Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Grizzlies Win Two Straight

With the holiday season upon us, and an unsuspected illness, I've been slow to post. That doesn't mean I haven't been keeping tabs on the Grizzlies.

I saw the Grizzlies live at the Fedex forum defeat a depleted Washington Wizards while home for Thanksgiving, and watched the Grizzlies win in an impressive victory against the veteran New Jersey Nets.

Picture from the Fedex Forum:



I expected the Grizzlies to beat the Wizards. The Wizards were without Gilbert Arenas, and I couldn't name any players on the Wizards bench.

The Grizzlies looked great in stretches, and they just had too many weapons for the Wizards. However, they also had lapses. The Grizzlies haven't developed that cut-throat mentality yet, and as a result they allowed Antwan Jamison to score 41 points, and gave Caron Butler some open threes down the stretch.

The Grizzlies made up for it on the road in a game they controlled against the Nets. They led almost the entire game, and when the Nets made their inevitable charge, the Grizzlies showed poise.

Their were still stretches where the Grizzlies let their guard down on defense, but overall they did a better job of compensating instead of sulking.

Kyle Lowry and Juan Carlos Navarro are as good as advertised, and Rudy Gay it looking better everyday despite fouling out against the Nets.

I'm looking forward to the next 5 games as the Grizzlies' schedule lightens up.

3 comments:

Lurch said...

I see Navarro is sneaking his way into ROY talks. The other impressive thing is that we are doing this without Darko. he showed himself to be a legitimate low post threat scoring and rebounding. Not will he open up more things for Gasol, but hoepfully will keep Swift on the bench longer. Our defense needs to improve. We kept bailing NJ out with bad fouls (lazy defense) with the shot clock under 5. I still feel that Ivaroni is struggling to identify the hot hands during a game and figuring out good combinations on the court, but this should improve as the season progresses. Another thing from the past two game sis our over abundance of shooters. Unlike the past when Miller was our only real deep threat (occasional jason Williams, but he defined streaky). Now on any given nigt you can expect usually 2 out of our 4 shooters to be lights out. Thoughts on the Raptors? back to back road games are never fun especially after last night's battle.

Anonymous said...

I say we should do whatever it takes (short of trading Pau) to get Joakim Noah from Chicago - That's the competitive attitude we seem to be missing.

bkatz said...

i saw the grizz tonight vs minnesota. granted minnesota is the worst team in the league, but i was extremely impressed with the grizz's performance. not only did they dominate every aspect of the game, the guys looked relaxed and looked like they were having fun (something that was clearly lacking last year). the defense was phenomenal too. stro was blocking shots left and right. darko was playing tough. and even pau had stretches of the game where he was dominating al jefferson and/or craig smith. keep it going grizz!