Hints of team’s eternal hibernation
Grizzlies finished inaugural season on a high, but worrying trends had already begun to surface
My final game report on our city’s first season in the NBA came 20 years ago Thursday and carried a Los Angeles dateline.
It began like this: Music from heaven never sounded so good. A season in hell for the Vancouver Grizzlies ended Sunday to the uplifting strains of gospel music and a voice screaming ‘hallelujah.’
More than almost anything else that I can remember about the Grizzlies’ first season, one that teased with a scattering of highs set against a near-constant backdrop of mindnumbing lows, was the finale of the 1995-96 season at the ramshackle L.A. Sports Arena, home of the then equally horrible Los Angeles Clippers.
Was that day just the first in a series of significant upcoming events — a top-four pick in the upcoming draft, salary cap money to add quality free agents — which would change the course of the franchise for the better?
Or were the basketball gods simply feeling empathy for their newest expansion creation, one that entered Game 82 on the verge of setting a new futility standard for first-year franchises?
Unfortunately, we all know the answer was the latter.
But on that day, after the Grizzlies unfurled their most dominant stretch of play for the entire season, a 22-2 second-half run to beat the Clippers 108-101, you wanted to believe it was the former. Especially when, in the moments immediately following the game, a gospel group took to the floor in rehearsal and began belting out hymns of belief. Hallelujah, indeed. That victory, hot on the heels of a 92-78 win at Denver, gave the Grizzlies a finish to their season that mirrored the start: Consecutive wins and a lot of hope.
“To go into the off-season on a twogame winning streak, regardless of your record, with the realization that this is expansion, you have to have a lot of optimism about that,” Grizzlies point guard Greg Anthony told me afterwards.
Yes, the victories gave Vancouver a 15-67 record for the season, allowing them to share, and not own, the worst expansion record in league history.
And although you don’t want to use the word “jinxed” when you look back in hindsight all these years later on that expansion campaign, you begin to see the signs that would show themselves as trends over the next five seasons.
Expectations would climb, attendance would drop and with the ominous spectre of franchise relocation set to rear its ugly head, things would only get worse.
Here’s some trends from Season 1 that would prove to be the signs of Vancouver’s NBA apocalypse.
1 No glue guys
How is this for an ominous sign? On the first day of the team’s first training camp in Richmond, Gerald Wilkins met the media by holding a sizable ice pack on his back. Yes, the expansion draft cast-off from Cleveland was fully recovered from a ruptured Achilles that forced him to miss the entire 1994-95 season. And yes, he was very upbeat. But it wasn’t long before he had to have back surgery to fix a bulging disc, missing two-thirds of the season. He played just 28 games in Vancouver, then left for Orlando where he played 152 of 164 games over the next two seasons.
And then there was blue-collar forward Kenny Gattison, the ex-Charlotte standout, who, because of a neck injury suffered in a freak oncourt collision, elected to retire at mid-season.
Both were in their early 30s. And while neither was going to be a game-changer on the offensive end of the floor, both were the kinds of players who had come from winning locker-rooms, each bringing a level of warrior mindset that the club so desperately needed with its young roster.
How important could both of those players have been if they had returned in mentoring roles the next season? Scan the 1996-97 roster that would win just 14 games and you see just how alone the team’s rookie sensation Shareef Abdur-Rahim was in terms of elder influence.
For its entire Vancouver history, Blue Edwards and Grant Long were the only vets decorated enough and willing to fill that role and that simply wasn’t enough.
2 Exiled to the north
More ominous signs from the city that so many players still say they loved to visit (but not stay)?
The Grizzlies, by the standard of the day, actually had some decent salary cap room to add quality free agents to their roster in the summer of 1996. Yet they couldn’t lure anyone. In fact, the two marquee additions, George Lynch and Anthony Peeler, came from the Lakers for nothing more than a swap of second-round draft picks in 1998 and ’99 because they were in the midst of creating salary cap room to lure free-agent Shaquille O’Neal from Orlando.
The Lakers surveyed the landscape and sent the pair to the place they figured could do the least damage to their cause.
Peeler later fumed when it was suggested that promising rookie Chris Robinson might challenge him for the starting two-guard spot and later demanded a trade. He got that wish and was dealt to Minnesota for Doug West, who in turn also asked for a trade that never came. Lynch? He got himself into a whole lot of trouble with the club in the 1997-98 season when he uttered the infamous line: “If I was the fans, I’d be booing us because we’re a better team. If I was here, I wouldn’t have season tickets.”
And of course the Steve Francis saga tops them all.
Picked No. 2 overall by the Grizzlies in the 1999 draft, he forced a trade to Houston. Two seasons later, the moving vans were pulling out of GM Place and heading for Memphis.
3 Losses by the bushel
Much is made of the 19- and 23-game losing streaks endured by the Grizz in their expansion campaign, but based on their cache of lottery picks and their evolution as an NBA franchise, things actually got a lot worse for the franchise that was the swiftest to reach 100, 200 and then 300 losses.
Here’s the worst streaks of each of their five other seasons in Vancouver:
1996-97 — Lost 16 of 18, including 15 straight, and then 24 of 25 for a 14-68 finish.
1997-98 — Lost 15 of 16 and then lost 13 of 14 to finish 19-63.
1998-99 — In a 50-game, strikeshortened season, they went 2-23 over a 25-game stretch, a streak that maxed out at 3-29 over 32 games en route to an 8-42 record.
1999-2000 — Streaks of 0-11 and 0-12 en route to a 22-60 finish.
2000-01 — While news of its relocation to Memphis becomes more and more of a reality, the team finishes its tenure in Vancouver by losing 23 of its last 28 games to finish a then-franchise-best 23-59.
4 The weird and the what-ifs?
The Grizzlies had the potential to author some epic plot lines, but the basketball gods were just never with them.
Like on that day in 1999 when Francis returned to Vancouver for the first time since forcing the trade to Houston. Despite the tomatoes thrown his way by the GM Place crowd, all he did was hit a shot with 2.6 seconds left that forced overtime and led to an eventual 118-110 Rockets win.
And then there are the what-ifs, as in what if the Grizz had accepted the Steve Nash deal that the Phoenix Suns had asked for back on draft day in 1997?
“Phoenix called, but they’re being unreasonable,” then-GM Stu Jackson told me after the team had selected point guard Antonio Daniels in the draft. “They called because they realize the kid’s (Nash) not going to play. But what they’re asking for we just can’t do. If we did what they were asking for Steve Nash, we’d have one happy day and then we’d spend the rest of the year saying: ‘What did we do?’”
It was believed that Phoenix wanted Vancouver’s No. 4 pick for Nash and an unnamed player.
If Vancouver had pulled the trigger, they would have had their point guard for the next decade-plus and they would have likely chased either Paul Pierce or Vince Carter in 1998.
And if all of that had happened? Maybe Rogers Arena is playing host to an opening-round playoff game tonight.
Howard Tsumura covered the Grizzlies throughout their six-season tenure in Vancouver. He looked back at the team’s 1995-96 NBA expansion campaign in our season-long series It Was 20 Years Ago Today