Grizzlies 82 at Spurs 95

Grizzlies lose to Spurs in blowout fashion - Carrying a one-point lead into the half the Grizz collapsed in the third barely managing to score double figures in the 3rd. They had only 5 points until a sudden onslaught with a minute left in the quarter, which kept the Spurs lead down under the 20 point mark. But the Spurs were pretty much in cruise control from that point on.

This is definitely a preseason level of play we're seeing so far across the league. The Grizzlies probably just played for the first time with their new acquisitions, Dante Cunningham (#44) and Quincy "QPon" Pondexter (#20). Also it was the first action Marc Gasol has seen since he played for the Spanish national team earlier in 2011. No need to get bent out of shape but there are some immediate questions:

• Why did Tony Allen only play 15 minutes when clearly we needed him with Manu running free on us?
  
• Why didn't OJ play more too?
  
• Why isn't ZBO being ZBO?
  
• Why so many stinking turnovers? We got killed in that department. We were outrebounding and outscoring the Spurs like crazy in the first half. Without the turnovers we would have been blowing them out. Once they caught fire, it was all over for us.

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I have begun a new experiment this year and will post the results after each Grizzlies game. I am tracking the scoring production of all 5 starters from every single game and comparing against the average. I also include the highest scoring 6th man from each team. If you've analyzed the games so far in the first 2 days of this season you will probably observe that the Small Forward has dominated (Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Lebron James, Hedo Turkoglu, and even Rudy Gay). Anthony was like +35 on the Celtics Christmas Day due party to Paul Pierce's absence. Here are the result thus far:

You will see the total for SF contributes highest to the winnings so far. The guards have emerged as significant players in the determination of the winning team. A surprise from these sloppy contests is the negative impact power forwards, centers, and sixth men have had on their teams' success. This is not good for Memphis! Hopefully this trend reverses as the season progresses and defense gets tighter, I predict.

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Grizzlies in Game1:

Player	eStat	u = mean difference
Mike Conley	-4	u = -8.765
Tony Allen	-22	u = -26.882
Rudy Gay	+5	u = -4.118
Zach Randolph	+0	u = +0.353
Marc Gasol	+7	u = +5
6th (Dante Cunningham)	-1	u = +2.824

And so far I am happy with my metric here because it clearly shows where we were dominated (Manu Ginobli) but is a somewhat misleading category because Tony Allen only played 15 minutes!

Let's get those Thunder on Wednesday Grizz!