1. A Team Emerging: Don’t look now, but the Grizzlies are starting to look like a real basketball team. With a convincing win tonight, the team has won four of its past five and, at 5-9, is only a few tantalizing possessions away from being 7-7. They aren’t that far from being a decent team (which makes the boneheaded way they rounded out the roster at the end of the summer even more depressing, but I’ve bemoaned that too much lately already) and aren’t that far from being a fun team to watch, though a 1-8 start and the Iverson debacle have guaranteed that it’ll be hard to get people to notice.
Tonight was a quality team win, with all five starters in double figures, good contributions from the bench, and six players with two or more assists. And an identity is emerging: One of the league’s most rugged yet skilled post tandems (Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph) as a focal point, flanked by a couple of dynamic perimeter scorers (Rudy Gay and O.J. Mayo), with young, hustling, defensive-oriented role players (Sam Young, DeMarre Carroll, hopefully Darrell Arthur later) off the bench. If the team can straighten out its point guard play (more on this in a bit) and mold top pick Hasheem Thabeet into an every-night contributor — neither an easy task right now — this team will start to make a lot of sense.
I know that teams built around dominant individual stars usually win big, but I have a long personal history of rooting for balanced teams (Bad Boys Pistons, Pippen/Sheed Blazers, Miller/Smits Pacers, Webber/Divac Kings, etc.) against superstars. I can get behind a team that has four players averaging between 15 and 22 points and looks like it’s starting to grow some backbone. The question now is whether this progress can survive the five-game West Coast road trip the team embarked after tonight’s game.
