There’s a lot of great stuff going on in the NBA currently, but at the head of the class even beyond Phoenix and Golden State are Ja Morant and the streaking Memphis Grizzlies.
On Tuesday night the Grizz handled the Warriors even with Klay Thompson scoring 14 points in just over nineteen minutes while recording a team high +17 rating.
It didn’t matter what Klay did because the Grizzlies are on fire even without one of their better players Dillion Brooks out for awhile. The Grizzlies won their 10th staight game and 20th out of their last 24 games.
The Grizzlies are on the cusp of being the next young NBA team in a small market city to become a league favorite kind of like the Thunder were almost a decade ago.
I was wrong earler this season when I wrote the Thunder are a year behind Memphis in their rebuild. That was overly optimistic. Even if Oklahoma City hits the lottery and lands say a Paulo Banchero….the Thunder after two years of shamelessly tanking like they have will take at the least another two years to then integrate a winning culture and learn how win in the last four minutes of games against good teams.
Sometimes you have to lose to be winner again, but in the NBA you have to learn how to close out against good teams. You have to not only be talented, but be menatlly and with a collection of players who ply smart with an edge to their game.
Memphis has a good young coach in Taylor Jenkins and a deep team which could maybe use another veteran piece to add even more wing scoring.
But what Memphis has most of all is the next star of the league in Ja Morant who on Tuesday night did the unthinkable when in the midst of Klay Thompson’s return made the Splash Brothers the seconf tier storyline of the night.