While several NBA teams have gone in and out of the playoff picture over the last five years, the Memphis Grizzlies have remained consistent. They have made the playoffs every season since the 2010-11 campaign, when their new core of Mike Conley, Zach Randolph, and Marc Gasol led the team to an upset of the 61-21 San Antonio Spurs in the first round of the playoffs. This started the process that involved the Grizzlies trading Rudy Gay, their supposed star, and continuing to move pieces around their central trio. Memphis has had home court advantage in multiple series throughout the last half decade, but the team has never won even a single Conference Finals game. Sure, the Western Conference is tough, but if a team like Memphis is consistently mediocre, isn’t it just stagnant? It becomes pointless to make the playoffs and lose in the first or second round every season; this is precisely the reason that teams like the 76ers tank year after year, hoping to draft a star that can take them to the Conference Finals and further. So what do we make of the Grizzlies at this point?
At this point, it’s clear that the Grizzlies aren’t going anywhere significant in the playoffs, as currently constructed. To me, the team is just dwindling down, with a massive teardown of the roster inevitably coming soon. The current Grizzlies resemble a sitcom in its later seasons, with everyone just waiting for the end of its run. Let me explain.
The Memphis Grizzlies are a Sitcom on its Last Legs
Memphis started out as a solid, intriguing new playoff team during their very first postseason run with the current core. Not many people paid attention to the Grizz as they managed 46 wins and the eighth seed in the loaded West, back in 2011. Look at nearly any sitcom for comparison – it almost always takes people a little while to catch on and start watching a good new show. Memphis’ presence in the playoffs soon became a regularity, and it was to no one’s surprise that the team started appearing on national T.V. more often. Well, are you ever surprised to see re-runs of The Big Bang Theory anymore? The show started in 2007, but I had never even heard of it until 2011 – it just wasn’t on T.V. all the time. Yet nowadays, it seems that the show is constantly available to watch. It takes a while for a sitcom to gain popularity, but once it does, it locks in a slot in CBS’s schedule. The Grizzlies are no different now, with a fair share of TNT doubleheader games allotted to them every season. But of course, the creators of a sitcom always start worrying that the show is becoming too stagnant, so they add some new characters. Going back to the TBBT example, the show created new characters such as Amy and Bernadette after the first few seasons. These characters have their moments, but at the end of the day, these are the characters that take the show away from its original vision. They help develop the beloved main characters to the point that they aren’t the same people we enjoy watching. Viewers fell in love with the awkward nerds who would never dream of having girlfriends, not the married versions of Howard Wolowitz and Leonard Hofstadter. In a way, the Grizzlies are similar. The grindhouse has tried to evolve, with management adding several new players over the last few years. But no matter who comes in to help – Courtney Lee, Vince Carter, Jeff Green, and Mario Chalmers, among others – the Grizz will always be the same grit-and-grind team that can’t shoot threes at an above average rate or succeed playing small ball. They’ve tried starting Green at the four this season, with Randolph coming off the bench, but what’s the use? No small ball lineup that Memphis throws out can hang with the best five man units of the Warriors, Spurs, and Thunder.
By the last season of a sitcom, the jokes are usually old and tired. The actors just want to have one last strong season, and finish their time with the show; everyone is just waiting for it to end. That’s the current state of the Grizzlies. Mike Conley is a free agent this summer, Zach Randolph turns 35 in July, and Marc Gasol has shown a significant drop in production this season, on the wrong side of 30. I still wouldn’t be surprised if Conley re-signs, but at this point, it doesn’t matter. The Grizzlies are primed for a major shakeup, one way or another. They can keep Conley, Gasol, and long-time fan favorite Tony Allen, but as my colleague Taylor Odenat wrote recently, the grindhouse needs to be destroyed. The team can remain competitive, if possible, but Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace needs to make some major changes throughout the roster, and at least one to its core group. The Grizz have had a great run, with plenty of special playoff moments, and some unfortunate ones as well. But the team was never good enough to be a real championship contender. It’s time for the end of an era in Memphis.
