Randolph, Grizzlies turning some heads
The Memphis Grizzlies did it again on Sunday, seizing home-court advantage in their NBA Western Conference semifinal series against the Oklahoma City Thunder with a 114-101 win in Game 1.
It was the same blueprint the Grizzlies used to upset the West’s top seed, San Antonio, in the opening round — they won Game 1 on the road and then closed out the series with three wins in Memphis.
After the Spurs were eliminated Friday night, the discussion centered around San Antonio’s flaws — Tim Duncan’s too old, the Spurs are too small, Manu Ginobili was too hurt, and so on. Not a lot of folks paid much attention to Memphis, even after the first-round stunner.
At the heart of it has been Zach Randolph, a guy who has been around the league for a decade since leaving Michigan State after his freshman year in 2001 and who arrived in Memphis in the fall of 2009 getting ready to play for his fourth NBA team and carrying all sorts of baggage from his days in Portland and his short stints with Isiah Thomas’ Knicks and the Clippers.
All Randolph has done in two seasons in Elvis-town is revitalize his career. He made the All-Star Game in 2010 during a season in which he averaged 20.8 points and a career-high 11.7 rebounds a game for the Grizzlies. This season, the scoring dipped slightly to 20.1 points a game, but he again set a career-high for rebounding, yanking down 12.2 boards a night.
Playing in the postseason for the first time since 2003, Randolph has been an absolute beast. He scored a career playoff high 31 points in the clincher against San Antonio on Friday and put up a new career playoff high of 34 points as an encore in helping Memphis pummel the Thunder on Sunday.
But it’s not just scoring. Randolph had a long — and well-deserved — reputation for being something of a black hole on the offensive end. If the ball went into Z-Bo, it never came back out. But the light has flashed on for Randolph. He averaged more than three assists a game against the Spurs and his passing from the low post is one of the many reasons Memphis is the surprise team of these playoffs.
It could be argued, however, that the Grizzlies aren’t really that big a shocker at all. Memphis was 27-13 in its final 40 games, even after tanking the final two because the Grizzlies actually wanted the matchup with San Antonio.
Memphis also showed on Sunday that it can play varying styles — after shutting down the Spurs with an airtight defense in the first round, the Grizzlies hammered Oklahoma City on the offensive end, putting up 114 points on just 94 possessions, turning the ball over just eight times.
Randolph and fellow big man Marc Gasol — Pau’s kid brother — combined for 54 points against the Thunder’s interior defense of Kendrick Perkins, Serge Ibaka and Nick Collison.
And, hey, maybe the quick turnaround helped Memphis. The NBA playoffs are renowned for being generous with the off days, but the Grizzlies had just 36 hours between finishing off the Spurs and opening with the Thunder.
For a team on the roll Memphis is on, maybe it helped that there was no time off to kill the momentum.
