NBA West – Memphis Flyer

Anyone who says they thought the Grizzlies would be in this position — 38-13, second in the Western Conference standings, with Marc Gasol as an All-Star starter and Zach Randolph playing the best basketball he’s played since the Griz knocked off the top-seeded Spurs in 2011 — is probably not being truthful. My season preview in these pages said that the Grizzlies had a good chance to have the best season in franchise history, and even I didn’t quite think they’d be doing this.

That’s not to say that all of the questions about this year’s team have been answered. In the aftermath of Tayshaun Prince’s and Quincy Pondexter’s trade for Jeff Green and Russ Smith, the Grizzlies’ offense — already much diversified from the way they used to play during the Lionel Hollins years — continues to evolve. But even though Green’s athleticism gives the Griz a whole new element to deploy, his lack of outside shooting (Green is a career 44-percent shooter, 33 percent from 3-point range) means that the Griz still have to operate in the narrow windows of floor spacing they’re able to create.

Vince Carter’s recent injury is a depressing exclamation mark on an underwhelming season, with Carter never quite finding his shot nor becoming the outside threat the Grizzlies signed him to be. Though he’s expected to return this season, teams weren’t even guarding Carter from three-point range before the injury, leaving him wide open to miss. With the addition of Green and Carter’s continued struggles to get on track (followed by his absence), the Grizzlies still haven’t solved the problem we’ve been talking about for years now: the lack of a floor-spacing knock-down 3-point shooter. Courtney Lee filled the role earlier in the season but has slowly begun to regress to his career averages. Shooting is still something the Griz just don’t quite have enough of — but it may be a moot point, now that the offense is beginning to fully integrate Green’s athletic attacks on the rim and his ability to draw attention away from Gasol and Randolph just enough for those two to operate.

The biggest stories of the season for the Grizzlies are, without question, the two guys who were the most important players coming into the season: Gasol and Randolph. Gasol continues to play at a level that has him getting serious discussion as an MVP candidate, aggressively carrying the Grizzlies’ offense when he has to. Randolph, meanwhile, is playing the best basketball he’s played since his 2012 knee injury, having ceded his “first option” duties to Gasol and Mike Conley only to reclaim them in a lengthy streak of double-doubles in January and February.

The real question is whether the Griz can win an NBA title this year, and with the Western Conference still wide open, it seems like all of the preseason talk about “this could be the year” is still very much in play: This really could be the year. Assuming the rest of the conference standings shake out somewhat close to the way they are now, the Grizzlies could catch the Spurs in the first round, which wouldn’t be optimal, but barring that, a return trip to the Western Conference finals seems like a reasonable outcome.

The Griz are good enough to make it to the NBA Finals this season — whether or not they do seems like it will come down to playoff matchups and which teams they have to face to get there. There are few teams with whom the Griz don’t match up well, and even those teams don’t feel impossible to beat the way the Grizzlies’ archrivals have in years past. (I don’t expect the regular season troubles, mostly injury-related, that the Spurs are experiencing to carry over to the postseason. Betting against San Antonio doesn’t seem wise , no matter the situation.)

This is already the best team in the history of the Grizzlies franchise, regardless of what they’re able to accomplish after the regular season. They’re a veteran group used to playing with each other, with a great deal of trust and faith in each other and a real shared desire to bring the NBA title to Memphis this June. With the remaining games of the season, the challenge is whether they can continue to improve and steel themselves for the approaching challenges of playoff basketball, and whether they can continue to win games at the rate they’ve been doing it so far.

The Grizzlies came into the 2014–15 season poised to get off to a hot start, but no one expected them to be this good. At the time of this writing, they’re 12–2, with one loss coming at the hands of the Eastern Conference-leading Toronto Raptors while missing five rotation players due to a stomach virus. They’ve got the fourth-best defensive rating in the NBA and, miracle of miracles, the fifth-best offensive rating. Head coach Dave Joerger, after a rocky start in his rookie season, has the boys in Beale Street Blue firing on all cylinders, playing to their strengths and dominating teams in a way we haven’t seen before.

The question, then, is: How long can they keep winning at this rate? The first 10 games of the season were against inferior teams, at least compared to some of the teams they’ll face in the next 20 games: the defending NBA champion Spurs (twice), their Finals opponents, the Miami Heat, and the Golden State Warriors (the only team higher in most power rankings than the Grizzlies), to name three.

At 12–2, the team is off to the same start as it had for the 2012–13 season, when the Grizzlies played .500 ball for most of January and February, before trading Rudy Gay to Toronto and making a run to the Western Conference Finals. In this year’s ultra-competitive Western Conference, a couple of months of .500 basketball might put them at the back of the playoff pack in January, something they certainly want to avoid.

There’s really one big (seven-foot-tall) reason the Grizzlies are playing the way they are: Marc Gasol, in the final year of his contract, is performing at a level we’ve always talked about in hushed tones, barely hinted at in his previous outbursts: “If Gasol would only …” or “If he ever figures out that he should shoot …” and so on and so forth. It’s early in the season, for sure, but Gasol’s name is already coming up in MVP candidate discussions. He’s scoring at a prolific rate — he just had back-to-back 30-point games against the Celtics and Clippers, the first such double of his career — and his rebounding numbers are up as well. The only thing Gasol is not doing more than he did last year is assisting, and that’s because this season Gasol is taking those shots himself.

The cynical explanation is that Gasol is playing this way because it’s a contract year and he wants to make himself a more lucrative free agent. The more generous explanation (and probably more accurate, given what we know about Gasol) is that Gasol has realized that he has to alter his game to take this team from “perennial playoff team” to “legitimate title contender,” and that given the talent around him this year, if he can sustain his current level of play, that’s exactly what the Grizzlies are: one of the best teams in the league.

I don’t expect the Grizzlies to keep winning 85 percent of their games. There are too many other good teams in the league, especially in the West. There will be nights when they are tired, nights when the other team is more fired up, nights when they just can’t hit the shots that are open, nights when it just isn’t happening. The NBA season is long and it’s littered with nights like that. But, on the flipside, this is a team that won 50 games last year, despite the injury plague that bit them from November on. A team that has won more games than anybody since Gasol returned from injury last season. If they won 50 last year, how many can they win this year?

Joerger has taken the good bones he inherited — let’s not pretend Lionel Hollins didn’t win with a similar (if less deep) roster — and turned them into a team that can beat any team in the league. They can play inside-out, and this season, when that’s not working, Courtney Lee’s hot shooting has saved the day more than once from outside, providing just enough floor spacing on offense to keep defenses honest. Beyond that, the whole team has bought into this season. They’re playing like a veteran team of guys who know each other, and who are motivated to get to somewhere they haven’t been before. The great thing about that for the city of Memphis? There are only two places they haven’t been before: the NBA Finals and an NBA title. Opportunities like this don’t come often for franchises, or cities, or teams. The Grizzlies seem determined to make their own luck, and seize what’s in front of them.

They’re stepping up to the occasion, and the whole basketball world has taken notice.