The 2017-18 NBA season was one to forget for basically everyone involved with the Memphis Grizzlies franchise. Locker room turmoil and injuries were at the forefront for a team that had made the postseason for seven years in a row, and by the time the year mercifully came to an end, the Grizzlies were 22-60 and lottery-bound.
No player was more indicative of how it was a lost season on the whole than Mike Conley. Memphis’ star point guard was limited to 12 games due to a heel injury that required season-ending surgery and had the worst shooting numbers of his NBA career. Conley has been a steady hand for years in the Grizzlies’ backcourt, but his 2017-18 campaign was never able to really get off the ground.
The good news for everyone in Memphis is that Conley is back healthy on a Grizzlies team that hopes to make it back to the postseason this year. One thing that could help in that endeavor is the mindset of their point guard, who told James Herbert of CBS Sports that he’s entering 2018-19 with a chip on his shoulder.
“I almost see it as a blessing that I had this opportunity to sit out, regroup, get myself together and it’s almost like a new lease on life as far as an NBA career,” Conley said. “It’s almost like I’m coming back fresh and I’m coming back mentally healed and just mentally ready and raring, with a fire, with a chip, with everything to prove again. You can easily lose that over a 10-year career. You get so accustomed to doing the same thing over and over again, making the playoffs and being good and all these things and winning games. At some point, you almost need something that kickstarts you again and makes sure that you don’t lose that edge. I think I got that edge back just from the season that happened before.”
This certainly isn’t anything new that we’ve heard out of an athlete coming off of season-ending surgery, but it is interesting that Conley more or less said that he was getting to a point where he was going through the motions and that this helped him almost recalibrate. But despite this view that he has a new lease on life in the league, Conley made it clear that spending last year on the sidelines really took its tole — he told CBS Sports that he “sat in the living room with the lights off, just thinking” on the day he learned about his injury ending his season, which led to some more hardships.
“On top of it, just seeing the snowball effect initially from all that, me not being there for my team, me not being out on the court, us starting very well early on in the season to being a team that ends up in the lottery, it felt like a lot of that was on me,” Conley said. “I felt responsible in a huge way. So, throughout the year, it was just struggling with the fact that all this is kind of happening because of me. The whole time. I kind of carried that all through last season. Ultimately, I think what helped me is I even carried it into the offseason, but in a way that it motivated me to get back better than ever and healthier than ever. Because I didn’t want to have to feel that feeling again or let my teammates or let the city feel that again.”
Between Conley’s return, a hopeful bounce back year for Marc Gasol, and the presence of promising rookie Jaron Jackson Jr., there are reasons for optimism for the immediate and distant future in Memphis. But as Conley showed, the road to getting to that point was anything but easy.
(Via CBS Sports)
