Tag: Darrell Arthur

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Griz-Clips Game 3 Preview: Lessons from Los Angeles

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Its that time again.

The playoffs move from Flophouse to Grindhouse tonight, with an 8:30 tip down at FedExForum. A few things on my mind as the series moves to Memphis:

Fourth Quarter Contrast and the Unremarkable Bench Disparity: I don’t have much in the way of expectation in terms of performance or outcome tonight, but I do in terms of strategy. Based on adjustments between Games 1 and 2 and his subsequent public statements, it seems like Lionel Hollins has come around to a notion that, frankly, I wrote and talked about in the run-up to the series: That, against the Clippers, the Grizzlies likely need to tighten their rotation, lean more on the starters, and be careful with early fourth-quarter lineups.

While the details are different between Games 1 and 2 in terms of foul issues and player performance, both games ended up only one bucket apart through three quarters. In Game 1, the Clippers lead 75-69 to start the fourth. In Game 2, the Clippers lead 75-71. After that, things went very differently, with the Clippers running over the Grizzlies 37-22 in Game 1, and the Grizzlies battling to a 20-18 advantage in Game 2.

What was different? Let’s start with who was on the floor. In both games, the Clippers started with the same full bench unit, which happens to include what might arguably be three of their five best players this season — Eric Bledsoe, Jamal Crawford, and Matt Barnes.

In Game 1, the Grizzlies countered with a “throwing-stuff-against-the-wall” small-ball lineup, with Tayshaun Prince sliding to the four and three bench players on the perimeter. Marc Gasol was the only starter playing his regular position. This lineup made a couple of shots early to cut the deficit to one, but couldn’t handle the Clippers on the boards or Eric Bledsoe in the backcourt and by the time the Grizzlies started coming back with more starters the game was already beginning to slip away.

In Game 2, by contrast, The Grizzlies began the quarter with a more conventional two-starter lineup (Mike Conley and Zach Randolph) but came in more quickly with other starters when signs of trouble emerged.

On the whole, the biggest difference between the two fourth quarters for the Grizzlies came in the backcourt, where starters Conley and Tony Allen combined for roughly five minutes in Game 1 but played 23 of 24 minutes in Game 2. Perhaps this had something to do with the enormous defensive disparity between the two games.

On the Clippers end, the biggest disparity was the odd gift from Clippers’ coach Vinny Del Negro, who had played proven fourth-quarter Griz killer Eric Bledsoe for the full-fourth quarter in Game 1 and but then yanked him after five minutes in Game 2.

The good news for the Grizzlies is you can probably expect their Game 2 adjustments to carry over. The bad news is that Del Negro may not be so reliable.

In general, I shrug off worry about the bench disparity between the two teams, with the Clippers’ bench outscoring their Grizzlies’ counterparts 79-51 through two games. It is what it is at this point. The Clippers are built like this. Their strong bench isn’t just a luxury. Reserve guards Bledsoe and Crawford are more dynamic than veteran starter Billups. Starting center DeAndre Jordan is such a deplorable foul shooter that he can’t be trusted in the fourth quarter. All season, reserve small forward Barnes has outplayed starter Caron Butler. The Clippers best lineups, on the season, have tended to be bench-heavy lineups. While the Grizzlies would love to get better, more consistent production from the likes of Jerryd Bayless, Quincy Pondexter, Darrell Arthur, or Ed Davis, they don’t need to play the Clippers even bench vs. bench. Basketball isn’t played that way. The only match-up that matters is roster vs. roster.

The question for the Grizzlies is if the starters can play heavy minutes — and have their rest staggered effectively — without wearing down. Conley and Gasol played 44 minutes each in Game 2. That’s probably a bit much to expect. But with the season on the line and no back-to-backs in the playoffs, there’s no reason — beyond poor play or extreme foul problems — starters can’t play 38-40 a game.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Grizzlies-Clippers Series Preview: Ten Takes, Part Two

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Playoff-tested Tayshaun Prince could have the right match-up against the Clippers.

  • LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
  • Playoff-tested Tayshaun Prince could have the right match-up against the Clippers.

After a cover package in this week’s Flyer and a first installment of this series-specific preview yesterday, I wrap it up today with this second installment. The series begins at 9:30 tomorrow night in Los Angeles. Until then …

6. TP3: The Clippers are associated with Chris Paul and Blake Griffin. The less starry Grizzlies with the trio of Zach Randolph, Marc Gasol, and Mike Conley. But if Eric Bledsoe is the secondary player I see as most crucial for the Clippers’ hopes in this series, I think Tayshaun Prince could be the Grizzlies’ wild card.

Prince has been a very modest scorer for the Grizzlies since coming over at midseason, averaging only 8.8 points a game on 43/37 shooting, with his 9.1 field-goal attempts per game including only 1.1 three-points attempts.

But Prince has been a bigger factor against the Clippers. In three games this season, including one when he still played for Detroit, Prince has averaged 15.3 points on 54/57 shooting, his minutes (31.7 average for Griz, 36.3 vs. Clips), shot attempts (12.3), and three-point attempts (2.3) all up.

Though the sample size is obviously tiny, Prince’s shot selection has been less mid-range dependent against the Clippers than it’s been this season overall. And it’s easy to see why that might be the case. None of the Clippers’ small forwards — Caron Butler, Matt Barnes, and Grant Hill — are a deterrent to Prince’s post game. Meanwhile, the Clippers have proven susceptible to both wing scoring and three-point shooting overall, so if Prince spaces the floor out more than is typical for the Grizzlies — and this was happening in last week’s meeting between these teams — there will be open long-range looks.

Prince has hit the 15-point plateau only twice in 37 games with the Grizzlies, one of those against the Clippers. But with favorable match-ups, an expected bump in minutes, and so much defensive pressure on the Grizzlies’ backcourt, the bet here is that Prince does it a couple of times here if the series goes long and averages double-digits.

Prince’s ball-handling ability can also be a crucial release valve for the Grizzlies offense, giving the team a viable option outside the backcourt to advance the ball downcourt and initiate offensive sets, an adjustment the team made in the second half of the last meeting between these teams, after Eric Bledsoe had manhandled Griz guards in the first half.

The lanky Prince could also be the catalyst in another potentially key element of the series: Three-point shooting. Last spring that was — unsurprisingly — a big advantage for the Clippers, who made six a game on 38% shooting while the Grizzlies made three a game on 29% shooting. There’s good reason to think this disparity might even out this time.

The Grizzlies were an average team in terms of defending against three-point shooting before the Rudy Gay trade, but have been the NBA’s best in that department since. A more attentive Prince is less likely to surrender the kind of long-range barrage that helped the Clippers steal Game 1 last spring. Meanwhile, the Clippers have struggled to defend the three this season. In the two games between these teams since the trade, the Clippers and Grizzlies have each made 12 three-point field goals, but the Grizzlies have done so on 48% shooting to the Clippers’ 29%.

The key to threes in this series could be at the three, where the Clippers’ Butler and Barnes averaged three makes a game between them in the regular season while the Grizzlies’ Prince and Quincy Pondexter — who combined to shoot 8-15 from three against the Clippers this season — averaged a combined 1.5 a game. Winning the small forward match-up — overall but especially from three-point range — could be a quiet tipping point in the series.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Postgame Notebook: Grizzlies 110, Celtics 106 — Gasol Sits, Bayless Erupts in a Weird, Wild One.

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Darrell Arthur started and stepped up in Marc Gasols absence.

  • LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
  • Darrell Arthur started and stepped up in Marc Gasol’s absence.

The Lead: The lead story of this game is not the game itself, it’s the news that came prior to tip, that Marc Gasol would not play. This news was followed by a one-liner press release from the team:

The Memphis Grizzlies today announced that center Marc Gasol re-aggravated an abdominal tear on March 22 at New Orleans and will be out indefinitely.

