Stuck out of town for the holidays, I assumed I wouldn’t be able to see the Grizzlies’ opener — a 95-82 loss in San Antonio — but the free League Pass preview saved me. My blanket comment is that it’s one game on the road against a good team and that even in the best of times the Grizzlies always lose the opener and almost always start out slow. Even with each game weighted a little bit more in a 66-game season, I feel like we need to have about five games in before getting too worked up about much. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have some thoughts on the game, and, true to form, these intended “quick notes” came in about three times longer than I planned:
1. Shot Distribution: Because so many hoops fans in Memphis have been trained via years of mediocrity to think their team can only have one good scorer at a time and because so few seem to remember how good the Grizzlies were at the moment when Rudy Gay injured his shoulder in back in February, of course the combination of Gay (18) getting a lot of field-goal attempts, Zach Randolph (8) getting far fewer than his norm, and the team losing is going to instigate some panicked overreaction.
The Grizzlies are not a team like, say, the Nuggets, where scoring skill is fairly balanced throughout the roster. Randolph and Gay are clearly the team’s two most talented scorers. Marc Gasol, Mike Conley, and O.J. Mayo comprise the second tier. Everyone else is — or should be — an offensive bit player. And shot distribution should reflect that reality. Instead, the shot distribution in last night’s game was flatter than what the Grizzlies need it to be.
