Tag: Ed Davis

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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

Game 59 Preview — Grizzlies vs. Trailblazers

CREDIT: 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.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Road Recap: Grizzlies 105, Pistons 91 — The Real Return of Quincy Pondexter

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Quincy Pondexter made a promising return last night in Detroit.

  • LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
  • Quincy Pondexter made a promising return last night in Detroit.

After a sleepy first quarter in the which the Grizzlies turned the ball over seven times and allowed 30 points to the Detroit Pistons, the team revved up its defensive intensity significantly, overwhelming the Pistons in the heart of the game with a 62-30 run in the second and third quarters.

Fourteen steals and seven blocks helping foster 24 fastbreak points was vintage Grizzlies basketball. Twenty-nine assists on 45 made field goals and balanced shooting (10 players with between five and 11 field-goal attempts) is new-look Grizzlies basketball. Put opportunistic defense and sharp, share-the-ball offense together and you get a blowout road win. (Extended garbage time made the final score look more reasonable.)

The best takeaways from the win, though, were the performances of Quincy Pondexter and Ed Davis. Pondexter got a few minutes in the penultimate game before the break, but didn’t look good. With a little more rehab/recovery time, Pondexter came back last night in true game shape. He knocked down a corner three, notched three steals, and was probably as effective on both ends as any Grizzlies player on the way to 10 points on 4-6 shooting in 22 minutes. Pondexter is both a better corner-three threat and a more physical, aggressive defender than either Tayshaun Prince or Austin Daye. His return will be very helpful for the Grizzlies and if he plays well, I think he could become a frequent fixture in closing lineups.

As for Davis, he got his longest run since joining the team — something abetted by the blowout — and was very productive, with 14 points on 6-7 shooting, four rebounds, and four blocks in 21 minutes. Davis showed his stronger-than-he-looks physicality with the blocks and power dunks and hit two of three on short jumpers that are more effective than fluid. He brings a different dimension to the team’s frontcourt rotation and hopefully this performance can help ease him into a larger role.

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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

First Take: Questions and Answers on the Rudy Gay Deal

Rudy_Gay.jpg

Wednesday afternoon, the Grizzlies pulled off the most momentous transaction since jettisoning Pau Gasol, dealing current leading scorer and franchise games-played leader Rudy Gay, along with cult hero Hamed Haddadi, in a three-team deal that brought back young power forward Ed Davis and a 2013 second-round pick from the Toronto Raptors and small forwards Tayshaun Prince and Austin Daye from the Detroit Pistons.

There are copious angles to consider with this deal, but let’s try — as quickly as possible — to give an initial reaction to many of them, in question-and-answer form. I’ll wade into some of these issues more, with more time for reflection, in the coming days. But here’s my first impression:

Is this really the best the Grizzlies could do?

Apparently so. While the Grizzlies gave up the highest-wattage player in the deal, they also checked most of the boxes on their wishlist:

Obtain a significant younger player on a good contract: Ed Davis, check.
Add a draft pick: Toronto’s second-rounder this summer, likely to be in the 35-45 range, check.
Add a replacement small forward on a more manageable contract: Tayshaun Prince, check.
Clean up payroll to enable flexibility under the tax going forward: Check.

Even accomplishing all that, it’s hard to get excited about the deal. Prince, at age 32, with three years left on his deal, is a less attractive wing replacement than seemed to be the realistic ideal. (My version of realistic ideal: Jared Dudley.) Davis, while a great get as a general asset, will likely have less of an immediate impact based on available minutes than a similarly productive wing player would have. And the second-rounder is not the kind of draft pick people — including the Grizzlies — had in mind.

The inability of the Grizzlies to get a first-rounder in a deal for Gay may suggest how much the confluence of Gay’s massive contract and sluggish production has impacted his trade value. Toronto, it should be noted, could not have given the Grizzlies a first-round pick for 2013, since their pick this summer may be owed to Oklahoma City. As a result, a first-rounder from Toronto couldn’t have come until at least 2015. But apparently the Grizzlies weren’t able to get a first-rounder in any deals they considered otherwise viable.

Though there’s definitely risk of further decline for Prince over the remaining years of his contract — I would fear the third year may have value only as an expiring-contract trade chip — this deal is preferable to what it would have been without a third team, which wouldn’t have addressed replacing Gay at small forward.