It was a game with a hundred turning points, each more compelling than the one before it, building to a crescendo that ended with … an inbound violation? Well, that's something else for the Memphis Grizzlies to work on before Friday, we suppose.
In a mesmerizing yet jagged game to determine which of the two top play-in teams was better suited to deal with the precocious Houston Rockets this weekend in the first round of the actual Western Conference playoffs, the Golden State Warriors out-experienced the Grizz, 121–116. That experience and the steady relentlessness it made was the one thing Memphis could not overcome. They refused to take the knee after a befuddled start and then just kept on refusing, forcing the Warriors to draw 75 points from Jimmy Butler and Stephen Curry in order to survive the kind of scare they are both too old to endure too often. The correct team won, but only after working far harder than they either had meant to or logically can be expected to do repeatedly.
To make the Rockets series sing, the Warriors will have to cheat the calendar with knowledge and guile in all the ways they did Tuesday night, and against a better, more complete, and more persistently reliable foe. It may end up as the best of the West's four first-round series because of all the possibilities, including the notion that both teams will be punching uphill at different stages for different reasons. Nobody would be surprised with either team winning, which is more than most 2–7 series can promise.
Memphis was the team that needed Tuesday more, as much for psychic reasons as tactical ones. The nature of life at the play-in level is that the seven–eight game is not sudden death, but the loser gets to play a second game with sudden death on the horizon. Memphis spent some time as one of the best teams in the league this year, but won few admirers down the stretch and spent the final two dozen games undoing all the good they had done in the first 58. In the process, the Grizzlies got coach Taylor Jenkins fired and plummeted from second place and the euphoria of a 151–148 overtime win over Phoenix to become a scuffed-up eight-seed that looked somehow worse than that as the playoffs drew closer.
But through different administrations and styles of play, the Grizzlies have always fancied themselves the prototypical hard nut/tough out, all the way down to Ja Morant's persistent need to mime being a munitions expert at inopportune times. They didn't absolutely need to beat Golden State, which is something they hadn't done in their last 10 games in San Francisco, but they needed to regain their swagger in case of a loss, and to that end they showed themselves to be another worthy character in a conference mural full of them.
In erasing a 20-point first-half deficit, reminding us why they matter and how good their must-see players (Morant and Desmond Bane, most notably) really are, and most importantly providing character-acting and grit to a tournament that promises to be oppressively Laker-heavy, the Grizzlies made the second half of the game a crusade for their continued relevance, and the fourth quarter a hard reminder that they will get their quart of blood on the way out of the building no matter what. Morant and Bane distorted the Warriors' dreams of an easy walk-off, rookie center Zach Edey righted himself after an indifferent start, and the Grizz had themselves positioned to steal the win outright until the moment when, down three with 5.4 seconds left, Santi Aldama couldn't get the ball inbounded in time to avoid a rarely called violation. The Grizz were out of timeouts, which meant that in the absence of a better inbound play—or a healthier Morant, who had stepped on Buddy Hield's ankle in the third quarter and was noticeably limping through the remainder of the game—Aldama's only play was to pass the ball to someone and hope for the best. The best did not present itself, that pass never came, and the Warriors, who have thoroughly remade themselves through the Butler trade, finally finished a task that they had seemingly completed an hour earlier.
The Butler trade elevated the Warriors from playoff team emeritus status to a very live postseason underdog, and they are that even though they are old and small because Butler, Curry, and Draymond Green are fueled by the power of history. The Grizzlies, on the other hand, have been trying to figure out what happened to themselves since the end of February, and because they will get another crack at a playoff berth on Friday against the winner of the Sacramento–Dallas Purgatory Challenge, they will get another attempt to reinforce what they made Tuesday night.
If nothing else, these Grizzlies will give prohibitive favorite Oklahoma City more to think about than either the Kings or Mavericks, and who wouldn't prefer that? I mean, we all saw Magic–Hawks in the Eastern Conference play-in opener earlier on Tuesday, the highlight of which was Trae Young getting himself ejected with five minutes left for being pissy and the result of which was America locking in the certainty of More Orlando Magic Basketball. It's a given that the West is galactically more entertaining, but the Grizzlies widened that margin even more by rediscovering their best and most obstinate selves Tuesday night.
