The Memphis Grizzlies are back like they never left

As the NBA pushed itself further and further into the pace and space era, moving more and more of the action to the perimeter, the Memphis Grizzlies increasingly became an anachronism.

The Grizzlies of recent seasons almost always played two traditional big men together. They consistently played at a snail’s pace, ranking in the bottom five in possessions per game for five consecutive seasons. They hardly ever shot 3-pointers. They remained among the NBA’s most persistent chasers of their own rebounds even as much of the league drifted away from valuing the offensive glass.

As the core group of players that did all these things aged, it became more and more en vogue to say that the next season would be the one where the Grizzlies finally fell off. How long could they could keep eking out close wins and out-performing their expected won-loss record based on their point differential? How long could they keep succeeding on grit and grind and guile and gumption? And yet, they persisted. Memphis’ current streak of seven consecutive playoff appearances is the third-longest in the NBA.

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The 2017-18 season sure seemed like it would finally, at long last, be the one where the Grizzlies actually did fall off. Franchise pillars Zach Randolph and Tony Allen left the team in free agency. So did Vince Carter. The Grizzlies cut ties with their 2016 first-round pick (Wade Baldwin) and they did not have a first-rounder in the 2017 draft to make up for it. Their major offseason acquisitions were a couple castoffs from the Kings (Tyreke Evans, Ben McLemore), and a second-round pick they snagged from the Rockets on draft day (Dillion Brooks at No. 45).

With the mass migration of talent from East to West (Jimmy Butler, Paul George, Carmelo Anthony, Paul Millsap, etc.) adding even more depth to a conference that was already a bear to get out of, it was not difficult to envision Memphis dropping off and finally sitting out the postseason. It’s early yet, but for seemingly the millionth straight season, those concerns may have been unfounded.

The Grizzlies are 7-4 through 11 games, with big wins over the Warriors, Rockets, Clippers and Blazers. They’re fifth in the West in point differential, and seventh in the league in Net Rating. They are once again strangling teams defensively (third in defensive efficiency as of Wednesday night, per NBA.com) and scoring at about an average rate (17th). Basically, despite losing two of the major principals from the grit and grind era, the Grizzlies have managed to remain pretty much the same team. Sure, they’re going about things a tiny bit differently — shooting more 3s (12th in attempts per game!) and getting into the offense a tiny bit faster — but the net result so far has been the same old Grizzlies.

And there’s reason to think this is sustainable throughout the season. Conley and Gasol long ago passed Randolph and Allen in terms of on-court impact, if not necessarily the personification of the team’s grit and grind culture. (The duo that remains in Memphis is certainly quite gritty and grindy, but come on. This is Z-BO and Tony we’re talking about here.) They remain at the forefront of everything Memphis is doing, and they’re largely shining as we’d expect them to. Neither player is shooting all that well just yet, but their fingerprints are on every play, every action within the offense. And of course, they are the backbone of that stingy defense, and the twin pillars of the team’s communication system.

Even more encouraging than the production of their stars, though, is what the Grizzlies are getting from members of their supporting cast.

The organization has shown the ability to conjure NBA-level production out of fringe-y wing players in the past — they’ve gotten good minutes out of basically everybody who has come through Memphis to play on the wing except for Rudy Gay and Jeff Green — but the one thing they have always been missing is a secondary perimeter creator beyond Conley. For years, Conley has been the Grizzlies’ only perimeter penetrator who could pierce the defense from the outside-in, forcing it to bend in ways that create easy looks from under the rim or the 3-point line.

They’ve tried a ton of different players in that role — Allen, Carter, Gay, Green, Lance Stephenson, Jerryd Bayless, Tayshaun Prince, Courtney Lee, Wayne Ellington, James Johnson, Beno Udrih, Quincy Pondexter, Nick Calathes, Matt Barnes, Troy Daniels and more — but none have given the Grizzlies exactly what they need. The whole idea behind giving Chandler Parsons the contract they did was that he was supposed to bring the combination of outside shooting and off-the-bounce creativity the team was so badly missing. Alas, last season was a total wash for Parsons, as he once again struggled with injuries.

Healthy now, he’s coming off the bench and giving them that skill set in fits and starts. Some games it’s there and some games it’s not. That’s to be expected given his health issues, but whenever it’s there it’s a major boost. It’s not entirely coincidental that the Grizzlies have lost to two bad teams in the games Parsons has sat out for maintenance. They really need that extra dose of creativity and shooting that he brings, especially when Conley is off the floor.

It helps that two of their latest unearthed gems — James Ennis, formerly of the Heat, and second rounder Dillon Brooks — are giving them really good minutes on the wings. Ennis is guarding three positions, knocking down his spot-ups (36.4 percent on catch-and-shoot 3s), making smart cuts and filling in the blanks. Brooks is actually playing three different positions on both ends depending on the lineups, and doing everything Ennis is doing plus making smart passes in transition and the half-court. He immediately looks like he belongs on the floor and is capable of playing major minutes for a playoff team. If his shot ever comes around, he could be a long-term starter-quality player. (If we could just get him to stop fouling.)

The real revelation, however, has been Evans. He’s been exactly what the Grizzlies have needed for so long. It’s fair to question whether his outside shooting will regress. He’s a career 30 percent 3-point shooter knocking down 43 percent of his looks from deep. He did make 37 percent of three attempts per game over the last two years, though, so maybe the improvement is more real than fluke. And the one thing Evans has always been able to do is get to the rim with the ball in his hands, and he’s doing that a whole lot for this team.

Evans ranks second on the Grizzlies with 9.4 drives per game, per the Second Spectrum data on NBA.com, a figure that ranks 12th in the NBA among players averaging less than 30 minutes per game. The greatest number of drives per game any non-Conley Grizzly has averaged during the optical tracking era is 6.9, and that was Lance Stephenson during the season where everybody else on the Grizzlies was hurt. What they’re getting from Evans off the bounce is unprecedented for this version of the team. That ability to get into the paint has helped alleviate one of the biggest issues for Memphis over the last few years — the offense no longer craters when Conley hits the bench. Memphis is scoring only 1.9 fewer points per 100 possessions with Conley out of the game this season, per NBA.com; over the last five years, that number averaged six points per 100 possessions, and it was 9.2 per 100 last year.

Memphis seems at least somewhat unlikely to get this level of play from the supplementary perimeter players all year, but any drop-off should be augmented by Conley and Gasol progressing to the mean, and by the return of JaMychal Green, who’s been out since going down with an injury four minutes into the season. With only the Warriors and Rockets so far distinguishing themselves as the true class of the West, with the Timberwolves unable to stop anybody from scoring, with Kawhi Leonard injured, with the Thunder capable of blowing teams out but seemingly unable to execute on either end in a close game, maybe the Grizzlies haven’t been knocked quite as far down in the conference pecking order as we might have thought.

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Maybe, when the season comes to a close, they’ll be right back where they’ve been for seven years in a row — the playoffs.