Author: Kevin Lipe

I was at FedExForum Wednesday night along with 11,000-odd other people to watch a basketball game, and something sort of resembling one happened for thirty-five minutes or so before a lineup made of Griz bench players finally started playing like they meant it and closed a 20-point deficit to a Mavs lineup of camp bodies and one white guy (Mickey McConnell) who literally no one in the media room after the game had ever heard of before. That was when the game itself got interesting.

But even before the Grizzlies lineup of Nick Calathes, Jamaal Franklin, Tony Gaffney, Jon Leuer, and Ed Davis began to mount a counteroffensive (“offensive” being the operative word for most of the action that took place Wednesday night in the Grizzlies’ first home preseason game), things were “interesting.”

To start with, the Grizzlies were without Marc Gasol, Tony Allen, Tayshaun Prince, Quincy Pondexter—all of whom missed Monday night’s game against the Bulls as well—and Kosta Koufous was out with an injury as well. Obviously none of these guys are seriously hurt; it’s the second game of the preseason and there’s still no point in pushing it any harder than they have to to be ready to go by the first regular season game. But against a Mavs lineup only missing Jose Calderon—much like the Bulls were only missing Joakim Noah Monday night—it made for some interesting matchups. The Grizzlies starters were Mike Conley, Jerryd Bayless, Mike Miller, Zach Randolph, and Ed Davis, who ended up playing most of the night out of position at center.

The game was good for gauging the development of some of the newer guys, of course. Jon Leuer had a tremendous game, scoring 17 points, grabbing 10 boards, racking up more assists (5) than Nick Calathes (who had 3), and looking confident and collected the same way he did Monday night. If he continues to be able to drill that elbow jumper, he’s going to be a credible threat to move into heavy rotation. It’s not hard to imagine a frontcourt rotation stretched to Gasol-Randolph-Koufos-Davis-Leuer, depending on matchups, rather than just the first four. Leuer looks good. It’s “just preseason,” but he looks like he’s going to make some noise this year.

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Jamaal Franklin looks like a legitimate NBA player still. He shot too many threes Wednesday night, going 1-5 from beyond the arc (not the blog), but he played a very good game, especially in that 4^th quarter when the Griz closed the gap with Dallas. He looks like a good facilitator, and someone whose hustle is going to make him a factor on defense. He just looks like he belongs. I have high hopes for Franklin’s future, even if he takes a while to reach them.

Overall this is still a team with a lot of things to work on. We saw flashes of brilliance from Nick Calathes in the passing game, hitting guys with no-look passes timed to be in the right place at the right time, but that chemistry is going to take time to develop, and so sometimes his targets aren’t where he thinks they’re going to be. The turnovers (the Grizzlies had 17 of them) were problematic, as the Grizzlies are being too lax with the ball while trying to force the issue with the tempo (which, I gotta say, didn’t seem to be all that much faster Wednesday night—much less noticeably so than Monday). It’s all a work in progress, which coach Dave Joerger stressed in his postgame presser.

But we’re not going to know what sort of shape this team is in until we see them play with the full complement of starters against another team’s full complement of starters (and play hard—meaning Zach Randolph and Samuel Dalembert aren’t casually strolling down the court making smalltalk and catching up with each other while theoretically “getting back on defense”). The offense is coming along, sure, but we still haven’t seen Marc Gasol in it, much less been able to tell whether it really builds off the Gasol/Mike Conley tandem the way we expect it to.

Long story short: Wednesday night’s game against the Mavericks showed us a few things about some of the Grizzlies’ bench players—and definitely showed us that, as Dave Joerger said in the postgame, there’s going to be some competition for roster spots and for playing time this year, because the Grizzlies find themselves in the unusual (for them) position of having too many bench players who can actually play. Turnovers are a problem at this point. Fluidity in the offense, currently nonexistent, can reasonably be expected to develop over time.

The extreme constraints posed on the two games we’ve seen so far—the lack of starters, end-of-the-bench guys going up against the other team’s starters, the odd lineups on the floor to see what works—have made it hard to get a read on where this Grizzlies team really is. There are some promising developments, and some nagging issues, but until we really see the team at full tilt, all of this is conjecture, because we’re only able to see a subset of the roster in action at a time. We just don’t know yet. Games like last night’s aren’t useless, but they’re not exactly revelatory.

