Tag: Memphis

Grizzlies eliminate No. 1 seed Spurs in six games

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — On the last night of the Spurs’ season, and most likely his career, Antonio McDyess was sitting in his locker at FedEx Forum before Game 6 on Friday, reliving one shining moment.

On the screen in front of him, Gary Neal had just buried a 3-pointer to send Game 5 into overtime.

“Crazy,” McDyess said, as if watching it for the first time.

Friday night in Memphis, there would be no more miracles. There would not be enough craziness for the Spurs to force a Game 7.

In fact, when the eighth-seeded Grizzlies just did what they do — grinding out a 99-91 victory to oust the top-seeded Spurs — it didn’t seem crazy at all.

It didn’t even seem like an upset.

Zach Randolph had 31 points and 11 rebounds, taking over the fourth quarter, to lift the Grizzlies to the second round for the first time in franchise history. Memphis will face fourth-seeded Oklahoma City in the Western Conference semifinals starting Sunday.

“They were the better team,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “They played better than we did in the stretch of six games.”

In doing so, Memphis pushed the Spurs into an exclusive and unwanted club, joining them with the 2007 Dallas Mavericks as the only No. 1 seeds in NBA history to lose a best-of-7 series in the first round.

Tony Parker had 23 points, while Manu Ginobili added 16 and Duncan had 12 points and 10 rebounds. But the Spurs, as had been the case for most of a first-round series that felt like a barroom brawl, could not overcome Memphis’ sheer tenacity and physicality.

“They played their asses off,” Popovich said.

For a moment, midway through the fourth, the Spurs seemed poised to pull another rabbit out of another hat.

It started with Ginobili making another Hail Mary, this one from 49 feet at the third-quarter horn, providing the Spurs hope that the fates were still with them after their overtime victory in Game 5.

After trailing for nearly every second of the game, and by as many as 14 in the first quarter, the Spurs took an 80-79 lead on McDyess’ jumper with 4:41 to play. The rugged Grizzlies, with an orneriness mirrored best by pugnacious coach Lionel Hollins, would not let the Spurs have a Game 7.

Hollins called timeout, and Randolph took over. In the next 2:30, Randolph scored 10 points, beckoning the Grizzlies to ride to the second round on his back.

“We rode him like he was an English war horse,” Hollins said.

Said Randolph, who scored 17 in the fourth: “I just wanted to get the ball in my hands and get into the paint.”

While Randolph was a one-man wrecking crew, Memphis buckled down on defense, doing what the championship-era Spurs used to do in tense postseason moments: Get stops on demand.

By the time the Spurs surfaced for air, Memphis had taken a 91-82 lead with 1:11 to play.

The list of what the Spurs squandered — or, perhaps more accurately, what the Grizzlies took from them — is a long one.

Sixty-one victories. The Western Conference’s top seed. Optimism that, perhaps, Duncan’s Spurs might be positioned for one more championship run.

Instead, they left the FedEx Forum vanquished amid a hail of streamers, headed early into an uncertain offseason that could be made longer by looming labor strife.

For McDyess, who is leaning strongly toward retiring this summer, it could be the end of a 16-year career.

“We played well all season long,” Parker said. “It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t play well in the playoffs.”

Even as the Spurs lamented all that was lost, and with Popovich off to have “dinner and a Gatorade,” they had to appreciate what Memphis had accomplished.

Casting off their winless playoff history, the Grizzlies went from the lottery to the second round in one season. And they went through the No. 1 seed to get there.

Crazy indeed.

Spurs’ Game 1 history only goes so far

Gregg Popovich can be a stubborn man, the type to talk the sky out of being blue, but even he can’t argue with fact.

Yes, Popovich has been forced to acknowledge, ever since upstart Memphis swiped Game 1 of this first-round playoff series Sunday, his Spurs team has a habit of turning postseason-opening 0-1 deficits into NBA championships.

It happened in 2003. And in 2005. And again in 2007.

Turns out, there’s a good explanation for that.

“Because we were better than the team we were playing,” Popovich said.

In what was either a thinly veiled challenge to his team, or simply a matter of good public relations, Popovich then wondered aloud Monday if that were still true in 2011, against an eighth-seeded Memphis team targeting a monumental upset.

“We’ll see if we’re a better team than the team we’re playing,” Popovich said. “If we’re not, they’ll win the series.”

The Grizzlies drew first blood in Game 1, riding Shane Battier’s 3-pointer with 23.9 seconds left to a 101-98 victory at the ATT Center that was the first in the club’s playoff history.

Whether Battier’s bomb represents the opening salvo in just the second first-round takedown of a No. 1 seed in the best-of-7 era — or was simply another bothersome first-round blip in a tradition of them for the Spurs — will be settled in the coming days.

What is for certain, thanks to Battier’s clutch shooting, is that Game 2 on Wednesday has taken on the whiff of a must-win for the Western Conference’s No. 1 seed.

Only three teams in NBA history have lost the first two games of a series at home and recovered to win the series. The most recent to do it were the 2005 Dallas Mavericks, who pulled that Lazarus routine on Houston in the first round that year.

“We’re a confident team,” Spurs forward Richard Jefferson said. “We understand it’s a seven-game series for a reason.”

Though not a guarantor of future success, history can offer the Spurs some comfort, though they’d probably just prefer to have Manu Ginobili back from injury.

Beginning with the 2003 playoffs, the Spurs are 6-3 in series that started with an 0-1 deficit, including one first-round series against Phoenix and two against Denver in championship years.

A No. 7 seed last season, the Spurs dropped Game 1 in Dallas, then recovered to win their first-round series in a breezy six games.

