Tag: Game Preview

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 74 Preview: Grizzlies vs. Spurs

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

A big game tonight at FedExForum will feature the leagues two best centers this season.

  • LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
  • A big game tonight at FedExForum will feature the league’s two best centers this season.

UPDATE: The Spurs have now announced that both Tim Duncan and small forward Kawhi Leonard will be out for tonight’s game.

There are only four regular-season games left at FedExForum this season and tonight’s is a doozy. It’s a rematch of what I consider this season’s best game — the January 11th overtime Grizzlies win — and one in which both teams are fighting for playoff positioning and the Grizzlies are trying to tie a franchise record with win number 50.

Three things on the brain about tonight’s game:

1. How will Pop play it?: Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is notoriously protective of his stars during the regular season, so it will be interesting to see how he approaches this one, the second half of a back-to-back set after last night’s surprising home loss to a Miami Heat team playing without Lebron James and Dwyane Wade. Tim Duncan — having an under-appreciated fountain-of-youth season — hasn’t hit 65 total minutes on a back-to-back set since opening weekend. He played an uncharacteristic 35 minutes last night. So, if the Spurs stay to form, he may be limited tonight. The younger Tony Parker has topped 70 minutes in back-to-backs a couple of times this season, but has more typically been kept to 60 or fewer minutes. He played 37 last night. And the third member of the Spurs’ star trio, sixth man Manu Ginobili, is already out with a hamstring injury. The Spurs are 1.5 games up on the Thunder in the race for the West’s top seed and are now three games back of the Heat for overall homecourt in the playoffs. How much does this game mean to them?

2. Are the Griz back in a groove?: The Grizzlies, by contrast, enter the game in a better place, having corrected both a 1-3 since an overtime win over the Thunder and a more troubling five-game road losing streak with a 2-0 weekend against the Rockets and Wolves. The team’s post-halftime defense returned to lockdown mode (16- and 17-point third quarters allowed). Zach Randolph broke out of his slump (35 and 19 on 11-23 shooting). Marc Gasol looked uninhibited (42-13-10 on 16-24 shooting). Mike Conley concluded an near-All-Star quality March (34 and 13 with 6 steals on 13-26 shooting). And the bench was a big boost in Minnesota. The Grizzlies will need a strong closing kick — and some luck — to get homecourt advantage in a first-round series. A win tonight would be highly encouraging in that regard.

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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

Game 56 Preview: Grizzlies vs. Mavericks

Dirk Nowitzki is back for the Mavericks.

  • Dirk Nowitzki is back for the Mavericks.

The Grizzlies will try to extend their conference-leading seven-game win streak tonight when they host Southwest Division rival Dallas Mavericks at FedExForum.

As usual, three thoughts in advance of the tilt:

1. The Twisty, Troubling Post-Trade Trajectory: The Grizzlies have gone 8-2 against a weak schedule with their post-trade roster, but, despite the record, this stretch as been one of sharp turns in terms of style and effectiveness. I’d break it down like this:

Off Eff Def Eff Pace Ast Ratio

WAS 91.9 81.4 92.9 17.4
PHO 97.3 102.5 93.1 12.3
ATL 102.2 113.0 90.6 22.0

These were the Post-Trade Malaise games. They squeaked by against an undermanned and offensively inept Wizards team and then lost two straight, plagued by turnover-riddled offense against the Suns and “no mas” first-half defense against the Hawks. The whole team was in a funk.

GS 105.2 100.2 93.5 20.3
MIN 118.4 97.8 89.3 22.8
SAC 108.5 102.5 99.1 16.5

The Rally the Troops Winning Streak heading into the break, seemingly prompted by the team and its coach simply deciding to stop pouting and get down to business. The offense exploded and the defensive tightened up a bit, but was still short of the team’s established norm.

DET 113.1 93.4 95.1 21.7
TOR 102.4 94.9 86.2 15.9

The Rudy Trade Road-Trip out of the break. Against the Pistons, the Grizzlies seemed to put it all together, combining their pre-break offense with a return to the ferocious defense that had been their hallmark for much of the past few seasons. The defense was just as spectacular against Toronto, but the paced slowed and the offense bogged down. A result of pressing too much in an unusually physical, second-of-a-back-to-back roadie or a start of something?

ORL 99.1 92.2 88.9 18.9
BKN 92.4 86.0 83.0 15.2

My fear is that this pair could become Regression to the Mean Weekend. The defense kept getting better, the offense fell apart, and the pace slowed to a crawl, with the danger that the Grizzlies could be coming out of their trade turbulence and settling into what they were for the two months before the deal: A great defensive team and a bad offensive team. Since the trade, Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol are both shooting under 45% from the floor while the team’s three-point attempts, already lowest in the league, have been trending down even more.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 54 Preview: Grizzlies vs. Magic

Marc Gasol looks to get his offense back on track against the Magic tonight.

