Grizzlies
Making the best of what you have doesn’t mean you don’t yearn for more. The undercurrent of regret during this era is that the team spent its best draft pick on Hasheem Thabeet and biggest free agent contract on Chandler Parsons with a bum knee. They always wanted — and sought — more. Wanted more shooting. Wanted more efficient offense. Wanted a bigger star. Grit and grind wasn’t a rejection of those things. It was about exceeding expectations even without them.
The future of “grit and grind” in Memphis is less about it being tied to style of play — though tough, physical defense is probably a prerequisite — than about whether or not it’s tied to a specific group of players, an assembly that’s always had an expiration date, and I think that’s what Hrdlicka was most focused on.
On one level, “grit and grind” has been shorthand for an era of Grizzlies basketball, and all eras end. Was it a rallying cry that will pass with this competitive era, or will it remain as a kind of ethos — like the Spurs’ “pounding the rock” — that survives roster and stylistic tweaks?
Evolution, Deferred
The notion of this season as a transitional one for the Grizzlies is not untrue, but misses that this transition has been ongoing for a few seasons now, and has been delayed primarily by bad decisions and/or forces beyond control more than by resistance to change.
Many of the changes that David Fizdale has been celebrated for bringing to old, ugly, ossified “grit and grind” are things that his predecessor, Dave Joerger, had already begun, with various levels of success.
The shift in the team’s pecking order toward Mike Conley and Marc Gasol, once the team’s fourth and fifth options, began even before Joerger, with the trade of Rudy Gay. The team’s pace of play jumped for three straight seasons under Joerger, and has slowed down a little this season. The team’s three-point attempts increased for three straight seasons under Joerger, including a big jump in his final season, though the increase under Fizdale has been greater still. The team’s offensive efficiency increased under Joerger, finishing in the top half of the NBA in his second season as head coach for the first and only time since Hubie Brown’s departure. It’s increased more this season, but in the context of a larger league-wide uptick. Joerger first flirted with moving Zach Randolph into a sixth-man role, and with Matt Barnes and Jeff Green last season, played much more small ball than the team has played this season, a consequence of Chandler Parsons’ injury and ineffectiveness.
Fizdale built on these moves, cemented many of them, and added more — most dramatically spurring more threepoint shooting from his frontcourt. He’s encountered less resistance to modernity than Joerger initially did. But in both cases, attempts at evolution were mostly slowed by other forces. For Joerger, it was the big miss on Jeff Green and an avalanche of injuries. For Fizdale, it’s been almost entirely about injury-created gulf between Theoretical Chandler Parsons and Actual Chandler Parsons. Reliance on the so-called “Core Four” has been more default than strategy.
The biggest friction around “grit-andgrind” this season for the Grizzlies has been more linguistic than actual, about a new coach from another culture that seemed to assume it was about style of play and acceptance of limitation, when that’s not generally what players and, especially, fans have wanted it to mean.
Grizzlies fans didn’t balk at Tony Allen’s benching this season because it was an affront to grit and grind. They balked because the Grizzlies didn’t have a better option. And they didn’t grow weary of the Parsons minutes mandate because he didn’t embody some notion of “Memphis.” They grew weary of it because he was never healthy and did not help the team.
Grizzlies fans want a team that plays hard and with some personality. They don’t need it to be slow and stay “in the mud,” to choose a different Grizzlies phrase often conflated with ye olde grit and grind. That team can launch a lot of threes, as this one now does, it can play fast, as this one doesn’t. But as long as that team plays hard and with personality, and seems to embrace the city as much as the city embraces it, I suspect fans will be happy to waive their “grit and grind” towels in celebration.
What is “grit and grind”? It’s both era and ethos. As an era, the first and potentially final iteration will pass — is passing before our eyes. As an ethos? Tony Allen might have coined the phrase, but its future is up to fans who own it and players yet to come who can choose to embrace it.