Unless you’re Jon Leuer.

Coming off the heels of Monday night’s loss to the Chicago Bulls in St. Louis, I’m not sure what to expect tonight other than more of the same: new Grizzlies players—and/or new NBA players—feeling their way through the breaks of the game, trying to find a comfort level with the league and with the Grizzlies’ new, more uptempo offense.

The Mavericks are in a weird place this year, having lost out on the Dwight Howard sweepstakes and the Deron Williams sweepstakes and the Everyone Else sweepstakes and ended up with Jose Calderon and Monta Ellis (who, of course, Have It All) but not committed to wholesale tanking in an effort to land one of the coveted 2014 lottery picks. Presumably they’re going to keep trying to contend as long as Dirk Nowitzki is on the roster, but what that looks like in practice, this season, is a Mavericks team that’s hard to gauge.

As CBS Sports’ Matt Moore said in his first NBA Power Rankings column of the season:

The Mavericks have become my Mendoza line for Power Rankings. If you are above them, you are a good team, if you are below them, a bad one.

The key question with the Mavs is this: can you replace Darren Collison, O.J. Mayo, and Chris Kaman with Jose Calderon, Monta Ellis, and Samuel Dalembert and become a much better team in the process?

Meanwhile, the Grizzlies will still be in the feeling-out process that we saw them in on Monday night. Without Marc Gasol, Tony Allen, Tayshaun Prince, and Quincy Pondexter—three of them presumably starters on opening night—it wasn’t going to be much of a fair fight, especially with Derrick Rose on a mission to prove he’s back. Not sure if any or all of them will be out again tonight, but if they are, it’ll definitely be a chance for the bench players to step up again and see what they’re made of.

I’ll be paying close attention to the offense tonight, and how well some of the bench units play together. Those are the kinds of things preseason games are for. Getting too wrapped up in the W’s and L’s is a good way to miss the ways the team has changed (for better or for worse) over the offseason.

At any rate, I’m just excited to get a chance to be back in the Grindhouse. Robert Pera said at Media Day that he hopes to have the Wi-Fi working by the first regular season game. Between that, the in-game music (especially that one Clippers game at the end of last year where we got to hear “Supernaut” and Motörhead), the BBQ, and the Memphis-Wrestling-on-Channel-5 feel we’ve all come to love, it’s been too long away.

The Grizzlies lost to the Chicago Bulls last night in St. Louis, and they lost by a lot: the final score was 106-87. However, the Grizzlies were without Marc Gasol, Tony Allen, Tayshaun Prince, and Quincy Pondexter for various reasons, and even though the Bulls were without Joakim Noah, it’s hard to argue that the two teams were playing at equal strength. The Bulls—led by a Derrick Rose who is clearly back to being his old self on the court, cutting fearlessly and exploding past defenders—appeared to be running a pretty tight rotation until somewhere in the third quarter when Rose headed to the bench for the last time, having played 23 minutes.

So last night wasn’t much of a game in terms of “are the Grizzlies as good as the Bulls” or anything larger than “how does the team look?” or “how does Player X look this year?” and to my mind we got some pretty good preliminary looks at what to expect out of the Grizzlies’ reserves this year.

For starters, the Dave Joerger offense really does move much faster. That was apparent from the get-go, with the team getting into sets much earlier in the shot clock than in years past, and more movement off the ball. It appears that Coach Joerger was Not Bluffing^tm about that one. It was interesting to see Zach Randolph moving much faster than he usually does (than he used to?) getting to his spot in the post, instead of walking up to his defender and simply pushing him out of the way. Those kinds of things are going to make it easier for the Grizzlies to score all year long.

Speaking of scoring, the Grizzlies started out on an 11-2 run by shooting somewhere in the vicinity of 75%. Remember that, because it will not happen often. Joerger’s new offense is one thing, but there’s no way he’s miraculously turned the entire roster into an elite shooting team.

