Even in their most graceful moment, a touch of ugliness managed to creep in, like an old, inevitable friend, for the Memphis Grizzlies.
Down two in the dying seconds in Golden State, Mike Conley drove at Draymond Green and slipped as he stepped back to create separation. But Conley brushed off the brief moment of imperfection, an awkward tickle in the throat before the song’s most important note, and then rose up and drained a perfect shot that was all net, no rim. An air-ball that counted for two points.
The Grizzlies would go on to win in overtime, capping off a 24-point comeback. At 90-66 a game is typically dead on the operating table, and against the Warriors, in Oakland no less, it’s six feet under. But the Grizzlies are the version of Ryan Reynolds in Buried that actually makes it back to the surface. They refuse to die, and their last breath is the hardest to take away.
No team has been more cruelled by injury in the past year than Memphis, and no team has been as stunningly resilient. They clawed to the playoffs last year without Conley, Marc Gasol and most of their depth, and this season when Conley went down, the Grizzlies didn’t just weather the storm of his absence, they used it as a headwind.
New coach David Fizdale has led Memphis into basketball’s pace-and-space era, a move the Grizz were already inching towards last year under Dave Joerger, who symbolically sent Zach Randolph to the bench to give the starting line-up more speed and shooting. But the sensibilities of grit and grind have been retained, and Memphis is still a team that often feels like it should be brawling with Anthony Mason instead of running to keep up with Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson.
That incongruity, though, produces basketball magic. And the win over Golden State, Memphis’s second of the season, was vintage Grizzlies.
Zach Randolph muscled his way to 27 points, establishing deep post position, using his brawn to create the slightest separation to drop his floaters, stepping back for 2011 Z-Bo fadeaways, and pulling down offensive rebounds along the way, through both violence and cerebral genius.
A top-ten player this season, Marc Gasol’s star ascended even further, his mix of discipline on defence and opportunism on offence anchoring Memphis on both sides of the ball. More svelte than ever before, Gasol is now as comfortable taking Draymond Green off the dribble as he is bullying his way to buckets over Zaza Pachulia. With his deft passing, Aaron Ramsey-on-his-best-day movement patterns, and on-court demeanour that oscillates between arrogant, awe-struck and ecstatic, Gasol is a basketball gem.
So is Mike Conley, who has achieved the impossible in being the second-highest-paid player in the sport and remaining underrated. It’s Conley who has to bail out Memphis’s often stagnant offence at the end of the clock, and he bailed them out all the way to the most unlikely of victories in Oakland, his teardrop jumpers over Green and Klay Thompson saving then winning the game.
Tony Allen, the fourth Beatle in Memphis, is a star in his own right, not just a Starr. He played cruel, suffocating defence at the end of the game, and had his typical nervous-breakdown-inducing no-no-yes scores on offence too, finishing over Kevin Durant late. He never appears to know what he’s doing on offence with the ball in his hands, a sort of genius, drunk, stream-of-consciousness writer, but sometimes his own confusion creates confusion in the defence too, and ends up being an improbably powerful tool.
It was too perfect, too Memphis, that they iced the game on a Tony Allen hesitation drive to the hoop in overtime.
While the Warriors played entitled basketball in the fourth quarter, the Grizzlies played desperate. Inevitably, desperation is more empowering than entitlement. Golden State settled for atrocious Hollywood off-the-dribble deep threes, while Memphis stayed alive with plays like James Ennis stripping and outhustling Curry and Durant in their laziness, the most indie of productions.
The game’s most telling play was also its most decisive moment, in overtime when Draymond Green stole the ball from Troy Daniels then immediately turned it over back to Allen. Allen fed Randolph who had deep position on Green, practically at the hoop. But while Durant and Curry were doing their guitar solos and the rest of the band stood and watched, Randolph, before his days in Memphis blue long defined by a malignant selfishness, instinctively looked for the open man and found Daniels alone in the corner.
Daniels, with the ball’s trajectory surely directed by the basketball gods and any god who fancies selflessness, drained it.
The Grizzlies, at 23-16 and sixth in the West with a barely positive net rating, are not a contender. They are, though, a marvel and a basketball treasure. Six games clear of the woeful Blazers and the eighth seed, Memphis will likely avoid Golden State in the first round of the playoffs. The Grizzlies should be thankful for that and, in a less dire sense, so should the Warriors.
And so, perhaps, should we. Over seven games, Memphis’s desire, their toughness, their altruism, would be bloodied to an unrecognisable pulp by Golden State’s cruel talent. But for a night, a childish fantasy can become a kind, comforting reality. David stands over Goliath, Mike and Marc stand over Steph and Kevin, and the basketball world feels, fleetingly, like a better place.
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