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- Z-Bo: Man of the Match, and then some.
The Lead: The word of the game: Sisyphean.
The Grizzlies entered the night as the only team in the NBA without a legitimate “bad” loss, but for most of this one it sure felt like the Suns were going to hand them one.
A disastrous first quarter-and-a-half featuring 12 Grizzlies turnovers put the home team in a 16-point hole, their biggest deficit of the season. But, with Tony Allen missing the game, Quincy Pondexter and Darrell Arthur came off the bench to ignite the Grizzlies defense and pick up the team’s energy, spurring a 16-4 run that pulled the Grizzlies to within a couple of buckets.
But every time the Grizzlies would get the boulder near the top of the hill, it would roll back down. On eight different occasions between the late second quarter and late fourth quarter, the Grizzlies cut the Suns lead to four or less only to have the Suns answer with a basket. A Shannon Brown drive. A Markieff Morris three. A Luis Scola jumper. A Goran Dragic bank shot. A Dragic three. A Marcin Gortat jumper. A Jared Dudley three. A Jermaine O’Neal jumper. Answers coming from everywhere.
It’s common in NBA games for teams to expend so much energy coming back from a big deficit that they run out of gas before they can cross the finish line, and this one sure felt that way. But a three-foot Zach Randolph runner with 1:30 left in regulation finally pushed the boulder on top of the hill, if only for a minute. And a short Rudy Gay jumper with the shot-clock off and a subsequent defensive stop sent it to overtime. And that’s when Zach Randolph — magnificent all night — planted that damn rock.