Through one reading of Sunday’s outcome, Battier’s game-winner is simply a reboot of Stephon Marbury’s buzzer-beater for the Suns in 2003 or Andre Miller’s 35-point game for the Nuggets in 2005. Sound and fury, signifying little.

“Each year is different,” guard Tony Parker said. “It’s not the first time we lost Game 1. Hopefully, we can use that to our advantage.”

Easing the pain of — or perhaps enhancing the frustration of — their latest Game 1 defeat, the Spurs accomplished much of what they wanted Sunday.

Had it not been for Battier’s 3-ball, the storyline would have been Matt Bonner’s two clutch fourth-quarter threes, or Jefferson’s solid 13-point, six-rebound contribution, or the way the Spurs kept the gritty Grizzlies off the glass.

For the first time this season, the Spurs outrebounded Memphis (40-38), owned the offensive boards (11-5) and scored more second-chance points (15-5).

“If you had told me before the game we’d do all those things, I would say it was a win,” Popovich said.

Battier’s 3-pointer, part of a 55.2-percent shooting performance for Memphis, negated that good work. With it, the Grizzlies announced their presence in the series, as surely as guard Tony Allen later announced their intentions.

“We didn’t come here to win one game,” Allen said. “We came here to win the series.”

The Grizzlies could do just that, if they prove to be the better team. Before the series is over, the Spurs expect to have their say.

One and not done

Until 2003, the Spurs were 0-17 in NBA playoff series in which they lost the opener. The team is 6-3 since in such scenarios, including at least one series win in each of its past three championship seasons. The following shows how the Spurs have fared after losing the first game of a series since 2003:

2003: Beat Phoenix 4-2 in first round; beat Dallas 4-2 in Western finals; won NBA championship

2005: Beat Denver 4-1 in first round; won NBA championship

2007: Beat Denver 4-1 in first round; won NBA championship

2008: Beat New Orleans 4-3 in Western semifinals; lost to L.A. Lakers 4-1 in Western finals

2009: Lost to Dallas 4-1 in first round

2010: Beat Dallas 4-2 in first round; lost to Phoenix 4-0 in Western semifinals

2011: Trailing Memphis 1-0 in first round

Randolph’s shot sends Spurs to 2-1 deficit

By Jeff McDonald
jmcdonald@express-news.net

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Memphis’ Zach Randolph toed the 3-point stripe late in Game 3 on Saturday, out of his range, his element and maybe his mind. Only two people in a pulsing FedEx Forum had an idea of what was about to go down.

One of them was Randolph. The other was George Hill.

“He practices that shot all summer long,” said Hill, the Spurs guard and a frequent offseason workout partner of Randolph’s in Indianapolis. “He can shoot it well.”

Randolph’s rare 3-pointer, the defining basket in a 91-88 Grizzlies victory that perhaps has swung this first-round series, gave Memphis a five-point lead with 41.9 seconds to go.

It set the stage for an ending nobody in the arena could have seen coming.

A game that began with in-house fireworks ended with a whimper, with Manu Ginobili pinned in the corner, unable to squeeze off a shot as time expired.

The Spurs down by three, Tim Duncan was trying to call ?time out during the scramble, which began when Hill snatched a Randolph miss ? with 5.9 seconds remaining.

“I should have been all over the referee to get the time, and I didn’t notice,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “That was my fault.”

Randolph had 25 points, and Marc Gasol chipped in 17 as the Grizzlies seized a 2-1 series lead.

And now, a Memphis team that earlier claimed the first postseason win in club history and followed with its first home playoff win Saturday, stands halfway to becoming the second eighth seed in the best-of-7 era to topple a No. 1.

Duncan summed Game 3 up this way: “Things just didn’t go right.”

Almost from the start.

The night began with a sellout crowd of 18,119, just the fifth of the season at FedEx Forum, whipped into a towel-waving froth. Professional wrestler Jerry Lawler and pregame pyrotechnics only added to the hysteria.

The Spurs did not handle the moment well at first. Duncan opened the game by airballing a free throw, and it would be the second half before things got better. Manhandled again by the bruising Memphis frontline, the Spurs trailed by as many as 15 in the first half.

“In the first 24 minutes, we went through the paces while they were out there playing their ass off,” Popovich said.

The Spurs came back, despite seven third-quarter turnovers, including four from the struggling Tony Parker. After trailing for all of the second and third quarters, the Spurs twice tied the game in the fourth. Then, everything went sideways on them.

Memphis coach Lionel Hollins declined to reveal exactly what he was looking for out of a timeout, up two with 56.7 seconds left, but it is certain he didn’t mean for the play to end with Randolph nearly dribbling out the shot clock 26 feet from the basket.

During the regular season, Randolph had tried 43 3-pointers, making just eight — a paltry 18.6 percent. Floating near Randolph on the perimeter, Duncan had a sense of the math.

“I didn’t assume that was in his arsenal,” Duncan said.

By then, Randolph didn’t have a choice but to let the ball fly.

“It felt good when it left my hands,” he said.

That made it 91-86 Memphis, but Ginobili — who had 23 points — followed with a pair of free throws, and after Randolph missed another jumper, Hill grabbed the rebound.

In lieu of calling time out and setting up a play with about five seconds left, Hill pushed the ball ahead to Ginobili, who got stuck between Gasol and Mike Conley as the horn sounded.

“I thought I had a little more time, but it seems that I didn’t,” Ginobili said.

In terms of the series, the Spurs do still have time, but it is rapidly running out.

“Bottom line is somebody’s got to win four games,” Duncan said. “Whoever gets there first is the winner.”

If, stunningly, that turns out to be the Grizzlies, Randolph’s rainbow — the one only two people saw coming — could be the lasting image.