As for players? Here are some notes on what we learned about the guys playing last night:

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• Nick Calathes would appear to be the real deal. Last night he made some nifty passes, got to the rim on some nice drives, and generally did good work. For the first time in recent memory, the Grizzlies may actually have a good backup point guard who can manage a game while Conley’s on the bench. He wasn’t perfect—especially on the defensive end of the floor—but fears that he wouldn’t be able to handle the transition to the NBA game were probably misplaced, as Calathes looked comfortable commanding the offense. Certainly a better point guard than Bayless Wroten Dooling Arenas Mayo Tinsley Pargo Selby Lowry Vasquez okay I’ll stop listing point guards now because that’s depressing. Long story short: Calathes looks like a legitimate backup point guard, already. No “he might be a backup point someday.” He looks like he’s already there.

• Ed Davis had a pretty good outing. He’s definitely been working on some facets of his game this summer, especially offensively. My main concern for Davis is one that’s going to be harder for him to fix: he’s still undersized, and there are times when he’s still getting pushed out of position in the post. When he’s able to slip behind his defender, he does a good job (better than last year, anyway) of finishing at the rim, but there were a couple of times last night when Davis tried to post up Taj Gibson and simply got shoved out of the paint. That’s not something that’s going to be easy for Davis to fix unless he has another growth spurt, or something, but I don’t think it’s anything to be too worried about at this point. Let’s see how he does as the preseason and regular season progress; it’s still too early to tell what kind of a leap Davis is making with his game this year.

• Jon Leuer quietly had himself a solid game, racking up 9 points, 4 assists, and 5 rebounds in 23 minutes of play. Leuer was clearly looking to get his outside jumper going, and that he did, showing his abilities as a floor-stretching big who can’t be left unguarded from the elbows. If Leuer is able to consistently play at that level in the regular season, making the occasional big play on defense while knocking down jumpers, it’ll go a long way toward replacing Darrell Arthur’s production (or, at least, the production DA would have had if he were healthy). Leuer played with confidence last night—obviously having a coach who isn’t Lionel Hollins and a long-term contract is a better situation for him than being dumped onto the Grizzlies’ roster from Cleveland in January.

• Jamaal Franklin looked… like an NBA player. In the recent past, rookies brought in by the Grizzlies have been of the “project” variety, guys who look as out of place on an NBA court as I would on Dancing with the Stars. Franklin didn’t seem to have those issues last night. Sure, he made some rookie mistakes and turned the ball over once, but he appeared to be playing with a comfort level and a basketball IQ level that have been missing from “the Wrotens and the Selbys of the world” and that’s going to be a good thing for the Grizzlies. Clearly the kid can play basketball. I hope he’s able to work his way into the rotation sooner rather than later, because I think his unique athletic gifts make him a valuable asset.

One thing bugged me last night: I tweeted this:

Weirded out by seeing Franklin in #22. My mind still tells me it’s Rudy Gay I’m watching.
— Kevin Lipe (@FlyerGrizBlog) October 8, 2013

…and I was met with a cascade of “Rudy who?” replies.

Which is all kinds of disingenuous. You may still hold a grudge against Rudy Gay for the way he acted after being traded to the Raptors last year. Certainly he should’ve handled it better. You may still not like Gay’s game and you may still be mad that he was literally unable to see the rim and yet still refused to wear contacts. Those are valid feelings, and I won’t deny them to you. But to act like you never liked the guy, and like it never meant anything to you that he was in Memphis for as long as he was? C’mon. Don’t act like some of y’all don’t still have Rudy Gay jerseys in the backs of your closets. The dude was here for a long time. He wore #22 that whole time. You can claim to not like him now, but don’t pretend you never liked him. You did. We all did.

Thus concludes that rant.

• Jerryd Bayless did all kinds of aggressive things last night, shooting whenever he felt like it (which is almost all the time), attacking the rim whenever he got a chance, making some crazy steals and gambles on defense that sometimes paid off… basically Bayless ran around doing Bayless things last night. It may sound like I’m criticizing him for that, but I’m not: Jerryd Bayless is at his best when he’s comfortable on the court and he’s playing with attitude and fearlessness, and that’s what he did last night. Sometimes that’s not going to go well and he’s going to miss a ton of shots. But that same fearlessness is what makes him want to be the guy to take the game-winner, and sometimes he’ll do that too.

Plus, that fearlessness is what made him almost kill Ray Allen dead that one time:

All in all, it was a good first look at some of the Grizzlies players we’ve had questions about for a long time now. I anticipate getting an even better look tomorrow night at the Forum against the Mavericks, and maybe we’ll see Gasol/Allen/Prince/Pondexter get some minutes, too. At any rate, it looks like the answers to those questions are starting to emerge, and it looks like this is a Grizzlies team that’s coming into the season in a good mental space, and that’s hard to feel bad about, no matter what the actual score of the game was.

