Wednesday NBA Roundup: Marc Gasol Won’t Let Grizzlies’ Puzzling Season Unravel

The strangest thing about the Memphis Grizzlies’ 98-86 win over the Detroit Pistons on Wednesday was the perfect sense it made.

Up until that result, fueled by a career-high-tying 38 points from a wholly dominant Marc Gasol, little about the Grizzlies’ season felt logical.

It started with a run of clutch wins that seemed unsustainable…until Memphis sustained them. Then there was Gasol’s inexplicable development into a three-point sniper. Next came the 7-2 mark without Mike Conley (who’d been playing the best ball of his life before a back fracture). And then, oddest of all, three straight losses following Conley’s early return.

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If that nonsensical streak had held, the Grizz surely would have lost Wednesday’s meeting with a reeling Pistons team fresh off three straight losses, a players-only meeting and a thorough dressing down from head coach Stan Van Gundy.

But Memphis broke the pattern, and it did so in a way that hinted at how it’ll break down opponents from now on.

After building a 10-point advantage after the first quarter, the Grizzlies fought off Detroit’s repeated charges. And then Gasol took over with a third-quarter surge, per Keith Langlois of Pistons.com:

#Pistons 8 straight scoreless trips, Gasol 3 makes it 16-point game. Gasol 29 points on 12 shots. Yeah.

— Keith Langlois (@Keith_Langlois) December 22, 2016

It broke them:

marc gasol is unleashing a john wick sequel on the pistons.

— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) December 22, 2016

The Grizzlies leaned on Gasol for their offense, and he punished Detroit, leading the way with his scoring, passing and total offensive game. He made 14 of his 17 shots, grabbed five boards, handed out four assists and snaked a pair of steals.

Gasol made Andre Drummond look like he was stuck in cement on an early jump hook:

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Then, he buried a three (he hit two of his three attempts) and blew past Jon Leuer on an up-fake from behind the arc on the next possession. Gasol used to be the best defensive player in the league. Now, he’s still great on that end (obviously):

But with the added bonus of being an offensive weapon without weakness.

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Conley wasn’t anything special against Detroit, scoring nine points in 24 minutes, but the guy setting career highs in efficiency and volume earlier this year isn’t gone. He’s just finding his footing after time off.

Via Ronald Tillery of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, head coach David Fizdale had it right when he explained Conley’s and the team’s struggles over the last week as the predictable result of rust:

Our guys coming back from injury are really out of rhythm. And they’re probably coming back sooner than expected, which means it’s really rough offensively. Their timing is all over the place. Even recollection of some of our sets. When you don’t do dummy offense for weeks or a month, you don’t know the plays as well and the timing of them.

With Gasol beasting on both ends at an MVP-candidate level, Conley sure to sort himself out and a young, athletic corps of role-fillers that had no choice but to mature with Conley sidelined, Memphis suddenly has more ways to be successful than it has in years.

Yes, the defense remains the league’s best; the backward, confounding theme of this season isn’t pervasive enough to change that. But in addition to predictably suffocating stopping power, Memphis also has shooting specialists like Troy Daniels, …

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