Requiem for a Grind: Memphis walk hesitantly into the future

The Memphis Grizzlies remind me of what 1994 would have been like if I’d been old enough to appreciate it.

Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption were fresh in cinemas, Nirvana released Unplugged in New York, and the jury was just being sworn in for the case of a famous athlete and actor who may or may not have murdered his wife.

The present day Grizzlies have long belonged back in that time.

There is an absurdity in watching Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph deal with the modern majesty of Stephen Curry and Russell Westbrook on switches – it feels so much more right imagining them banging bodies with Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone and Rik Smits.

Memphis have been a throwback, a warm reminder that while the force of the future is inevitable, the past can still softly cling to the present. They’ve played with the pace of dial-up internet, throwing the ball into the post with a steadfastness as admirable as it was seemingly futile in the modern era.

The magic of the Grizzlies was that they made you believe, if only for a day here or there, that it wasn’t futile. In 2011, they were a game from the conference finals, and two years later they went one better, finishing four wins away from the finals and a favourable match-up against the smaller Heat. Last year was their swansong, the dead Grizzly bear bounce, as Memphis found themselves with a 2-1 lead against the Warriors in the playoffs.

The Warriors are the most aesthetically pleasing basketball team in a generation, champions of an exciting, optimistic modernity. Ideologically, it felt wrong wanting the antiquated Grizzlies to triumph over them – it would have represented stagnation for the sport. But the Grizzlies make antiquated and wrong feel so right, and it was impossible to wish failure upon the rag-tag group of grit and grinders who compensated for a lack of God-given talent with an ocean of Earth-bound endeavour.

That’s not to say that Memphis’s stylings don’t have their own visual appeal. Aesthetic is so often a lie, and ugliness in Memphis has been one of basketball’s most beautiful truths. They scrap and they claw, but they do it with a delicacy around the hoop as soft as Randolph’s touch, as nuanced as Gasol’s passing.

Of course, order prevailed and the Warriors emerged triumphant, ensuring that evolution remained undefeated. But for a moment, Memphis had them worried. They had the basketball world believing that maybe all the things we’ve held to be true – that size is basketball’s greatest currency, and that the elegance of shooting and ball movement can be made vulnerable to strength and physicality – might still be so.

There was a power and respect that Memphis commanded simply by being able to create these doubts and pose these questions time and time again, even if they were never able to give their own affirmative answers. There was something admirable in the idea that Memphis was going to be resolute in adhering to its identity, that the tent-poles of the past were still their best way to build for future success.

But then a notification crossed my smartphone that Randolph was getting benched, and it became clear that Memphis had given in, the past was dead, and they too like everyone else were walking hesitantly into the future.

It was fitting that the death-knell for the Grit and Grind era was heard in Charlotte. A week ago, the Hornets laid waste to a completely healthy Grizzlies team, scoring at least 29 points in every quarter on the way to a 123-99 destruction. Charlotte did it while freed from the shackles of their athletically challenged low-post artist and offensively deficient wing stopper.

There might not be two better facsimiles in the league for Randolph and Tony Allen than Al Jefferson and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. Without the latter pair, the Hornets thrived, whirring the ball around in a four-out offence, raining 18 made threes on the Grizzlies, oppressing them with modernity.

The Grizzlies have caved. By starting Matt Barnes at power forward – Memphis’s answer to Charlotte’s Marvin Williams – and playing smaller, the Grizzlies have signalled that they realise they can’t keep living in 1994. It’s the right move.

Their 14-12 record is a mirage, undermined by a net rating that has them 25th in the league, with a point differential that ranks above only the lowly Nuggets, Pelicans and Lakers in the West. No team is averaging fewer points per game in their conference, and the once vaunted Memphis defence has tumbled to the 25th in the league, below the woeful Sixers. The curtain has fallen.

It was a great run while it lasted. The Grizzlies weren’t so much Back to the Future as they were a Night at the Museum – a collection of prehistoric skillsets brought to life to run wild in the modern day, wreaking a smiling havoc upon everything in their sight.

The future is exciting and necessary, but it is also frightening and unknowable. The Grizzlies, if nothing else, were knowable. And they reminded us that the past is often not something to be scoffed at or stepped upon – it is something to be cherished, and then, inevitably, walked beyond.