- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- Mike Conley: Man of the Weekend
This weekend’s Grizzlies back-to-back got away from me a little bit. I was at Friday’s home game with the Pistons, a 90-78 win, but as a civilian, taking my soon-to-be-three-year-old son to his first game. And I watched Saturday night’s 99-95 overtime road loss to the San Antonio Spurs on DVR delay.
As a means of catching up, I’m re-purposing the Postgame Notebook format to look back on what happened in Griz World this weekend:
The Lead: The Grizzlies went 1-1 on the weekend while playing without Tony Allen, who was nursing a sore groin.
Friday’s home game against the Pistons was a rough repeat of the prior home games against the Cavaliers and Raptors: The Grizzlies played down to competition in the first half and then turned up their defense in the second to secure a double-digit win.
Saturday night, the Grizzlies played a very well rested Spurs team on their own home floor, on the second night of a back to back, and built a 15-point lead in the second half before succumbing to some combination of fatigue, poor execution, and questionable calls.
On the latter: The missed shot-clock violation near the end of overtime was clearly an official’s error, but one that was only harmful to the Grizzlies in retrospect. If Jerryd Bayless and Rudy Gay had connected on the subsequent long lead pass for a transition layup, the Grizzlies would have benefited from not having the violation called. As far Manu Ginobili grabbing Gay’s arm on his attempted catch of that pass, it was definitely a foul, but not all actual fouls are actually called in NBA games. For the Grizzlies, that was an infuriating non-call, but it wasn’t a terribly surprising one.
As it is, after 15 games the Grizzlies stand at 12-3 and still lack a bad loss: Single digits to the Clippers in their home opener. A narrow home loss to a deep, athletic Nuggets team on the final game of a three-in-four-nights set. And nip-and-tuck road overtime loss in San Antonio on the second of a back-to-back. That’s it. The Grizzlies are the last team standing this NBA season that has yet to lose a game by double-digits.
If you want to be concerned about something, you could point to the team’s 0-2 record in games that have come down to execution in the final couple of minutes. But two games — two! — is a pretty small sample size.