That may sound bad, and it’s certainly not optimal, but I’d caution against freakouts. As the release implies, Gasol’s been playing hurt the last couple of weeks, and still playing well. There had already been signs and adjustments. Gasol was not jumping the tip in recent games to save wear and tear. And he would wince some after physical plays (such as the two charges he took against the Thunder). I wondered if the Randolph-heavy offensive game plan against the Thunder was related to that the injury.

As for sitting him now, my sense is there’s a cause/benefit aspect: How important is the remaining playoff positioning and how do you weigh that against the value of rest and treatment for an injury that won’t be going away before playoff time?

Both before and after the game, coach Lionel Hollins suggested it was a day-to-day thing. Others I talked with suggested Gasol would likely miss multiple games. But no one seems to think this endangers his availability for the postseason.

With Gasol out and Zach Randolph coming off the bench after being late to shootaround, the Grizzlies started Ed Davis and Darrell Arthur up front. The Celtics were also shifting lineups, with Kevin Garnett and Courtney Lee both out with ankle sprains.

The result was an out-of-character contest for this particular match-up. On the season, both Memphis and Boston are elite defensive teams (second and fifth, respectively) who play at a slow pace (28th and 19th) and are mediocre offensively (20th and 22nd).

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Bigs and Balance: Elevating Marc Gasol and sharing the ball will be the Grizzlies’ second-half path.

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Zach Randolph has bounced back from a rough January, but dealing Rudy Gay hasnt really changed his role so far.

  • LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
  • Zach Randolph has bounced back from a rough January, but dealing Rudy Gay hasn’t really changed his role so far.

The Grizzlies emerged from last weekend’s NBA All-Star break still on pace for the best record in franchise history but with many questions to answer over the season’s remaining 31 regular-season games.

If the team, projected to finish fifth in the Western Conference even before the trade of longtime would-be star Rudy Gay to the Toronto Raptors, slides further than that, then jettisoning Gay will obviously be seen — fairly or not, given the preexisting downward trajectory — as a turning point. But if the Grizzlies maintain their ground or better, the correction will have begun not so much with the deal itself but with the delayed acceptance of it.

The Grizzlies, from the head coach down through the locker room, wasted a few days pouting in the wake of the Gay trade, despite the fact that the team’s slide since November had coincided with Gay’s worst season since his rookie year.

The trade itself was a reminder of something we learned with the Pau Gasol deal: that, in a lot of quarters, any deal made by the Grizzlies that includes financial motivation will be seen entirely through that prism.

Make no mistake, with new controlling owner Robert Pera acknowledging some initial cash-flow issues in the immediate wake of his purchase agreement with Michael Heisley, there are legitimate questions about the wherewithal of the new ownership group. But those questions can’t begin to be answered until we see how they conduct the coming off-season. The problem with drawing such conclusions from the Gay deal, of course, is that “financial reasons” and “basketball reasons” are becoming increasingly inseparable in the NBA. Gay is set to make north of $19 million at the conclusion of his current contract without having ever made an All-Star team. In a league with strict rules that tie player payroll to methods of player acquisition, that’s a poor allocation of resources, no matter your market.

Nevertheless, the deal was disruptive, and the team seemed very fragile in its aftermath, with head coach Lionel Hollins seemingly incapable of making public statements without generating controversy and the team’s defensive effort looking near non-existent in the first half of a road loss to the Atlanta Hawks.

But the team rallied to play a competitive second half in Atlanta, and, afterward, team leaders such as Marc Gasol and Tony Allen responded with tough-minded comments that went beyond the usual locker-room platitudes. A day and a half later, Hollins used his pre-game press availability to finally end the mourning. He didn’t pretend to approve of the deal, but he did re-engage the season’s challenge.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Postgame Notebook: Grizzlies 106, Lakers 93 — Lakers Continue Death Spiral, Griz Find Some Life

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

The Grizzlies pushed the Lakers around.

The Lead: This game began with both teams in a very fragile state and ended with one in an even bigger world of hurt and the other maybe — just maybe — finding out a few things.

