Tag: golden state warriors

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Beyond the Arc Sports

Is It Time To Worry About Mike Conley?

What’s going on with Mike Conley? His shot is cold from midrange and from deep. While he’s shown surprising speed and burst — considering he’s only been playing full speed basketball for about a month after having not played since November 13th, 2017 — his floaters and shots close to the rim aren’t falling.

I think it’s still too early to know for sure what Conley’s new normal is, but currently he appears to be experiencing a shooting slump and hasn’t gotten his legs back. He’s consistently mentioned the importance of — and that he’s working on — his conditioning in the few weeks he’s been back on the court.

In Ten Takes after Ten Games, Chris Herrington broke down a couple things that alarmed him about Conley in Wednesday’s game against the Nuggets. There was a moment where Conley sped between two Nuggets defenders to tap a loose ball downcourt for a Garrett Temple dunk, instead of handily beating his defenders to the ball and pushing the fast break himself. Herrington also pointed out that Conley often looked a little tired, and struggled to turn the corner like he used to in the game against Denver.

Are these things indicative of new physical limitations that Conley (and the Grizzlies) will have to deal with? I don’t know yet. But consider that the Grizzlies played Wednesday night’s home game coming off of a West Coast road trip that featured the Jazz and a back-to-back ending against Golden State.

Conley played heavy minutes in each game, including both back-to-backs. He was guarding Steph Curry till late Monday night in Golden State, flew back to Memphis, and played the 9-1 Nuggets on Wednesday. Jamal Murray nearly had a 50 point game against the Celtics before his visit to Memphis. I don’t think we have to hit the panic button on Mike Conley yet. We’ll need more time, and he’ll need more time to get his legs back.

It is somewhat alarming that Conley is playing heavier minutes this year (31.5) than he did in his short stint last season (31.1). And this is happening when Conley has much better backup in terms of handling the ball and initiating the offense.

We’ve seen Wayne Selden, Kyle Anderson, and especially Shelvin Mack afford Conley the ability to play off the ball, and that’s kicked the Grizzlies offense up a notch from when Conley had to facilitate everything. If Conley’s experiencing a shooting slump and conditioning is a work in progress, I think the Grizzlies offense could vault higher than where it currently resides, in the middle of the pack.

I’m not sure what Coach Bickerstaff could’ve done to get Conley more rest on the West Coast road trip and the home game against Denver. The Jazz and Nuggets games were close, and the Grizzlies collapsed in the second halves of the Suns and Warriors games. As improved as the roster is, the Grizzlies can’t live without Conley when trying to come back or close out a game.

Conley remains the crux for the Grizzlies’ hopes for a meaningful playoff run. To me, his game looks like it’s almost back where it used to be, minus shooting and conditioning, but maybe he isn’t the player he used to be. How will it all play out?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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From My Seat Sports

NBA 2017-18: We’ve Been Here Before

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Predictability is poison in the sports world. And despite a few significant offseason transactions, the NBA has become a 30-team barrel of arsenic. LeBron James has played in the NBA Finals seven years in a row. This will become an eight-year streak next June unless King James suffers a calamitous injury. (James has played 14 years and only once missed more than eight games in a season.) The Golden State Warriors have reached the NBA Finals three years in a row and feature two former MVPs still shy of their 30th birthdays. They’ll be the team in the way of LeBron and his current band of merry men, the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Larry Kuzniewski

Mike Conley

There have been precisely two NBA champions this century that, in historical terms, were surprises. The 2003-04 Detroit Pistons beat an L.A. Laker “super team” that featured Karl Malone and Gary Payton in addition to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. And the 2010-11 Dallas Mavericks upset James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and a few other Miami Heat, before that more-recent “super team” had fully formed. Sure, it can be said the Cavs upset the 73-win Warriors in the 2016 Finals, but they did so with LeBron James, so come on.

This isn’t new, of course. We likely would have seen eight straight Chicago Bull championships in the 1990s had Michael Jordan not wanted to prove he could hit a curve ball. We knew Magic Johnson’s Lakers or Larry Bird’s Celtics would win the title in the 1980s, but that was a fun coin to flip every spring. You have to go back four decades, to the 1970s, to find an NBA that was truly anyone’s guess. Eight different franchises raised the trophy in the disco decade. Raise a glass to healthy living if you remember the 1974-75 Warriors or the 1977-78 Washington Bullets.

There are fan bases today that are certain their team can crack the Finals code this season. Oklahoma City has filled Durant’s one-year void with a pair of perennial All-Stars: Carmelo Anthony and Paul George. If reigning MVP Russell Westbrook again averages a triple-double — did that really happen? — he’ll do so with more assists and fewer points. Last year’s assist leader — Houston’s James Harden — will now share a backcourt with former Clipper Chris Paul, a man who has led the league in assists four times himself. Will this dynamic duo vault the Rockets into the Warriors’ stratosphere, or will Paul and Harden just keep passing the ball to each other one night after the next?

