Grizzlies must correct ‘D’ down the stretch
Eight of the 11 Grizzlies who participated in last week’s losses at Atlanta and Washington were not around for training camp when coach J.B. Bickerstaff established the team’s defensefirst mentality.
But in the wake of the team’s worst defensive outings of the season, Bickerstaff rebuked the newness of his team’s roster as an excuse for its defensive struggles.
“The base of our defense, guys understand what they’re supposed to do at this point,” Bickerstaff said Tuesday before his team took on another challenging defensive assignment Wednesday night against the Rockets at Fedexforum.
There are some defensive intricacies the Grizzlies have yet to cover with a roster that has been overhauled since the season’s beginning. But whatever gaps there are in the defensive curriculum with the new-look Grizzlies roster, they do not explain allowing 132 and 135 points in losses to sub.-500 Eastern Conference opponents.
That’s what happened on the road for Memphis last week as the team’s hopes of conveying a top-eight protected pick to the Boston Celtics took a hit with a lackluster road trip.
“I think number one is taking it personal,” point guard Mike Conley said. “The personal challenges. I think we
rely on our help guys too much. We can’t get beat one-on-one. You have an opportunity to guard somebody, make them make two or three moves instead of just one and straight to the bucket.”
Bickerstaff suggested one theory on Tuesday for the team’s defensive woes against Atlanta and Washington last week: perhaps the team’s free-flowing offensive success in those games negated its sense of urgency to lock in defensively.
The Grizzlies scored a combined 239 points in the two losses.
“I think we got caught up in our offense a little bit,” Bickerstaff said. “Since we were scoring the ball, we thought we would just rely on our offense and we got away from who we are. We know what we need to do defensively. We’ve just got to go out and execute it.”
The Grizzlies feature four of the NBA’S top 15 guard/wing defenders, according to a compilation of defensive metrics published by Bball Index on Monday.
Of those four defenders — Mike Conley, Jevon Carter, Kyle Anderson and Justin Holiday — only Conley has been a season-long member of the rotation.
But even as players have come and gone through trades and injuries, the Grizzlies have remained among the league’s top defensive teams.
Their defensive rating of 107.8 since the Feb. 9 trade deadline ranks ninth in the NBA, which is down only slightly from the team’s 106.9 defensive rating in games played before the All-star break.
But to finish the season among the NBA’S top 10 in defensive rating, the Grizzlies will need to eliminate the lapses like those that occurred last week.
The team’s newness is not an excuse. If the Grizzlies are going to salvage what’s left of a tumultuous season, their defense must become consistent again.
“It’s been the message since it happened in Atlanta,” Bickerstaff said. “We spent the next two days of practice and shootaround working on defensive schemes. For us, it’s not a matter of, ‘are we capable?’ It’s not a matter of do we know what we’re supposed to do? It’s a matter of executing.”
Reach Grizzlies beat writer David Cobb at david.cobb@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter @Davidwcobb.