The Lakers began their day in Memphis with an Airing of Grievances, but were not able to follow it up with any Feats of Strength. Instead, their day just kept getting worse:

Dwight Howard had two rebounds and zero made field goals through 14 first-half minutes before grabbing his shoulder and asking to leave the game. He didn’t return.

Steve Nash impersonated a traffic cone on defense while shooting 2-6 with six turnovers.

Kobe Bryant went into Kobe Hero mode, which worked for awhile. Five minutes into the third quarter, Bryant had scored 24 points on 11-15 shooting, with three consecutive makes early in the quarter cutting what had been a 15-point Grizzlies lead down to only three. Bryant then went 0-8 the rest of the game and with the makeshift bandages he was applying to the team’s offense unraveling, the Lakers completely fell apart, the Grizzlies going on a 30-14 run between the late third and early fourth quarter to blow the game open. (An 11-3 Lakers garbage-time run made the game look closer than it really was.)

As for the Grizzlies, the 106 points were the most the team’s scored since January 7th in Sacramento. In both cases, you have to consider the defensive quality of the opponent — per Pau Gasol: “We make these teams look a lot better offensively than they really are” — but for a team that’s been struggling to even hit 85, the outburst served to relieve some pressure. They did this scoring at least 23 points in every quarter, without doing much from outside (4-13 from three), and despite terrible, turnover-riddled starts to each half.

It was the Grizzlies first game since the trade that sent away two rotation players, and Lionel Hollins had only 10 active players at his disposal. If an opponent in a death spiral had a lot to do with the Grizzlies success, part of it probably had to do with a collective — and potentially short-term — reaction to the theoretical adversity of the trade. Coming together. Playing with a chip on their shoulder. Having something to prove. Pick your cliché.

But I also feel like this performance suggests a few things for the now newish-look Grizzlies.

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Sports Sports Feature

Mr. Versatility

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

An unusually eventful Grizzlies season has been even bumpier over the past week, with the most intensely enjoyable home game of the season — Friday’s overtime win against the San Antonio Spurs — followed by two dispiriting non-performances: a big loss in Dallas the following night and a 99-73 drubbing at FedExForum Monday night at the hands of the Los Angeles Clippers. The 26-point scoring margin is the Grizzlies’ worst defeat of the season, and the 30.3 percent shooting was the worst home performance in franchise history.

There were excuses for both bad losses. The Dallas game seemed like a classic schedule loss, the second night of a back-to-back on the road after a draining overtime win. Monday night, the team was playing without leading scorer Rudy Gay, out of town for a family funeral. Gay’s loss, on top of the loss of his own backup, Quincy Pondexter, had the Grizzlies playing unconventional lineups all night and against the league’s deepest team. The Clippers, of course, were playing without their best player, Chris Paul.

If the Grizzlies have a good showing — win or lose — in a Wednesday-night rematch with the Spurs in San Antonio, these losses can maintain their asterisks. A bad showing Wednesday night and alarm bells will sound.

But while the Grizzlies’ contender status and season trajectory still hangs in the balance — pending the next game, the next Rudy Gay trade rumor, or the next Lionel Hollins radio interview — let’s take a quiet moment amid the clamor to recognize one player on the roster undercard who is doing good things now that promise even more going forward.

Darrell Arthur missed all last season with an Achilles injury and then missed the start of this season with a more minor leg injury. Upon his return, it’s taken him a few weeks to improve his conditioning and timing back to something resembling his pre-injury form. But in recent weeks, he’s shown why many — myself included — thought he was the team’s best reserve player and one of the league’s better backup forwards before the injury. Arthur’s minutes and production are both up in January — his rebounding rate up, his turnover rate down, his jumper starting to fall more.

Arthur’s surface stats don’t look like much — seven points, three rebounds a game — but watch him closely and you’ll regularly see Arthur make impactful defensive plays that don’t register in the box score: Blowing up pick-and-rolls. Switching onto and containing perimeter ballhandlers. Cutting off drives and setting up teammate steals. Racing down in transition to disrupt a fastbreak.