  • Marc Gasol looks to get his offense back on track against the Magic tonight.

The Grizzlies look to extend their current five-game winning streak at home tonight against the Orlando Magic. As always, when time permits, three thoughts on tonight’s game:

1. A Mismatch, On Paper: The Magic were the most active team in yesterday’s relatively quiet trade deadline, moving four players out — including sharpshooter J.J. Redick — and bringing four players in in two different deals. But, because of the timing of the trades relative to tonight’s game, it seems unlikely that any of the new players will be in uniform. Given that the Magic were already missing players to injury (Glen Davis) and suspension (Hedo Turkoglu), it seems like the Magic might only have eight players active tonight, with the majority of them first- and second-year players.

That’s bad news for a team that was already competing for the league’s worst record, going 3-26 (!) since a 12-13 start. The Magic have only one road win since mid-December and just lost by double-digits at home to the Bobcats. They’re bad — and now getting worse.

So, this should be a mismatch, but while the Grizzlies are one of only eight teams that currently have a winning road record, they’ve been vulnerable at home lately. Since Christmas, the Grizzlies have suffered home losses to the Sixers, Blazers, Hornets, and Suns, all teams with losing records.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 49 Preview: Grizzlies vs. Warriors

The Grizzlies return home for a big one tonight against the Golden State Warriors, a team only half a game back of the Grizzlies in the Western Conference playoff standings.

As always, when time permits, three thoughts:

Center Andrew Bogut is back for the Warriors.

  • Center Andrew Bogut is back for the Warriors.

1. Meeting Down at the Crossroads: These two teams have both struggled after strong starts. After opening 14-3, the Grizzlies have gone 16-15 since. The Warriors started 21-10 and have gone 9-9 since. And these declines have happened for reasons that are simultaneously similar and divergent.

For the Grizzlies, the great early start was driven by an unexpectedly and perhaps unsustainably explosive offense that garnered lots of national attention. That offense has now slid — and had plummeted well before the recent trades — from the Top 5 to 23rd in points per 100 possessions. For the Warriors, long a defensive sieve, it was a surprisingly — and perhaps unsustainably — stingy defense, even in the absence of center Andrew Bogut, that drove their rise up the standings. That defense has now tumbled from the Top 10 down to 17th in points allowed per 100 possessions.

2. Defending the Three: For the Grizzlies however, defense has actually been a bigger problem than offense of late. They gave up 10-24 three-point shooting to Atlanta in Wednesday night’s loss, much of that in transition. If that doesn’t tighten up tonight it could get ugly against a Warriors team that leads the NBA in three-point percentage at 39% (Atlanta is fourth at 38%).

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 42 Preview: Grizzlies vs. Nets

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

The Grizzlies embark on the second half of the season tonight against a Brooklyn Nets team that’s gone 10-1 in January and is pushing its way up the Eastern Conference standings.

This is likely to be a much tougher test for the newer-look Grizzlies than the Lakers provided Wednesday night.

As always, three thoughts:

Zach Randolph, All-Star

1. Zach Randolph: All-Star: The Grizzlies will welcome Zach Randolph tonight as the franchise’s first two-time All-Star. It was very unclear how All-Star selections were going to shake out for the Grizzlies this year. It could have been Randolph or Marc Gasol or both or neither. Any of those outcomes would have been defensible, with the final three spots presumably coming down to five worthy candidates — Randolph, LaMarcus Aldridge, and David Lee, who all made it, and Gasol and Stephen Curry, who did not.

Prior to yesterday’s announcement, I did a quick survey of media picks around the web. Of the 11 I found, only one — CBSSports.com’s Ken Berger — had no Grizzlies on the team. Two — ESPN.com’s Marc Stein and Ethan Sherwood Strauss — picked both Randolph and Gasol. And the other eight all had Gasol making it over Randolph. Still, I wasn’t surprised the coaches went the other way. Randolph’s per-game stats (16-12-1) are a little more impressive than Gasol’s (13-7-4), and Randolph has the easily digestible pegs of “second in the league in rebounding” and “first in the league in double-doubles.” For Randolph, it’s an outside affirmation of his full return from last season’s knee injury.

Gasol’s offense has waned along with the team’s over the past month, but his chief calling card is his rock-solid but rarely flamboyant defense, where he anchors the conference’s best unit. The choices of Joakim Noah and Tyson Chandler in the East proves the coaches don’t ignore defense for the sake of scoring averages, but in Gasol’s case, with so much worthy competition, his subtle excellence on that end wasn’t enough.

