Success in the NBA. How do you define it?
Is it purely by a team’s ability to win a title?
Pat Riley once said ‘when you’re coaching in the NBA, there’s winning and there’s misery’. Somewhat easy to say when you have the greatest point guard and centre combo in the history of basketball. (And no, I’m not talking about Greg Anthony and Patrick Ewing.)
Okay, I’m being slightly flippant, Riles was obviously one of the best coaches ever, famously driven, obsessed with winning and the perfect complement for Magic Johnson’s own brand of ultra-competitiveness that proved to be the ideal mid-career ignition system for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
But if Riley’s ethos were to be held against every team, then there’s 29 supposedly miserable teams at the end of every NBA campaign.
And realistically, this simply isn’t true.
A team down on its luck for an extended period could make a marked improvement and finish around the .500 mark and a low playoff seed, or even just outside the playoffs (think the Detroit Pistons so far this year, as an example) and that would be surely considered – when the proper context is applied – a successful season.
Your correspondent alluded to this last week – http://www.theroar.com.au/2015/12/21/reversing-curse-lebron-cleveland-ghosts-cavaliers-past/ – and there are myriad examples of teams considering “mere” improvement to be a solid marker of potential and development.
So what about a team that, year-in, year-out, wins 48-57 games, enjoys a few good playoff results but never wins a title, or even makes the Finals.
Is that a successful team? Clearly it is.
Take, as a recent example, the Memphis Grizzlies.
For the past five NBA seasons, the former Vancouver franchise has been a model of consistent – yes – success, almost metronomic in the consistency of their 50-plus-win seasons and some deep postseason runs.
Hell, even their first-round playoff exits were incredible; seven-game defeats to the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2014 and to the Los Angeles Clippers two years earlier could so easily have gone the other way.
With a core group led by a re-invigorated Zach Randolph, sublime centre Marc Gasol, playmaker Mike Conley and defensive stopper Tony Allen, the Grizzlies proved you don’t have to have a superstar to enjoy entrenched prosperity. (Yes, there’s a flipside to that coin, as Memphis, Atlanta, Toronto and others have discovered in recent times.)
Throw in solid role players like Tayshaun Prince, Courtney Lee and Mike Miller (in his second go-around with the Grizz) and coach Lionel Hollins and his successor Dave Joerger had a deep, talented roster that proved itself time and again in the fierce heat of the Western Conference cauldron.
Since taking over half-way through the 2009 season, the Hollins/Joerger Grizzlies posted an overall record of 301-214, a winning percentage of 58.5 per cent (to the start of this season).
By any stretch of the imagination, this has been the most successful era of the franchise, surpassing the Pau Gasol/Shane Battier squads that suffered three straight first-round playoff defeats from 2004 to 2006. (But even then, that earlier success constituted an incredible improvement on its previous lowly standing in the league, having never even had a .500 season prior to 2004.)
It was also no coincidence that Memphis’ greatest success came after the January 30, 2013 trade that saw leading chucker scorer Rudy Gay packed off to Toronto and Prince (and Austin Daye, but still) come on board, inexorably charging to the Western Conference Finals before ultimately suffering a four-game sweep at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs.
It was, famously, ‘grit and grind’; the Grindhouse Grizz producing a marauding, malevolent brand of defence that consistently ranked in the upper echelon of the league defensive rankings.
But this season, the ‘grit and grind’ has ground to a shuddering halt.
Now just a classically mediocre .500 team, they occasionally show glimpses of their very recent past, but far more often display obvious signs of a team that has perhaps run its race.
Last in the league in scoring and a decidedly middle-of-the-road 13th in team defence, their stars – Conley aside – are all over 30 and beginning to show the effects of what have been lengthy NBA careers, the minutes racking up like so many miles on the odometer.
So, even within a franchise, there are .500 teams that should be celebrated and .500 teams that show a sharp decline, proving again that not all team records are created equal.
And so then, what to do?
Blow it up completely and start over? Perhaps, but their recent draft history – to put it generously – has been sub-optimal, their last pick to have any real impact was Conley, who, despite a very good career, has yet to be selected to an All-Star or All-NBA team, a second All-Defensive team nomination after leading the league in steals in 2013 the highlight. (This is not to deride Conley’s career at all but is more indicative of the lack of impact Memphis draft picks have had since.)
The danger in that is that not deconstructing quickly brings its own inherent problems whereby the team is papering over cracks with middling free agent signings that only drags out the inevitable. See Celtics, Boston from 2010 to the end of Doc Rivers’ tenure.
The other option is to try to emulate the NBA’s benchmark in retooling on the fly, the San Antonio Spurs.
In yet another of those quirky happenstances that seem to run through sports, it was the Grizzlies who triggered the last such mini-rebuild in San Antonio, famously shocking the first-seeded Spurs in the first round of the 2011 playoffs.
The Spurs subsequently moved George Hill to the Pacers for Kawhi Leonard at the 2011 Draft, and the result was yet another Indian summer for Gregg Popovich’s squad, one that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
So, the model is there, it is up to the Memphis front office on how they choose to confront the ever-ticking clock that is marking time on the Grizzlies’ status as a perennial playoff participant.
Regardless, it is a team that could yet assemble some kind of run down the stretch to ensure a playoff berth, and perhaps there is yet one final post-season burst. Unlikely, but not impossible.
But to declare that this Memphis team has been unsuccessful because it didn’t win a title in one of the most competitive eras of the NBA would do it a grave disservice.
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