The 2017 Playoffs Gave Us The Bittersweet Salmon Song Of The Grit-N-Grind Grizzlies

The unofficial end of the Grit-N-Grind Grizzlies era in Memphis is maybe the hardest sports-related heartbreak I’ve ever had to come to terms with. It’s been harder than when Michael Jordan retired the first time or basically every season the Chicago Cubs didn’t win the World Series.

Growing up in Memphis, I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of live pro sports, mostly because there wasn’t much to see. We basically had the Memphis Chicks, a long-defunct farm club for the Kansas City Royals whose baby chicken mascot bore no relation to the indigenous Chickasaw tribe from which it took its name. But I digress.

So when the team relocated from Vancouver in 2001, I was ecstatic (I was also pissed about the timing because I’d just gone away to college, but oh well.). At my very first NBA game at the Pyramid, I got to see one of my absolute favorite players ever, Jason Williams, playing for my hometown team and going head-to-head against Gary Payton, another one of my childhood idols, who lit us up for 30-some-odd points and gift-wrapped us one of the countless blowout losses we’d suffer during those early years.

That was the era my friends and I affectionately refer to as the “Stromile Swift years,” a player who turned out to be the perfect avatar for our team as he could be wildly entertaining but was simply not very good at basketball. Our only saving graces were the marvel that was a prime Pau Gasol and a rotating cast of coaches that included the inimitable Hubie Brown, “The Czar” Mike Fratello, and Tony Barone.

After a decade of basketball ineptitude, the Grizzlies finally broke through in 2010 with a stunning opening-round upset over the No. 1 Spurs. It was the spiritual birth of Grit-N-Grind – even if the slogan hadn’t quite caught fire yet – and it would become the defining epoch of what was once a third-tier expansion franchise nestled away in the Siberian media market of Mid-South America.

Its apotheosis came in 2013 with an improbable conference finals run that featured all of its core figures — Mike Conley, Marc Gasol, Zach Randolph, and Tony Allen — playing at the peak of their collective powers. Sadly, they ran headlong into a brick wall that was a San Antonio Spurs team nearing a zenith of its own.

So even though we didn’t realize it at the time, it’s rather fitting in hindsight that the final post-season sojourn of the Grit-N-Grind era came full-circle against their old nemesis the Spurs last spring, the swan (salmon?) song of a motley-ish crew of lovable misfits that had manifested as the perennial team-nobody-wants-to-face-in-the-playoffs.

At a time when the league was trending toward breakneck speed and outside shooting, Memphis zigged while everyone else zagged. They shunned the three-ball and pretty much scoring altogether. They pounded their opponents into submission with the bruiser duo of Randolph and Gasol. And they unleashed defensive stalwart Tony Allen on opposing offenses like a predatory free-safety.

And each spring, after they’d been categorically dismissed for their anachronistic style, they became at various points a living nightmare for just about every Western Conference powerhouse of the last decade. During their seven-year tenure, they upended the Spurs, Thunder, and Clippers in the playoffs and took the eventual champion Warriors to six games in 2015.

Even if Grizzlies fans everywhere knew deep down that they probably would never make a miraculous title run, for a few scattered fleeting moments they made us all believe that it was possible. Their thrilling OT win in Game 4 against the Spurs last spring to even their opening round series at 2-2 was quintessentially one of them and, in my admittedly biased estimation, the best game of the entire post-season.

Kawhi Leonard – who finished with a career-high 43 points, eight rebounds, six steals, and seven three-pointers – played like a cyborg down the stretch, scoring 16 straight points for the Spurs in the final four minutes of regulation to force overtime. It was one of those rare white-knuckle sequences of sustained stress where it felt like neither side could miss, despite the unimaginable degree of difficulty on each shot.

Conley was equally spectacular: 35 points, nine rebounds, and eight assists on 50 percent shooting from downtown. But it was Gasol who saved the day in the end despite a brutal shooting night up to that point. After Leonard knocked down yet another impossible three-pointer with seven seconds left in OT to tie the game at 108-108, the oversize Spaniard hit the shot of his career to send the series back to San Antonio for a pivotal Game 5.

The Spurs, of course, would go on to win the next two games and take the series, but despite all logic, the lead-footed geriatric Grizz had once again given one of the best teams in the NBA everything they could handle, and then some.

In an unabashedly copycat league, the Grizzlies’ defiance in the face of conventional wisdom isn’t just a reminder that there’s more than one way to play basketball. It begs a re-evaluation of how we measure success in a sport that has become increasingly of the problematic notion that every season is championship or bust.

The NBA is an immensely more interesting place when it features flawed and quirky outliers like the Grit-N-Grind Grizzlies. Because not everyone can be the Warriors. And that’s a good thing.