- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- Ed Davis is a likely start against Portland tonight.
The Grizzlies return home tonight to face the Portland Trailblazers in only the second meeting so far this season between these teams. The Grizzlies lost the first meeting, 86-84, in Memphis back on January 4th. Zach Randolph missed that game, as he’s likely to miss this one. Mike Conley scored only 6 points on 2-8 shooting and was outplayed by looming Rookie of the Year Damian Lillard, something of which the Grizzlies don’t need a repeat. But the biggest difference in the game was at the three-point line, where the Grizzlies actually shot a slightly higher percentage but the Blazers had 22 (!) more attempts.
I’m eschewing the usually three-part preview for this one, partly due to time constraints and partly because there’s one thing in particular I’m most interested in tonight:
Opportunity for Ed Davis?: With Zach Randolph and Darrell Arthur both looking doubtful, this means many more minutes and a likely start for Ed Davis, who’s coming off a double-double against Orlando.
Davis’ playing time has been pretty erratic since coming over as the primary long-term asset in the Rudy Gay trade. Though he’d been averaging more than 30 minutes a game for the Raptors over the prior month, Davis landed on a team with a deep, talented frontcourt rotation already in place, has seemed to struggle at times getting acclimated to the new system, and has had to earn the confidence of a coach more persuaded by his practice showing (and, apparently, his size) than his Toronto production.
The results, so far, have been mixed. Averaging only 11 minutes a game for the Grizzlies, Davis has shot 65% from the floor with a block rate that would rank third in the NBA over the full season. His free-throw shooting has been an unspeakable 39%. (He’s north of 60% on his career.) As a team, the Grizzlies have been a little better offensively with Davis on the floor and a little worse defensively. And you can put a “small sample size” caveat on all of it.