One predictable component of the modern NBA has actually played right here in Memphis. The Grizzlies are one of only three franchises to make the playoffs each of the last seven seasons (along with the San Antonio Spurs and Atlanta Hawks). If the Griz are to make it eight in a row, it will be without two players whose jerseys are now bound for the FedExForum rafters. With Zach Randolph in Sacramento and Tony Allen in New Orleans, the local franchise will be, in many ways, discovering itself for the first time in almost a decade.

With Anthony, George, and Jimmy Butler (now a Minnesota Timberwolf) having fled the Eastern Conference, the Western Conference playoff race has never been more top-heavy. If you consider Golden State, San Antonio, Houston, Oklahoma City, and Minnesota locks for the postseason, the west has ten teams each playing 82 games to secure three dance tickets to the playoffs. This will boil down to which teams can win the most games when not being knocked around by the conference’s “big five.”

Mike Conley still wears Beale Street Blue. So does Marc Gasol. Few NBA teams have as talented a tandem atop the roster. However familiar — however predictable — it may seem at times, the NBA season is here. In Memphis, that means one thing: grind time.

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Sports Sports Feature

Farewell, Sweet Grizzlies

There’s lots to say about whether the Memphis Grizzlies’ season was a successful one or not, or whether they did as well as they could have against the Golden State Warriors, given the circumstances.

There’s no doubt that their ever-present lack of offensive firepower and outside shooting played a big role in their elimination, but so did the laundry list of injuries to Mike Conley — a wrist issue, a bum foot that never got all the way healed, a broken face with titanium plates in it and a nasty recovery from a tough surgery, and then an ankle injury on top of all of that — and the fact that Tony Allen tried to play Game 6 and contribute on defense but could neither run nor jump because of his hamstring injury. The Grizzlies got bitten by the injury bug at the worst possible time; that’s not an excuse for why the Warriors were about to handle them in six games, but anyone who says that didn’t play a factor is being dishonest.

So now the season is over.

Coming into this year it felt like The Year — it felt like it had to be. It still feels that way a little bit, but the truth is that it wasn’t The Year. Until the Grizzlies figure out how to score enough to keep up with the modern NBA, it will never be The Year, and this season made that even more painfully clear than the 2013 Western Conference Finals did. Defense and a maniacal determination not to lose from your best players will only get you so far.

Given the way the Griz played until the All-Star Break, it felt like maybe the formula had been found. But after the Jeff Green trade (and maybe because of it but I’m not sure we’ll ever know the full story) things started to fall apart for a while, in a way that never really pulled back together until the playoffs, and even then only for some of the games. We may never see that group of Grizzlies again, the ones who were the best team in the league, with a top-five offense and defense.

This offseason is going to be one long gut check. Marc Gasol is a free agent, and while it seems likely that he’ll stay — and the Grizzlies haven’t made much noise about being worried that he’ll leave — that’s certainly not a guaranteed thing. Gasol has to now see, just like the rest of us do, that this team as currently configured will have to get extremely lucky to advance past a truly elite team in the playoffs. They’re very good, and no one wants to play them, and they’re always a threat, but that might be the extent of it without catching some lucky breaks along the way.

Even if Gasol stays, there’s work to do. The wing positions still don’t produce enough. Jeff Green has a player option he’ll probably pick up — and no one should fault him for that, really — and Vince Carter will still be here. There are exciting young players at the end of the bench in Jordan Adams, Jarnell Stokes, and Russ Smith (and JaMychal Green is also on a multi-year deal), so there are players to develop. Backup point guard is better than it’s ever been, but Nick Calathes is a restricted free agent. There’s a high probability that next year’s Grizzlies will look very different in some ways.

For now, though, the 2014-15 Grizzlies are done. This was a legendary regular season that turned into a frustrating one, that then turned back into a legendary playoff run featuring a point guard who put a mask on and carried the team to some improbable wins, even though he had no business doing so. We didn’t get to see them play for as long as we’d hoped, because in the end they weren’t who we wished they would be. But that’s how things go sometimes, and even in those moments it’s better to embrace what’s there than be dissatisfied by what isn’t.

We’re entering a very important summer for the franchise and its future and its fanbase. But even in these moments of loss, there’s a sense that this was a special year, a year of things that will not soon be forgotten. There will be more about this season and what it was in these pages, but now is the time for gathering ourselves, catching our breath, remembering the thundering roar of the Forum when the masked Mike Conley was introduced before Game 3, the way every other sound in the world was drowned out by the howl of the crowd, even the sound of your own thoughts.

In that roar, somewhere, is everything.

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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.

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Sports Sports Feature

Grizzlies Lose to Golden State, 125-117

After falling behind by as many as 20 points in the third quarter, the Memphis Grizzlies staged a fourth-quarter comeback before losing to the Golden State Warriors, 125-117, at FedExForum Monday night.

After shooting 1-16 beyond the 3-point line in the first three quarters, the Grizzlies got hot behind Mike Miller, Rudy Gay, and J.C. Navarro to close within five in the final minute, making 8 of 13 from beyond the arc.

Golden State withstood the late Memphis charge and held off the Griz to win. Rudy Gay led the Grizzlies with 32 points for the second consecutive game. For stats and boxscore, go to SI.com.