CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Larry Kuzniewski

In anticipation of the grand return of Lionel Hollins to Memphis as the head coach of the Brooklyn Nets, his first time back in FedExForum since he was helming the Grizzlies, I decided it was a good time to do a game diary, so that I could capture each and every moment of the game. That turned out to be a poor decision.

Before the Game

➭ There still seems to be a strawman argument out there that people shouldn’t cheer loudly/warm reception. People have written at length about how Hollins deserves a big ovation, and how people who don’t want to cheer don’t get it… Honestly, I’m surprised people would actually be that petty/bitter. I was chief among the Hollins Overreactors. The guy just flat-out rubbed me the wrong way a lot of the time. But as I never stopped appreciating what he did for the team and thus for the city, and the farther away we get from his weird and unpleasant exit, the more affection I have for the guy in hindsight, no matter what he’s done since. I’m certainly not going to flip out about the comments he made about Memphis (you know, the ones I already flipped out about) and let that keep me from appreciating the positives of the moment.

➭ Meanwhile in Brooklyn, the Nets are in disarray. By all accounts, this team doesn’t like Lionel, and Lionel doesn’t like them either. Things are not going well. You could kind of see this coming, though, right? If there’s anything we know about Lionel Hollins it’s that he’s best with a young team who (to be frank) haven’t been in the league long enough to tune out the guy who yells at them. If he were going to return to coaching, I wish it had been with a team that was young and needed discipline, rather than a team like Brooklyn that got old in a hurry and has nowhere to go but rock bottom at the moment. Unleashing a cranky Hollins on a team full of vets—including Deron Williams, the guy who managed to get Jerry Sloan fired—seemed like a recipe for disaster, and it hasn’t gone well.

➭ The moment of truth, before the game: a warm ovation (if not over-the-top) for Lionel and a slideshow of him during all his years with the Grizzlies—with Hubie Brown and Shane Battier at the Pyramid, with a very young Mike Conley on court, etc.—and just like he said in the pregame press conference, he was emotional. Visibly teary-eyed. It was a nice moment, and honestly, he deserved it, and the way the Grizzlies organization handled it was very, very classy.

First Quarter

➭ 11:21 Mike Conley turns a steal into layup for first Grizzlies basket. It’s hard not to notice that Kevin Garnett is barely running. I’m surprised he’s playing on a road SEGABABA against a Western Conference team, a game that doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but KG is KG, and he decides when he rests and when he doesn’t. Still, while he’s active on defense, it’s clear that this KG isn’t the one we’re used to seeing.

[jump]

Larry Kuzniewski

➭ 8:45 Jeff Green dunks (the first of many such occasions this evening) and turns to the bench to do the Vince Carter motorcycle celebration, which Carter, in his suit, thinks is hilarious. I call it the “motorcycle” celebration on Twitter and am immediately corrected:

➭ 8:01 Speaking of Twitter, I hadn’t noticed that Joe Johnson had put on a great deal of weight—starting to approach “bottoming-out O.J. Mayo in Milwaukee” territory, if we’re honest—until I saw this float past:

Dyer’s is the best.

➭ 6:58 It happens: Zach Randolph breaks away on a fast break, crosses over Mason Plumlee (with a hesitation move he may have picked up from Mike Conley) at the 3-point line and then drives past him all the way to the basket where he lays it in. Lionel Hollins calls a timeout because that is the only appropriate response to what he just witnessed.

➭ 4:30 Tony Allen enters the game. To me, TA is the wild card of Lionel Hollins’ return: what’s he going to do? It’s no secret that Hollins didn’t trust TA, and did everything he could to avoid having to play him when possible. I’m sure TA still remembers all the time he spent on the bench watching Xavier Henry start ahead of him… Look. We all know that if a Grizzlies player is going to do something that’s both stupid and wildly entertaining, it’ll be Tony. It’s entirely possible that Allen could do something crazy and then flex right in Lionel’s face, and Lionel might laugh, or he might just get into a fistfight with Tony Allen right then and there. Either outcome would be appropriately Lionel and appropriately Tony.

➭ 1:24 The Grizzlies are currently rolling out a lineup of Beno Udrih, Nick Calathes, Tony Allen, Kosta Koufos, and Marc Gasol. Lionel’s lineups were always infuriating fairly arbitrary, but he was a pretty staunch proponent of positionality overall. So… two point guards, Tony Allen, whom Lionel repeatedly referred to as “not a small forward,” and two centers. One can’t help but wonder if that thought crossed Dave Joerger’s mind as he realized who he had on the floor. Lionel’s really going to love this one.

Really, I’m sure he didn’t love it, because by the end of the first quarter the score is 32–15, and the Nets look like they have no fight in them at all. The Grizzlies clearly came out of the gate determined to send a message to their old coach—look what we can do now!—and, in his heart, I’m sure Lionel approves. He knows what’s up.

Larry Kuzniewski

Second Quarter

➭ 10:09 I picked this game to be a game diary because of the intrigue surrounding the return of Lionel Hollins, of course, and I figured that emotion among the guys (only 5 of them left) who played for him would make it an interesting game. At this point, early in the second quarter, the game looks like it’s going to be a bloodbath (and not the drudgery of a 10-point lead barely held on to for 48 minutes) and I’m going to have nothing to write about. That’s still mostly going to be true—most of the things worth noting happened early in this one, while the Grizzlies were building up their first big lead—but I had expected more drama, more intensity. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of that with the Nets this year.

➭ 9:01 Tony Allen hits a three, the only one he’ll take tonight. The Grizzlies are up 38–17.

