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The Grizzlies' refusal to quit brought their head coach to tears
The San Antonio Spurs eliminated the Memphis Grizzlies from the 2016 NBA playoffs on Sunday. The Spurs won a franchise-record 67 games this season, boasted the stingiest defense in the NBA, and entered the postseason completely healthy. The Grizzlies came into the playoffs without stars Marc Gasol and Mike Conley, with half their active roster having come from either the D-League or via midstream acquisition as injury-ravaged Memphis scrambled for enough healthy bodies to finish the season, and with the NBA's fifth-worst record and third-worst net rating since March 1. Spoons don't last long in gunfights; in this case, they lasted the minimum four games, as most everyone expected they would.
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While forward Matt Barnes said after the game that "there are no moral victories" in the winner-take-all NBA playoffs, there's still something admirable, still some dignity to be found, in continuing to fight in the face of inevitability. In his post-elimination press conference, Grizzlies head coach Dave Joerger emphasized that fight, and found himself overcome by emotion in the process:
It's a tough battle, but as far as this game, this series and this season, I hope you guys all took notice of what happened in the last three minutes of the game. Because Matt and Vince [Carter] ... they wanted to finish the game. And I think that's what Grizzlies basketball is about. Those guys are pros. And for what we've been through, I'd do anything for those guys.
They've embraced every guy who came in, no matter what their history was. They cared about them. They tried to have them ... these guys fought. And I can't tell you enough how proud I am of every guy that is in that locker room, and has come through that locker room. This season's been hard. It's been really hard. They could've quit. Could've quit. Could've not made the playoffs. And every day, they came out and they fought like crazy. [...]
So I hope that, as a community, we love our Grizzlies. We love on those guys, and wish them the best as they go forward in their career and, you know, hopefully a long time with us.
"This was not planned," he added with a laugh as he wiped tears out of his eyes.
Of course it wasn't. What about this Grizzlies season has been?
One of the league's steadiest and most stable organizations over the last half-decade was rocked and unmoored by a plague of injuries — most notably Gasol's fractured foot and Conley's Achilles tendinitis, but also season-ending injuries to backup bookends Mario Chalmers and Brandan Wright, among others — that led to Memphis suiting up an NBA-record 28 players this season. The constant roster churn forced Joerger to have to completely change his team's style and approach on the fly multiple times; the Grizzlies began the season with an offense predicated on the bruising interior scoring and playmaking of Gasol and Zach Randolph, and ended it hoping that Barnes, Carter and Lance Stephenson could string together enough perimeter buckets to spring an upset.
Through it all, though, Joerger kept searching for answers and his players kept working their tails off to provide them, even when they were drawing dead against superior and better-equipped competition.
“It wasn’t a fair fight and they didn’t care,” Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich said after the game, according to Ronald Tillery of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal. “You know whoever was available came out and played and they executed to the best of their ability. As I said, they played with a lot of heart and a lot of fortitude.”
As if we'd expect anything else from the Grizzlies. If this is the end of grit-and-grind Grizz as we know it — and with Conley entering unrestricted free agency, and Randolph and Tony Allen entering the final years of their contracts — it's a credit to Joerger that his team refused to pack it in, faced its fate head-on, and raged against the dying of the light.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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