Tonight, we get what we’ve been waiting for so impatiently all these many months since the Grizzlies played their last home game on May 27th: real NBA basketball, played between real NBA teams. I would say “in a real NBA arena” but tonight’s game is a little bit out of the ordinary: the Grizzlies are taking on the Chicago Bulls in St. Louis, Missouri, in a game that’s technically a home game for the Bulls.

The Grizzlies spent a good portion of the offseason trying to grow their regional fan base, sending Quincy Pondexter out on tour all across the Mid-South and then holding training camp last week in Nashville (where they apparently packed the house for an open practice on a Saturday afternoon during college football season). Playing an exhibition game in St. Louis is certainly in keeping with that strategy—I’ve always thought it was a little puzzling that St. Louis didn’t have an NBA team anyway. Maybe someday the Grizzlies can have a fierce rivalry with the reborn Spirits of St. Louis.

At any rate, the location of the game fits into the Grizzlies’ overall plan to grow the Grizzlies “territory” beyond the boundaries of the Memphis area and out to the whole region. But. That’s not why tonight’s game is exciting, not by a long shot. What’s exciting about tonight is that we can finally stop speculating and talk about actual basketball that has been played. If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t think I can help you.

Herewith, some things to watch out for tonight as the Grizzlies and Bulls face off.

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Things to Watch

• The Bulls are coming off an 82-76 win over the Pacers Saturday that saw Derrick Rose return to action for the first time after missing a whole season while recovering from an ACL injury. This isn’t just the Tigers fan in me talking: the basketball world is a better place with Derrick Rose in it, and I hope this season proves he made the right decision in sitting out a whole year. That said, I expect him to play pretty limited minutes against the Grizzlies tonight, especially by Tom Thibodeau standards. Rose played 20 minutes against Indiana. I’d expect to see the same sorts of numbers tonight.

• More importantly for the Grizzlies universe, tonight gives us our first look at what we’ve been talking about for months: we get to see what a Dave Joerger-coached Grizzlies team looks like in a game. We’ve heard all of the talk about uptempo play, about getting into sets quicker, about living with turnovers as a price of faster play, so on and so forth, but tonight the rubber meets the road for the first time. I expect to see a team that is familiar—there are too many of the same players on the roster for it not to be recognizable as the Grit & Grind Grizzlies—but changed, like your friend in high school that came back from summer vacation a foot taller than when you left. I, for one, welcome our new up-tempo overlords.

• The Grizzlies made the surprising move of waiving Josh Akognon yesterday. (They also waived Derrick Byars, but that wasn’t surprising given that the team hasn’t been buzzing about Byars all summer long). He was expected to make the roster as a shooting specialist, someone who could come in and heat up at a moment’s notice. All summer long, the Grizzlies were supposedly making moves to clear roster space for Akognon, and now he’s gone. To me, this means one of two things (or maybe both): (1) Akognon had a terrible training camp and obviously wasn’t going to be a good fit and/or (2) the Grizzlies feel like they’ve got their outside shooting situation handled—at least enough so that it wasn’t possible to justify keeping Akognon around. At any rate, it was a curious decision, but probably the right one.

• I’m not normally one to put much stock into preseason performances, opting to treat them more like scrimmages than a thermometer to tell me how good the team will be this year. That said, I think we’re going to be able to see the chemistry of this year’s Griz squad on the court; this is a veteran group, a core that has been together for a long time, and the new faces this year are (with the exception of Jamaal Franklin, alias “The Grindson”) guys who have been around the block and know what it takes to win basketball games. (Yes, I know Calathes hasn’t been proven in the NBA, but he’s got a sterling track record in Euro ball—he’s a proven winner at that level.) That should translate to a high basketball IQ, and a team that is able to feel its way out of tight spots by falling back on instinct. If it doesn’t, my guess is that we’re in for a little turbulence while the team adjusts to the new offense and the new mindset. But. Even if there’s a period of adjustment, I think this group of players is too smart—and too talented—not to gel just like last year’s model.