➭ 5:00 Deron Williams hits a 3. Normally, this wouldn’t be all that noteworthy, but Deron Williams has missed his last 21 field goal attempts, a streak stretching back across three consecutive games. He then follows that up with another make, which still means he’s been shooting terribly, but his “regression to the mean” here might mean he makes 7 in a row or something. I can’t imagine the kinds of things I’d write if a Grizzlies player making as much money as Deron Williams missed 21 shots in a row over three games. It would be bad.

➭ 2:18 The Nets are somehow back to within 11. The Grizzlies are going to have to put the foot on the gas the rest of the way to put these dudes away. They’ve been so bad all year about letting bad teams hang around and then just assuming they can come back if they get down, or win barely by holding on to a single-digit lead and not exert any effort. Sure, the Grizzlies are thinking about the All-Star break (as am I, if I’m honest), but to (1) let Lionel have the satisfaction of winning this game even though his team isn’t any good and (2) lose this and the Timberwolves game on either side of beating the Atlanta Hawks would be a major disappointment. The Grizzlies need to be gaining ground on Golden State for the 1 seed, not getting closer to Houston for the 3.

Larry Kuzniewski

Halftime

➭ Halftime entertainment is a “celebrity bachelor” thing with Natch the Bear, in which Natch is the bachelor (Natchelor?) and three ladies answering questions competing for his affections, Dating Game style. It was this close to being intelligible, but it came off more like the kind of thing that would happen in a dream about a halftime show: it would make sense in the context of the dream, and then afterward you’d just feel confused and strange about it.

➭ Also at halftime, the Grizzlies have made 1 three and the Nets have made 2. The season low for combined 3-pointers is 4 (Grizzlies @ Kings), so if nobody makes one the rest of the way—something that seems unlikely but also totally possible—we’ll have a new record low.

Third Quarter

Larry Kuzniewski

➭ 11:44 It was apparent to everyone from the opening tip, but Kevin Garnett is really at the end of his career now. He’s keeping Z-Bo off the glass, I guess, just by virtue of not getting called for fouls (his main defensive moves now are slapping hands and arms and flat-out shoves) and knowing where to stand because he’s still Kevin Garnett; he just can’t execute anything the way he used to. It feels like great players always play one or two seasons too long, and that’s clearly what’s going on here. It’s sad to watch, really, like watching Hakeem Olajuwon in a Raptors jersey.

➭ 2:30 My notes from 11:44 to now are almost as boring as the actual basketball game that was happening. But at 2:30, Zach Randolph dunks—and not just a tip-dunk, either, a real honest-to-goodness slam dunk—and Hollins calls a timeout again. I imagine once the Nets got back to the huddle, he asked them, “Y’all really going to let him do that?” and they all just kind of mumbled.

➭ 1:01 Jerome Jordan seems to be playing pretty well for Brooklyn. He was a Grizzlies training camp guy the summer before the Western Conference Finals year (Lionel’s last season) and he was the last guy cut before the beginning of the year. It was well known that Hollins liked him and wanted to keep him, so it makes sense that Hollins would give him a shot in Brooklyn. Funny how the basketball world works sometimes.

Fourth Quarter

➭ 11:24 Deron Williams commits his 5th foul, which is pretty impressive for a guy who died in 2012.

➭ 10:08 I got up from my computer to go get some popcorn. I never get up from my computer unless there’s a break in the action, but tonight… tonight calls for salty popcorn and not as much for careful attention. The Grizzlies are just clinging to a double-digit lead at this point, playing not to lose instead of putting the pedal down and running away with it. Makes sense—they’ve got to play the Thunder in OKC on Wednesday night, so the less energy they exert tonight, the better. But it would’ve been nice to see them beat the Nets by 45, just for the entertainment value. Instead, it’s been a 10-to–13 point game pretty much since halftime.

➭ 9:07 The attendance is announced: 16,901. There must be a lot of invisible people whose tickets were scanned in, or maybe 3,000 people are all getting BBQ nachos at the same time.

Larry Kuzniewski

➭ 5:45 Spent two minutes talking about Memphis breweries on Twitter with Matt Hrdlicka and Joe Mullinax, and I look up and notice that the Grizzlies are still up 14 points. Sometimes covering a basketball game is not as fun as you think it’s going to be. You have to pay enough attention to notice what’s going on, but you’d really rather be doing a million other things. Part of that is the grind—some of us writers need the All-Star break as much as the players do—and some of it is just the fact that a basketball game with a perpetual 14-point lead just isn’t that much fun to watch for the most part. You almost wish they’d implement some kind of running clock.

➭ 5:02 Zach Randolph hits a three-pointer. Now he’s had a crossover, a dunk, and a made 3 in the same game. Clearly the world is coming to an end and/or he’s showing out for Lionel Hollins. Maybe both.

Over the next five minutes of basketball the Grizzlies will try really hard to give the game away—the Nets will find themselves down only 7 with 50 seconds left to play, and they don’t foul until much later, when they’re down 9 with 18 to play. It really wasn’t an exciting game at all after the first quarter’s explosion of attitude and scoring. Sometimes that happens in the NBA: the outcome of the game just never feels like it’s in question. And sometimes that’s okay, but on a night that had so much potential for some kind of emotional occurrence, for it to be neither a close game nor a ridiculous blowout feels like cheating. It did not live up to the hype in any way, shape, or form. That’s good for the Grizzlies—the OKC game tonight is much more important—but it does mean that what had the potential to be A Moment was really just a sparsely-attended Tuesday night game against a middling-to-bad Eastern Conference team. That’s what it was, no more, no less.