Gasol will be matched up tonight with another “snub” in Nets center Brook Lopez, who is having a bounce-back season with the Nets, averaging 19 points a game on 52% shooting.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 40 Preview: Grizzlies vs. Pacers

After a disappointing 10-11 start, the Indiana Pacers had already crept up to 17-13 when the Grizzlies played them in Indianapolis on New Year’s Eve, and the Pacers continued their ascent afterward, going 7-3 since and moving to within 2.5 games of the top seed in the East.

The Grizzlies built a nice lead in that earlier meeting only to suffer one of those now-familiar offensive collapses, getting outscored 28-16 in the fourth quarter and losing 88-83.

Today’s rematch, of course, is being televised nationally on ESPN as part of the NBA annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day slate. Tipoff is noon.

As always, three thoughts. But we’ll make this one an “and one”:

1. Martin Luther King Day: The game itself is secondary today to honoring the legacy of Dr. King. The annual pre-game symposium, held on the FedExForum practice court, will feature NBA greats Patrick Ewing and Elgin Baylor, and one of sports’ most transcendent figures, the great Jim Brown. The halftime show will feature New Orleans R&B star Aaron Neville.

The reason we’re here:

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 37 Preview: Grizzlies at Spurs

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Mike Conley: The Grizzlies leading indicator.

1. Trend or Blip?: It continues to be very difficult to get a handle on exactly how good this Grizzlies team is: A 12-1 November followed by a 7-7 December. A 5-1 start to January, including a perfect West Coast road trip and culminating in a rousing home win over these very Spurs, followed by two really dispiriting losses.

Both of those losses have their mitigating circumstances: Saturday’s night’s road implosion at Dallas felt like a classic “scheduling loss,” the second night of a back-to-back, on the road, after a draining overtime win the night before. Monday night against the Clippers, the absence of both Rudy Gay and Quincy Pondexter threw the rotation into disarray against the league’s deepest team. True, the Clippers were playing without Chris Paul, but they notched a commanding win without Paul again last night in Houston — also on the road, on the second night of a back-to-back.

So, all that makes tonight’s game particularly important — not in terms of outcome as much as performances. A good performance, win or lose, and you can call those last two losses a blip or sorts. Another bad performance — with no good excuse to offer this time— and we’re looking at a troubling trend.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 36 Preview: Grizzlies vs. Clippers — With Bonus Rudy Gay Trade Speculation

CREDIT: LARRY KUZNIEWSKI

Mike Conley will have his hands full with Chris Paul and the Clippers.

  • LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
  • Mike Conley will have his hands full with Chris Paul and the Clippers.

After playing the Game of the Year against the third-seeded Spurs Friday night, the Grizzlies return home for another huge one tonight against second-seeded Clippers.

As always — or, at least when I’m able — here are three thoughts:

1. Pack Your Hatred: When the Los Angeles Clippers last walked off the FedExForum floor, it was Game 7 of last spring’s first-round playoff series, and they’d just handed the Grizzlies the most bitter defeat in franchise history. The teams faced off again on opening night in Los Angeles, with the Clippers winning 101-92.

The showboating dunkbot Blake Griffin. The foot-stomping sideline defender Vinny Del Negro. The sketchy slumlord owner. The beach-chasing celebrity bench. The villainous genius of Chris “Point God” Paul. This, now, more than any other opponent, is the team Grizzlies fans love to loathe. As public address announcer Rick Trotter tweeted over the weekend in good-natured anticipation: “Pack your hatred.”

2. No Rudy Gay: The Clippers are one of two teams — along with the San Antonio Spurs — currently in the top five in both team offense and defense, but they’ve come down to earth just a little, going 3-3 since their season-best 17-game win streak.

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 33 Preview: Grizzlies at Warriors

The Grizzlies beat the Warriors 104-94 in each team’s second game of the season, a win that looks more impressive now than it did at the time.

Prior to the season, I thought the Warriors would be a playoff team if they got more than half a season out of center Andrew Bogut, but stopped short of picking them because of doubts about Bogut’s health. It turns out I was right to doubt Bogut’s availability — he’s appeared in only four games so far — but wrong to think the Warrior’s couldn’t still make a leap without him.

Driven by All-Star caliber seasons from Stephen Curry and David Lee, Sixth Man of the Year-caliber seasons from Carl Landry and Jarrett Jack, and shockingly improved all-around team defense, the Warriors have been one of the NBA’s most surprising teams, sitting at 22-11 and only a half game behind the Grizzlies in a battle for fourth place in the Western Conference.

How good has Golden State been? They’re currently 9th in the NBA in offensive efficiency, 10th in defensive efficiency, and 4th in rebounding rate. The only other team in the top 10 in all three categories is the Oklahoma City Thunder.