- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- Jerryd Bayless scored a season-high 29, but it wasn’t enough in a game where so much went wrong.
After two days of practice to get a feel for their new players, the Grizzlies debuted a new starting lineup and still-evolving new rotation Tuesday night and ended up with perhaps their worst loss of the season, though I think the causal link between those two things is limited.
It’s said that victory has a thousand fathers but defeat’s an orphan. Not here. Zach Randolph, in the midst of an encouraging 21-13 bounce-back game, getting only one fourth quarter shot?
“I’ll take the blame for that,” Lionel Hollins said.
Marc Gasol fouling out in only 23 minutes and probably playing his worst two-way game of the season?
“It sucks, but it happens. This one’s on me,” Gasol said, dismissing the notion that the roster changes were to blame,
The fourth quarter, in which the Suns outscored the Grizzlies 31-19 to complete a come-from-behind victory, was a perfect storm of things going wrong for the Grizzlies:
Randolph didn’t get the ball, and wasn’t happy about it after the game.
The Grizzlies had more turnovers (7) than made field goals (5), and some of those turnovers were inexplicable, entirely unforced errors.
Phoenix point guard Goran Dragic, who’s often proved a tricky match-up for Mike Conley, got rolling, scoring 15 points on 5-6 shooting in the quarter, including a deja vu spinning lay-up when it seemed like the Suns were on the verge of a shot-clock violation.
And the Grizzlies had a head-scratcher of a late possession. Down four with the ball and 32 seconds to play, the Grizzlies came out of a timeout and, when they failed to get a good shot in the first few seconds after the in-bounds, settled for a rushed Darrell Arthur three-point attempt. An early shot would have been preferable given the shot-clock/game-clock margin, but a good shot was necessary.
