that every now and then—but last night McLemore struggled on both ends. I was not a fan of this signing when it happened, especially not when guys like Thabo Sefolosha were still available for roughly the same money, and McLemore hasn’t really done much to change my mind. Does he have the ability to be an NBA player? Sure. Will he put it together and stop costing the Grizzlies possessions? I’ll believe it when I see it. Last night, no.

Tweet of the Night

Before the game, this was pretty much the only real analysis left to be made:

lol good call pic.twitter.com/1Ge9c7h0cU

— ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (@starclusterr) December 5, 2017

Grizzlies 95, Timberwolves 92: Five Thoughts (2)

Up Next

Wednesday night the Grizzlies take on the Knicks in New York, in another very winnable game. It’s an East team and a road game, always a rough proposition for the Grizzlies, but the Knicks are not as good now as they were earlier, especially with Kristaps Porzingis still listed as day-to-day (he missed their last two games).

The Grizzlies should grab that New York win if they can, because this weekend they’re home for a back-to-back against the Raptors and the Thunder, two teams they’ll have a harder time with. The losing streak may be over, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Grizzlies are currently in one of the toughest stretches of their schedule. When Conley gets back, the worst may be over, and they’ll know how deep of a hole they have to climb out of.

This week on the show, Kevin and Phil talk about:

• David Fizdale got fired, and most of the national media has been totally wrong about the situation.
• The Sunday night loss to Brooklyn in which things finally boiled over between Fizdale and Marc Gasol
• Where the team goes from here on the court.
• Should Chris Wallace be next, or is he safe?
• The week to come, which could get very ugly for the Grizzlies.

The Beyond the Arc podcast is available on iTunes, so you can subscribe there! It’d be great if you could rate and review the show while you’re there. You can also find and listen to the show on Stitcher and on PlayerFM.

You can call our Google Voice number and leave us a voicemail, and we might talk about your question on the next show: 234-738-3394

You can download the show here or listen below:

Larry Kuzniewski

David Fizdale

After the Grizzlies’ eighth straight loss last night, in which things finally boiled over and David Fizdale sat Marc Gasol for the whole fourth quarter, the Grizzlies have fired David Fizdale. Associate head coach JB Bickerstaff will serve as his interim.

Fizdale came to the Grizzlies as a highly-regarded coaching prospect, and he probably remains one, but he and Marc Gasol never really meshed—I guess we can start talking about that more now—and the disconnect between the two of them, and between their philosophies, has been apparent on the court throughout the Grizzlies’ losing streak (and maybe also before). Now, it seems, the Griz organization has sided with Gasol.

My sense is that we’re not getting the whole story on what happened behind the scenes between last night’s press conferences and this news, and we may not for some time yet. Things had to have deteriorated quickly for this to be the move the Grizzlies made, and I cannot yet say that I understand why it was necessary. The Grizzlies are now on their third head coach since the end of the 2013 season when they didn’t renew Lionel Hollins’ contract.

ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski broke the news on Twitter, and it was confirmed by team sources. Bickerstaff was most recently the interim head coach for the Houston Rockets, and is a highly-regarded coaching prospect himself. Hollins was the Grizzlies’ last interim coach.