Two Games Left: A Pause for Contemplation

Larry Kuzniewski

Mike Conley should probably sit the two remaining games with his plantar fasciitis injury.

We’ve entered the final three days of the 2014-15 regular season, and frustrating as it is, we still don’t know anything. Tonight, the Grizzlies play the Golden State Warriors in Oakland, and the Warriors have every incentive to beat the Grizzlies and prevent them from getting the 2 seed, because if the Griz get the 2 seed, the Spurs likely fall to 5, to the same side of the West playoff bracket as the Warriors, who they would then potentially play in the second round. Beating the Grizzlies tonight ensures the Warriors that they won’t see the Spurs until the Western Conference Finals.

I still believe the Grizzlies match up well with the Warriors, blowout home loss in March aside. I believe the inside-out way the Grizzlies play, along with the tenacious on-ball defense, means that they have just as good of a shot as anyone else at beating Golden State on any given night. But given the Warriors’ historic domination of each and every challenger this season, it’s hard to feel good about going in to Oracle Arena in a must-win situation.

That said, if anybody’s going to pull this off, it’s the Grizzlies. With their backs against the wall, and no alternative but to win, they usually pull off some sort of miracle through sheer force of will and the utter violence of restriced area basketball.

But then you have the injuries. Tony Allen is probably out for the rest of the regular season. Mike Conley should be out for the rest of the regular season so he doesn’t aggravate whatever plantar fasciitis problems he has¹. Marc Gasol sprained his ankle early in Saturday night’s loss to the L.A. Clippers, and is “questionable” for tonight, and honestly, at this rate, he probably shouldn’t play either.

Update: After some careful reading, I’m pretty sure the CA piece that talked about the Conley injury meant to say “plantar fascia” instead of “plantar fasciitis.” That’s a huge difference contained in a small uncaught typo: the plantar fascia is the muscle on the bottom of your foot. Plantar fasciitis is a nasty slow-healing injury to that muscle. The CA article says that “There is inflammation and swelling above the plantar fasciitis”, which should probably read “plantar fascia” instead. We (I) regret the error (in not catching an error).

Faced with that prospect—entering the toughest arena in the league against the toughest team in the league in one of the rare late-season games that actually matters to them whether they win or not—it’s hard to be hopeful about the outcome of tonight’s game. And when it’s hard to be hopeful about tonight’s game, it’s hard to be hopeful about the Grizzlies’ playoff seeding, about their matchups and their path to the Finals, and thus about their hopes of achieving the preseason goal of making the NBA Finals and winning the championship.

Larry Kuzniewski

Gasol’s ankle injury Saturday night has added even more uncertainty to the mix.

I’m not going to try to talk you back into being hopeful about those things. Frankly I don’t have that in me at this point in the season, after weeks and weeks of each and every one of us tearing our hair out about what’s wrong with the Grizzlies. If they’d won some of those games they dropped—the Boston game, the Detroit game, the March Pelicans game where they blew a double-digit lead—we’d probably be having a different conversation. Just like I said at the time, the West is so tight this year that it turned out all those “meaningless” games in February and March actually mattered immensely in the difference between homecourt against the Mavericks and a series as the 6 seed against San Antonio or Houston.

But even that isn’t really the point right now. The main point right now is health, and the Grizzlies’ lack thereof. I would much rather the Griz end up with the 5th seed and home court against Portland than the 6th seed against the Clippers or Spurs, but if Allen, Conley, and Gasol aren’t healthy, it probably won’t matter much who they play in the first round, it’ll be the same brutal shorthanded slog. Everything comes down to whether or not those guys will be able to perform at their best. For the most part, the Grizzlies aren’t a team that can just plug bench guys into the system and hope for the best; the system is built around the very specific skills of the starting five, and then the bench guys come in and play more improvisationally. That’s not a slight against the bench, but it is the way the team is constructed, and so when one (or two) (or three) of those guys can’t play at a high level, everything gets thrown out of whack.

That’s what we saw in LA on Saturday. The turnovers, the stagnation, the confusion about who was doing what with the ball when—these are people we’re talking about, skilled basketball players who all approach the game in their own way. They are not directly interchangeable with each other like some Popovichian Borg Collective.

It’s hard not to feel a little apprehensive about how the next two or three weeks of Grizzlies basketball will go. Things are barely hanging together, limping down the stretch before being thrown into a Western Conference playoff gauntlet of historic and unprecedented difficulty. Only time will tell whether these Grizzlies, for all their might and for all their flaws, will be able to win these last two games despite everything stacked against them, despite every weakness with which they’ve been saddled, despite every broken body and worn-down mind they’re bringing to the fight. By Thursday morning, we will know where they stand. Everything between now and then is chaos.