Wizards 89, Grizzlies 80 Post-Game Three-Pointer
For better or worse, tonight’s preseason home debut didn’t really feel much like a preseason game. The Grizzlies played something approximating a regular-season rotation — all five starters playing over 30 minutes — and seemed more focused on winning the game than is typical in the preseason. Meanwhile, the Wizards were playing without their four best players and didn’t play any starters more than 25 minutes. That disparity made losing particularly frustrating, as was apparent on the court and which Mike Conley acknowledged after the game.
More on the first full sighting of the 2008-2009 Grizzlies:
1. D Up, O Down: While the Grizzlies certainly didn’t deliver an overwhelming defensive performance tonight, allowing 44% shooting to bunch of players who might not make the Wizards team, much less the rotation, it was clear that the defense is further along than the offense right now.
The Grizzlies demonstrated a more aggressive approach to pick-and-roll defense, with guards routinely fighting over the top of screens and big men stepping out aggressively to hedge or trap. And rotations on the back end that would be needed to make this effective seemed respectable. Generally speaking, you got a sense of how the quickness and activity this year’s team can deploy across the perimeter could be disruptive defensively, while starting bigs Hakim Warrick and Marc Gasol partly overcame their physical limitations with impressive effort.
On the other end of the floor, however, the Grizzlies were a huge mess. The team shot 35% from the floor and a miserable 2-17 from three-point range (including a combined 0-9 from Rudy Gay and O.J. Mayo, likely to be the team’s two best outside threats). Without a commanding post threat and with a dearth of good three-point shooters, the Grizzlies will have to find other ways to score and they really struggled tonight. With halfcourt offense a serious work-in-progress, the team needs to get a lot of transition opportunities, but tonight’s 10 fastbreak points won’t cut it. (Neither will only three steals — the team should be able to generate a lot more opportunities off forced turnovers.
In the halfcourt, this team needs to feed off dribble penetration to either create lay-ups, free-throw attempts, or open catch-and-shoot looks, but the execution here was highly erratic. There seemed to be a lack of purpose and structure. There was too much stagnation and the team devolved into forced one-on-one play quickly. Conley suggested after the game that there was a lack of continuity in the offense (my wording, not his), that after first options on plays were shut down, the team settled for too much individual play. That’s how you get Gay taking 19 field-goal attempts (and, with 14 free-throw attempts, his actual shot total was probably more like 25): With the offense routinely breaking down, the team’s best scorer ends up creating shots by himself. This resulted in a miserable 5-19 shooting performance from Gay, who came up limping slightly after an early spill and never seemed to recover his full athleticism.
2. The NBA is No Joke: Fans hoping to see something special with O.J. Mayo’s first home NBA game went away disappointed. Mayo scored 7 points on 3-11 shooting and had as many personal fouls as steals, assists, and rebounds combined. Mayo impressed with his attentive, tough-nosed on-ball defense and looked good when he could get off open looks, but didn’t look very explosive going to the rim and had one jump shot summarily rejected. Even against the Wizards' second-teamers and training-camp scrubs, he saw a level of size and athleticism he never saw in the Pac-Ten. There’s no reason to expect Mayo not to struggle in a transition to the pros.
Second-year guard Mike Conley was more effective than Mayo, but also had a highly uneven game. Conley flashed eye-popping quickness and elusiveness on a couple of forays to the hoop, but he just wasn’t as consistently dynamic as the Grizzlies need him to be. Hubie Brown always said that the most important thing for a player was knowing when to pass and when to shoot. For Conley, playing alongside two higher-profile perimeter players in Gay and Mayo who will both demand touches and shots, his challenge is knowing when to attack and when to defer and I sense he’s struggling with that. It’s very early, obviously, but I think Conley figuring out how to maximize his abilities within the team context is the key to this offense working. While Gay, Mayo, and even Warrick can be effective in isolation settings, Conley’s quickness and court vision should be the engine that creates better shots for the whole team.
3. The New Gasol: Relative to expectation, the most impressive player on the court tonight was Marc Gasol. Not only does Gasol look like a beefed-up clone of his big brother, he has some identical mannerisms. After picking up an over-the-back foul, the younger Gasol delivered what you might call The Full Pau: He clasped both hands to his face in disbelief, dropped them down over his mouth, and then raised them to the top of his head and stared up in frustration. It was serious déjà vu time at the Forum.
But that’s where the comparison stopped. Marc lacks his brother’s scoring ability, and will never play in an All-Star game, but in 31 minutes of a home debut he established to anyone who watched that he’s a different cat from Pau: He was throwing meaty ’bows after a defensive rebound. He stepped up to pop a Wizards cutter with a thundering chest-to-chest blow. He set a stiff pick and then flashed to the hoop for a putback lay-up. He grabbed 9 rebounds (4 offensive) and consistently fought hard in the paint. He passed the ball very well despite not garnering an assist. He didn’t get to show off his perimeter shooting, but that will come.
Overall, Gasol looked like a tough, efficient basketball player. A quality center from the get-go. If Darko Milicic — who missed action again tonight with a back strain — doesn’t get it together, not only will Gasol be starting in the middle. He’ll be playing two-thirds of the minutes.
The Jacob Riis Report: According to a team source I talked to after the draft, and also reported in the Commercial Appeal, the Grizzlies had a draft-day deal in place that would have sent Javaris Crittenton to the Washington Wizards for their first-round draft pick (#18 — where the Grizzlies were set to take Courtney Lee). The deal was contingent on certain players being off the board when the Wizards picked. When Nevada seven-footer JaVale McGee was still available, the Wizards declined the deal.
McGee looked raw in his pre-draft workout with the Grizzlies, but boy did he look good tonight. McGee came off the bench to score 20 points on 8-12 shooting, grab 8 rebounds, and block three shots. Despite banking in a straightaway jumper, McGee didn’t show a lot of skill, but he showed tremendous athleticism for his size and impressive assertiveness for a rookie. He ran the floor, got up above the rim, and dunked with flair.
Of course, the Grizzlies had something to do with McGee’s big game, having no one available to match him athletically. The centers were too slow and the power forwards were too short. This is a problem. If McGee is going to go nuts against the Grizzlies, what are Dwight Howard or Amare Stoudamire or Tyson Chandler or Kevin Garnett going to do?
Deflections:
Hakim Warrick: Fantasy league sleeper. With Darrell Arthur and Antoine Walker as the other options at power forward, Warrick’s going to get big minutes and he’s going to put up numbers. His rebounding and shot blocking has been impressive through two preseason games (11 and 3 in 38 minutes tonight), but I’m not convinced he can keep it up.
Marc Iavaroni picked up a technical foul tonight arguing a no-call when Rudy Gay was playing volleyball on the offensive glass. “Make the call!,” Iavaroni screamed to a ref standing right next to him. When the ref blew the whistle to T him up, Iavaroni responded sarcastically, “Finally.”
At one point, Greg Buckner was probably the third best offensive player on the floor for the Grizzlies (ahead of Quinton Ross and Hamed Haddadi). I bet he hasn’t been that high on a pecking order since he was at Clemson.
The Wizards featured a player named Taj McCullough. Could this be Todd McCullough's brother from another mother?
