- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol probably didn’t share the floor enough in the season’s final quarter.
After posting my Game 7 story early Sunday evening, I had to put it all away — absent a reluctant trip to Monday’s final media session — until we wrapped on this week’s paper yesterday afternoon.
But, with that out of the way, I sat down Tuesday afternoon, before my weekly appearance on The Chris Vernon Show, and went through the last 15 minutes of the game again. This gave me not only a different look at the action than I got from my upstairs media seat, but the ability to pause, rewind, re-watch, etc. And four things jumped out to me as major factors in the Grizzlies’ struggles, particularly on the offensive end, where the team mustered only 16 points on 4-18 shooting in the final quarter:
1. The Arenas/Haddadi Substitutions: The Grizzlies used lineups at the end of the third quarter and at the beginning of the fourth quarter that they hadn’t used in the series to that point, with Marc Gasol and Hamed Haddadi paired at the end of the third and Haddadi and Gilbert Arenas paired to start the fourth. And re-watching confirms that the Haddadi and Arenas substitutions really hurt the team.
Arenas hadn’t been effective in his limited minutes all series, of course. But, in fairness, Lionel Hollins had played Haddadi important second-half minutes in two other games — 4 and 6, I think — and gotten good results from this move. But it didn’t work in Game 7, and I think it had a lot to do with the situations in which Haddadi was placed. Haddadi is a quality backup center when he sticks to within five feet of the hoop, but in this game he was routinely forced to handle the ball on the perimeter — usually after running a pick-and-roll with O.J. Mayo, in which Mayo was trapped — which, unsurprisingly, resulted in turnovers and low-percentage shots.
2. Fatigue was Real: In his post-game press conference, Hollins cited fatigue as a factor in his late-game substitutions, and that certainly seems legitimate. On the game, the four players who logged the most minutes — Rudy Gay (40), Mike Conley (40), Zach Randolph (39), and Marc Gasol (37) — were all Grizzlies. Chris Paul (35) was the only Clipper to top 30 minutes. The Clippers’ superior bench play was one of the stories of the series and it was definitive in Game 7. There are a couple of times in the fourth quarter where Conley, playing with flu-like symptoms, looks like he’s going to collapse. The play before Randolph controversial trip to the bench in the middle of the quarter, he was jogging back on defense while Kenyon Martin was streaking past him for a dunk. On the crucial play late when O.J. Mayo got a steal and had a chance to cut the Clippers lead from six to four, both Chris Paul and Reggie Evans tracked him down to contest his shot. Not a single other Grizzlies player even crossed half court.