• All sorts of player combinations are potentially going to be visible for the first time tonight: the Kosta Koufos/Ed Davis frontcourt, Jamaal Franklin against real NBA competition, the Nick Calathes Experiment at backup point… we might see if Joerger really plans on playing Mike Miller at the 4, how much Zach Randolph is going to run, whether Marc Gasol is really turning himself into a more aggressive scorer… I’m excited for the chance to see every one of those things happen, and ten or fifteen more that you probably don’t want me to ramble on about.

Can we all just agree that it’s good to be back here, that we’ve missed NBA basketball and we’ve missed our Grizzlies, and that we’re excited to see what they look like, even if it’s “just” a preseason game? And that we’ve been irrationally excited about this day for months: the return of basketball to our lives, months and months of game after game after game, the punishing grind of the NBA season captivating as ever, and destined to be interesting no matter what the actual outcomes of the games?

Good. I like it when we all agree.

Since I’m unable to be in Nashville this week taking in the scene at Grizzlies training camp, I’m stuck back here in Memphis searching for something to write about clues that will tell us what to expect from this year’s Griz squad. By all accounts (mostly from Pete Pranica and Ron Tillery on Twitter, here on the outside of The Great Paywall) coach Dave Joerger has the team doing fast-paced drills trying to reinforce decision-making on the fly, getting the team used to operating in an offense that doesn’t wait until there are seven seconds left on the shot clock to get going.

I thought this note from Pranica was interesting:

Second @memgrizz practice finished. Controlled scrimmaging with :12 shot clock. Idea is to train quick decision-making. #GreaterMemphis
— Pete Pranica (@PetePranica) October 2, 2013

Could this really be the end of watching the Grizzlies head into the last minutes of a close game and start every possession by having Mike Conley dribble at the top of the key for eight seconds while Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph bludgeon their respective ways into position? Ball movement in the Griz offense improved by swapping Rudy Gay for Tayshaun Prince, even if Prince couldn’t match Gay’s scoring. He didn’t have to; he’s a good passer and an excellent facilitator. The missing piece was still the sense of urgency in the offense—how many possessions consisted of four guys standing around while Z-Bo posted someone up, and when the Grizzlies received the offensive rebound, they went right back to standing around while the post players got into position?

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Obviously, even though the Grizzlies were 30th out of 30 teams in pace last year, they still won a lot of games. So it’s not that the slow pace of play meant that they weren’t able to score more points than the other team. But what that slow pace did mean is that every possession was vital: they couldn’t afford too many empty trips to the hoop. The Grizzlies’ molasses-like pace trapped opposing teams like bugs in amber, taking even the most run-and-gun teams in the league—the James Harden-led Houston Rockets, for example, first in pace and 6th in offensive efficiency—and grinding them down to nothing.

What it couldn’t do against a better team, as we saw against the Spurs in the Western Conference Finals¹, was score enough points to make up for all those missed shots. When you can’t shoot the ball well, and you don’t get that many opportunities to shoot the ball to begin with, it’s a recipe for disaster against a locked-in good team that knows how to shut down your high-percentage post players. It becomes an even bigger problem when your “high percentage post players” stop being so high-percentage, as was the case with the potentially-declining Zach Randolph.

So even if the Grizzlies come into this season with a pace somewhere in the middle of the pack, it’ll still be a noticeable change from the old Lionel Hollins/Henry Bibby way of doing business. This Griz squad, even with an average pace, is going to look like those old Paul Westhead Loyola Marymount teams compared to last year’s model.

Which brings me back to Zach Randolph. When asked about the pace of play at Grizzlies Media Day on Monday, Randolph reminded everyone that he’s played for Mike D’Antoni before (Joerger would add that “D’Antoni loved him, too”) and that it’s “all just basketball,” and “running is just about conditioning.” Randolph, though, has struggled with injuries the last two years, with a severe MCL injury in 2012 and last year missing two weeks after severely spraining his ankle against the Heat and then playing 37 minutes on it.

The biggest question for me, then, about the Grizzlies and pace of play is not whether Randolph will be able to adapt to a more uptempo system. I don’t doubt that at all: he’s a great basketball player, and too skilled not to be useful no matter what sort of an offense he’s operating in. What I worry about is age, and wear and tear. When Zach played for Mike D’Antoni’s Knicks teams, he wasn’t 32 years old. Health has been an issue for him for stretches of the last two years, and that sort of stuff doesn’t tend to get better as players get older, does it? I worry about the mileage on the big fella. A stretch without Randolph could be good, in that it would let Ed Davis, Kosta Koufos, and Jon Leuer soak up some minutes that could help them come playoff time, but ultimately, the West is too close this year for the Grizzlies to operate at less than 100% for very long.

