With the season winding down, I’m going to spend the next couple of days looking at the league’s various year-end awards and making the case for Grizzlies players who deserve to be part of the conversation in each category. Up first, Zach Randolph’s undersung career year and his candidacy for all-NBA honors:
- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- Zach Randolph: Better than ever this season.
Zach Randolph had a career year in his first go-around with the Grizzlies, rehabbing his reputation, making his first all-star team, and becoming a team-leader and fan favorite. Randolph’s surface stats were in line with his career averages — he’s Mr. 20-10 — but he was a better, more efficient player than he’d been in previous stops, a case I made in this long mid-season piece.
Well, Randolph has bee even better in his second season with the Grizzlies, even if this new “career year” hasn’t registered as strongly.
In his primary areas of contribution — as a scorer and rebounder — Randolph has repeated last season’s performance — even improved on it a little bit. Randolph is once again averaging 20 points a game, but this time with a shooting percentage — .502 — that is the second best of his career and his best since becoming a starting player in his third season. Randolph is shooting more jumpers this season, but not more threes, maintaining last season’s reasonable decline in three-point shooting after growing far too fond of the shot in his time with the Knicks and Clippers. And while he’s shooting roughly the same percentage from the perimeter (40%), the big difference has been that he’s making his interior attempts at an even higher percentage, improving from 58% to 64% in the paint, per 82Games.com.
