The Lead: The Grizzlies completed their long march back to .500 with a rather thorough pounding of a Washington Wizards team that is now 0-23 on the road.
The Griz have been making a habit of blowing double-digit leads of late — I know, “of late” — most recently against the Toronto Raptors and New Jersey Nets last week. But not tonight. The Wizards held a two-point lead for a few seconds midway through the first quarter, amid five early ties, but then the Grizzlies built a multi-possession lead on a flurry of buckets from Darrell Arthur and Zach Randolph and never really let the Wizards back into the game.
After a 9-2 Wizards run cut the Grizzlies’ game-high 21-point lead to 14 early in the fourth quarter, instead of letting the momentum completely turn, the Grizzlies responded with run-stopping buckets from Sam Young and Marc Gasol and never let the Wizards get within single digits.
The Grizzlies got double-digit scoring from six players in a strong team-wide effort, that number not including O.J. Mayo, missing the second of 10 games to league suspension for violating the NBA’s drug policy, or Rudy Gay, who struggled through foul trouble and general ineffectiveness en route to season-low four points on 2-11 shooting.
“It’s nice to be back at .500,” Lionel Hollins said after the game. “We’ve been scratching and clawing. Stuttering and starting and stuttering.” The team was last at .500 back on November 8th, when a home win over the Phoenix Suns put the Grizzlies at 4-4. The team followed that game with a five-game losing streak that the culminated in a road loss to this same Washington Wizards team. Since then, the team had gotten to within two games of .500 six times without closing the deal. Now after winning five of its past six games to get back to even the team gets something of a clean slate, as Zach Randolph put it after the game, and a chance to build on this momentum and make a legitimate playoff push in the season’s final three months.