Randolph will be fine operating in the new uptempo Griz system. I just wonder if it’s going to mean the Grizzlies have to spend some time without him in February or March. I worry that this might be the year that age starts to catch up to Randolph in a way that starts to change his game, and I hope for the Grizzlies’ sake that he adapts to it as well as he can. I have no reason to doubt that he will, but it’s too big of a question mark right now, sitting around waiting for something to write about basketball to get underway.

The thing that struck me most about Grizzlies Media Day yesterday was the ease. On the eve of training camp at Vanderbilt in Nashville, they all seemed comfortable with where they were at, comfortable with their situation, free to talk about the roles each player will have to play for the team to be successful this year—even when that meant talking about the fact that the Grizzlies are capable of going eleven or twelve guys deep if they have to, and that that depth necessarily means that minutes are going to be hard to come by for guys who don’t establish themselves in the rotation. At no point did anyone seem tense, or withdrawn, or even uncomfortable with what was going on around them.

What was going on around them was that each player sat at a little round bistro table with a black tablecloth on it, and guys like me (and, more often, guys with big honking TV cameras and lights and microphones with little cubic TV station logo boxes on them) grilled them for twenty minutes on everything from conditioning to whether they thought Lionel Hollins was a jerk to what restaurants they frequent in Memphis¹.

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This was actually my first Media Day, and while the crush of reporters, all talking over each other to get their questions heard and answered, was a little overwhelming at times, the whole thing had the feel of the first day of school, everyone hanging out in the hall before that first class shooting the breeze about what we all did while we were away from each other.

The takeaway is this: this Grizzlies squad has been fortunate. The core of the team has had a lot of continuity, and even though (as I talked about in my first piece for the blog) the locker room contains a lot of new faces, these are guys who are comfortable together, at ease. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it. But I wasn’t expecting the whole thing to be so… mellow. So Zen.

Robert Pera was not so Zen. He had a lot to say about his vision for the franchise: that he sees continuity and player selection as the keys to winning in a small market—constant references to the Spurs way of doing things—and that he has no intention to run the Grizzlies with an eye toward profitability, instead wanting to (1) win basketball games and (2) win basketball games and (3) do good things in the community of Memphis and (4) win basketball games. Pera came across as very passionate about his mission, both with Ubiquiti Networks and with the Grizzlies. Lots of talk of “bridging inequalities with technology,” mostly referring to Ubiquiti and emerging markets, but there are applications closer to home, both with Memphis and with the Grizzlies.

We’ve seen these Grizzlies develop from scrappy young underdogs with a couple of established pieces to a battle-tested veteran contender bolstering itself with youth around the edges. Mike Miller and Tayshaun Prince both had an understated workmanlike quality about them, calmly talking about struggling to stay healthy in the late phases of their respective careers and about knowing how to handle championship expectations. These are guys that have been there, have done that, and know what it takes, and along with Tony Allen, the guys on this team with rings seem to be the tone-setters. It’ll be interesting to see how that veteran leadership steers the team this year when the going gets rough, and just how much Miller and Prince—and even Allen, who is no spring chicken anymore himself—will be able to contribute to the Griz this year.

There was a pretty clear lack of BS in the room. Nobody really said much about how much muscle they added, and I don’t think anybody did any workouts with Hakeem Olajuwon. Ed Davis, put on the spot by Geoff Calkins and Ron Tillery about whether he regretted taking a shot at Lionel Hollins on Twitter when Hollins said he thought Davis should go to summer league, didn’t take it back. Said he was “insulted” by being stuck on the bench in the Ovinton J’Anthony Mayo Memorial Doghouse². When asked if all the talk about running bothered him, Zach Randolph reminded everyone he played for Mike D’Antoni.

