Well, Memphis, at least your college football team still has a chance at a championship this season.
Harsh? Yes. Uncharitable? Yes.
Inaccurate? I don’t think so… which is why that needed to be said.
You could put forth dozens of different reasons why Monday night’s 50-point win by the Golden State Warriors over the Memphis Grizzlies won’t mean much come April. Each of those reasons would contain a considerable degree of both validity and legitimacy. Yet, the weight of visual evidence suggests that no matter how hard the Grizzlies try; no matter how hard they Grit and Grind; no matter how fully The Grindfather, Tony Allen, leads his team at the defensive end of the floor, Memphis will fall short in the end.
Monday night in Oakland’s Oracle Arena, the NBA season concluded its first seven-day stretch. In that one week, the Warriors announced their presence as a team ready to defend its title, and that will understandably acquire most of the ink and bandwith after a 119-69 shellacking of the Grizzlies. Yet, in the aftermath of this bloodbath, the story of the losing team feels just as significant if not more so.
Memphis is a city unlike any other. It’s anything but a cookie-cutter slice of American culture — it’s distinctive and cuts against the grain. This is to be admired, and yet it carries with it an irony: Memphis’s decision to cut against the grain of the NBA’s evolution — a conscious organizational choice which has led to some notable successes — seems to be running out of life. The Memphis movement — the NBA’s “slow food movement” — is being run down in the fast lane by a team which runs the floor and finds three-point shots when it can get them.
It’s not GOINK very well for the Grizzlies right now, and one can’t shake the sense that their already-shrinking window narrowed a little more on Monday, just a week into a new season.
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The Los Angeles Lakers were destroyed by the Boston Celtics in Game 1 of the 1985 NBA Finals. Given that the Celtics stole the 1984 Finals (they really should have been down 2-0, but James Worthy made that crosscourt pass Gerald Henderson stole), Boston had rented space inside the Lakers’ heads. After that first game in 1985, it was hard to see the Lakers — as good as they were — getting off the deck to reverse the course of that series. Yet, they did so.
It is true that blowout losses at one point in a season can be overcome. The 1985 Lakers showed that embarrassing and humiliating defeats can be overcome in a very short period of time. For this and other related reasons, Memphis can legitimately refrain from panicking. Again, one can cite many reasons why a mid-May reunion with Golden State will produce a series anything unlike Monday night in Oakland.
Yet, facts are facts, and the more alarming part of this half-a-hundred-point pounding is not that the Dubs rang up 119 in their own building; it’s that the visitors scored a Grisly 69 points.
Clang.
Bonk.
Thud.
These are the sounds that have filled autumns, winters and springs in Memphis for years. Season after season, the Grizzlies impress us with their defense and post play… and fail to hit the perimeter shots that could lift them to a higher plateau.
Make no mistake: Memphis has reached a West Finals series, something the Los Angeles Clippers can’t yet claim. The Grizzlies have done more with their resources than most of their Western Conference compatriots. This is a franchise to be admired from a wider view.
Yet, Memphis — this different city, this unique culture — has, in the realm of NBA basketball, taken things a little too far. Monday night offered a rather convincing affirmation of this notion, as a team handcuffed for years by its inability to make shots continued to throw bricks for 48 minutes. A 34-point first half and a 35-point second half meant that even if the Grizzlies had defended at a high level, their labors wouldn’t have produced a victory. Much of the NBA community wouldn’t be singing the Warriors’ praises Tuesday moring had this been an 81-69 slog.
Nevertheless, while most of the league is captured and enraptured by the Dubs, it’s that 69 which serves as a five-alarm reminder that this organization — so conscious of its one screaming, blaring, glaring deficiency — didn’t make any real move to address it in the offseason. This brings up a larger point about the situation the Grizzlies face.
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How did the San Antonio Spurs continue to remain the NBA’s best organization, beyond the fact that they have the best people in the seats of power (R.C. Buford as general manager, and Pop as the coach)?
They were willing to re-invent themselves.
You don’t need to read a long re-telling of the story. You know the story. The Spurs went from Bruce Bowen and a defense-first approach to a more souped-up offensive game in which Tony Parker, not Tim Duncan, became the central engine of the team. This kind of agility — this organizational, communal willingness to change the outer identity in order to further the core internal mission of winning — has given the Spurs their staying power in the Association.
It might be time for Memphis to make that kind of shift.
Is that alarmism, one week into an NBA season? Maybe.
From this vantage point, it seems like an acknowledgment of what we saw Monday night… and how some beatdowns are more indicative of the future than others (such as Game 1 of the 1985 Finals).