This month, with the injury to Pondexter, we’ve seen Arthur add to his resume by playing a more than passable small forward. Prior to Monday night’s debacle, the Grizzlies had outscored opponents by nine points in 43 minutes with Arthur on the wing. Against the Clippers, with most of the team in the tank, Arthur fared a little better than most and did while guarding five different players over the course of the game.

Arthur was the star of that dramatic win over the Spurs, with his best all-around game since facing the same Spurs, pre-injury, in the playoffs two seasons prior. Arthur made a series of big plays in the fourth quarter and overtime in that game: defensive rebounds, mid-range jumpers, winning a tip against Hall of Famer Tim Duncan, and sprinting out for a transition dunk that sealed the game in the final seconds. But his best moment was easy to overlook. In the final sequence of the game, after Gay made a pull-up jumper for the go-ahead basket, the Spurs had a chance to tie or take the lead. They ran a high pick-and-roll between point guard Tony Parker and Duncan. And Arthur blew it up: switching onto Parker and pushing him outside his shooting range, recovering back to Duncan to deny a pass, and then jumping back out on Parker to contest the fadeaway jumper that was left. Three key defensive plays in a matter of seconds to preserve Gay’s big shot and set up Arthur’s own dunk at the other end.

While many things are uncertain about the Grizzlies right now, Arthur’s comeback and blooming versatility is a good story flying under the radar.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Silver Lining Playbook: Darrell Arthur’s Value and Tony Wroten’s Promise Amid Roster Uncertainty.

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Darrell Arthut

An unusually eventful Grizzlies season has been even bumpier over the past week, with the most intensely enjoyable home game of the season — Friday’s overtime win over the San Antonio Spurs — followed by two terribly dispiriting non-performances: A big loss in Dallas the following night and a 99-73 drubbing at FedExForum Monday night at the hands of the Los Angeles Clippers, the team that had ended the Grizzlies season on their previous appearance in the building. The 26-point scoring deficit against the Clippers marked the Grizzlies’ worst defeat of the season and the 30.3% shooting in that game was the lowest for a home game in franchise history.

There were excuses for both bad losses, if you want them. The Dallas game seemed like a classic schedule loss, the second night of a back-to-back on the road after a draining overtime win. Monday night, the team was playing without leading scorer Rudy Gay, out of town for a family funeral. Gay’s loss, on top of the loss of his own back-up, Quincy Pondexter, had the Grizzlies playing little-used and unconventional lineups all night, and against the league’s deepest team. The Clippers, of course, were playing without their best player, point guard Chris Paul.

If the Grizzlies have a good showing — win or lose — in a Wednesday night re-match with the Spurs in San Antonio, these losses can maintain their asterisks. A bad showing Wednesday night — a third in a row — and alarm bells will sound.

But while the Grizzlies’ contender status and season trajectory hang yet still in the balance — pending the next game, the next Rudy Gay trade rumor, or the next Lionel Hollins radio interview — let’s take a quiet moment amid the clamor to recognize two players on the roster undercard doing good things now that promise even more going forward.

Darrell Arthur missed all last season with an Achilles injury and then missed the start of this season with a more minor leg injury. Upon his return, it’s taken him a few weeks to improve his conditioning and timing back to something resembling his pre-injury form. But in recent weeks he’s shown why many — myself included, not to mention new Grizzlies exec John Hollinger — thought he was the team’s best reserve player and one of the league’s better back-up forwards before the injury. Arthur’s minutes and production are both up in January — his rebounding rate up, his turnover rate down, his jumper starting to fall more.

Arthur’s surface stats don’t look like much — 7 points, 3 rebounds a game — but watch him closely and you’ll regularly see Arthur make impactful defensive plays that don’t register in the box score: Blowing up pick-and-rolls. Switching onto and containing perimeter ballhandlers. Cutting off drives and setting up teammates’ steals. Racing down in transition to disrupt a fastbreak.