Overall there was a sense that last year was great, but it didn’t mean much because the Grizzlies didn’t win a championship. One gets a sense that that’s really what these guys want, and that they all—to a man—believe that this year’s Grizzlies roster gives them the best chance they’ve ever had to do it. As they head off to Nashville to start training camp, the main focus of which appears to be “avoiding injuries” if you listen to what most everybody said in the Media Day interviews, this is a team that believes they’re legitimately on the cusp of being able to do great things. Over the coming weeks as the preseason gets underway and we start the march to the regular season, we’ll take a more in-depth look at whether I think they’re right.

I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of taking the reins of Beyond the Arc wasn’t a little intimidating. I’m not Chris Herrington, and it’d be foolish for me to try to be. Beyond the Arc is an important voice in the Grizzlies world. I’m humbled to be the guy chosen to take the reins, and it’s my intention to continue what I see as the tradition on Beyond the Arc: smart, level-headed writing about the Grizzlies, from the perspective of a guy who loves Memphis and loves NBA basketball.

A quick autobiographical blurb for everybody who isn’t familiar with my work over the last two seasons at SB Nation‘s Grizzly Bear Blues: I’m a native Memphian, and I’ve been a Grizzlies fan since they came to town. My literary tendencies are a little more Lester Bangs than beat writer. I once sold Brian Cardinal an iPod when I worked at the Apple Store. I think the NBA is a fascinating self-contained universe full of characters and possibilities that no other sport can offer, and I think the NBA and the vibe—the soul—of Memphis do fascinating, original things to each other when they collide.

Besides the obvious purposes of self-introduction, I think there’s an interesting parallel here: Beyond the Arc is filled with fresh faces, and so are the Grizzlies. New coach¹. Almost completely new bench. An ownership group fresh off its first offseason in control of the team—and fresh on the heels of being ranked as the #1 franchise in all of pro sports by ESPN The Magazine. It’s sort of a weird situation, isn’t it? Last year was the most successful season in the history of the franchise, and yet now, four months later, everything is different and there are questions about all of it and everything is shrouded in mystery and uncertainty.

We’re going to find out a lot of things about these Grizzlies (and probably some things about ourselves as fans) over the course of the 2013-2014 season, and that finding-out process begins today at Media Day as the team prepares for its training camp in Nashville².

Of course, it’s media day, not a Joni Mitchell record, so I’m not expecting any groundbreaking revelations. I’m expecting to hear that one player or another is “in the best shape of his career” and that each and every man on the roster “really worked hard this offseason to improve (some aspect of his game).” Maybe a player lost ten pounds of weight or added ten pounds of muscle. It’s always the same going into training camp: everybody is ready, everybody likes each other, everybody believes in the new coach, everybody is ready to make some noise this year and try to bring an honest-to-God NBA championship home to the (We Don’t) Bluff City for the first time.

Not to say that Media Day is pointless, but it’s not going to answer any of the real questions that surround the Grizzlies this season:

• Is Dave Joerger the right hire for the head coaching spot, and will he be able to manage the locker room as well as we know he can manage the X’s and O’s? When he says the Grizzlies are going to “pick up the pace” this year, what will that look like on the court?
• Is this Zach Randolph’s last season in a Grizzlies uniform, given the size of his contract and the shift of the offensive focus to the Mike Conley/Marc Gasol tandem? If so, will he be on the roster at the end of the season?
• Is the addition of Mike Miller enough to remedy the Grizzlies’ ongoing issues with outside shooting?
• Is Nick Calathes a viable NBA backup point guard?
• What, if anything, does Tayshaun Prince have left in the tank this season, and if it’s less than the front office is expecting, will they be able to move him?
• Is Ed Davis going to make the developmental leap the Grizzlies seem to be wanting him to make this year? He’s clearly an outlandishly talented player, but there’s a great deal of pressure on him this year to be the Grizzlies’ Power Forward Of The Future. Will he step up to the challenge?

Those are just some of the questions floating around the Grizz as they head into training camp. Everyone expects them to be good again this year, but it remains to be seen how good. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered before we really start to get a picture of who this team is, and how they’ll look on the floor. With a much-improved bench, they’re clearly in a position to improve on last year’s success, but the Western Conference has gotten better around them, and the race for the top spots is going to be tighter than ever.

In short, things are going to be different, both here at Beyond the Arc and down on Beale St. at the Grindhouse. No matter what the outcome, it’s going to be an interesting season, no doubt about it. I hope you’ll be along for the ride.