Two Sides Of Unconventional NBA Roster Construction
Each has contended. Each touts plenty of talent (and eccentric players). But only one of the Houston Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies has turned their weirdness into wine.
Looking for something to watch on League Pass last week, I convinced myself that Lance Stephenson — who shot 17 percent from three in Charlotte last year — was having a decent run with the Memphis Grizzlies, to whom he’d recently been traded.
Lance. Effing. Stephenson. That’s how I rationalized watching a mostly mediocre Grizz-Nuggets game.
For the record, Lance was solid (14 points on 6-of-9 shooting over 20 minutes). Truth told, I was more interested in Born Ready’s unique brand of renegade sloppiness — a uniquely cavalier approach to basketballing that can either work out well or burn noxious and bright like a tire fire. Making matters weirder, on this Grizzlies roster, Lance is merely one of many borderline lunatics masquerading as players.
There’s a distinct appeal to NBA teams whose strangeness and unpredictability can be chalked up to deeper instability, improbability, or a surplus of offbeat personalities (see: Kings, Sacramento). Indeed, the league’s history is riddled with such squads: All three Detroit Pistons championship teams met this criteria, as did the 2012–13 Nuggets, who won 57 games with Andre Iguodala, Ty Lawson, and Danilo Gallinari… and JaVale McGee and Corey Brewer.
Most squads of this stripe fall short of a title for a very simple reason: they’re too wild to be consistent. Instead, they often stick around as playoff staples, making life difficult for primary contenders and, in some cases, inspiring serious-strange devotion among certain hardcore fans. The end result can, at times, be as weirdly beautiful as it is compelling.
It can also turn into a sour mess, and right quick. Two of this season’s Western Conference playoff hopefuls, the Grizzlies and the Houston Rockets, represent two possible outcomes of unconventional, arguably knucklehead-based roster construction — one a relative success despite their setbacks, while the other teeters on becoming a potentially massive failure.
Since losing franchise centerpiece Marc Gasol to injury, the Grizzlies have, against what many would consider smart odds, held fast to their decent-to-dangerous turf. They’re well above .500 and project to stay that way, per ESPN’s Hollinger odds. That might not sound amazing in and of itself, until you remember they’re not just missing Gasol. Three of the five players who brought them to 50-plus wins in each of the past three seasons are out, including Gasol and Tony “FIRST TEAM ALL-DEFENSE” Allen by way of injury, and Courtney Lee via trade.
The result is a starting lineup that, along with grit-n-grind vets Ironman Mike Conley and Zach Randolph, includes the following:
- Matt “I’m Not Done Whooping Fish’s Ass” Barnes.
- P.J. “Reign of the Tec (Or Questionably Discovered Handgun in 2013 Arrest)” Hairston.
- Chris “Birdman, or The Virtue of Being Completely Innocent of Hideous Criminal Allegations” Andersen.
And this bench:
- Lance “Born Ready (To See Everything That’s on the Internet)” Stephenson.
- Mario “Flagrant Fouls Like It’s My Job (and Two Championship Rings)” Chalmers.
- Vince “Air Canada” Carter, who can still reverse dunk at 39.
(Note: JaMychal Green and Brandan Wright don’t quite mesh with the point I’m trying to make. Whatever.)
It’s not always clear how half these players are gonna, you know, score the basketball, but they do. On its face, the Grizz bench seems a liability primed to garner more technical taunting fouls than productive stretches of play, but since January 2016 they’ve been the highest-scoring reserve unit in the NBA. On a whole, the team’s not playing defense up to usual standards — 15th of 30 per Hollinger, compared to third last year — but they’ve won enough to be one of five playoff guarantees from the West.
Part of the Grizzlies’ relative success this season —particularly remarkable in light of their abysmal start, and that was with Gasol on the floor — is attributable to some of the, ah, less-than-sexy stats. To wit, they’re fourth in both free throws made and percentage, an obvious byproduct of their grinding-to-the-bucket style that’s long been a healthy source of points on nights when shots aren’t falling (i.e. often). Additionally, working primarily in half-court sets has made Memphis pretty darn good at taking care of the ball, ranking seventh in turnover ratio. Much of this is attributable to Mike Conley, a forever-underrated playmaker who knows all his teammates’ strengths. Indeed, just because he often works with two traditional bigs doesn’t mean Conley fails to understand floor spacing. If anything, he arguably has to work harder than peers blessed with more inherent dynamism, and has thrived on making the most of what he has night after night.
There are, of course, plenty of other beyond-the-box-score traits that make this Grizzlies team tick. Consider Matt Barnes, who, despite being a 12-year vet with a fading shot, remains a more-than-capable defender and a good, unselfish passer who plays harder and faster than you’d expect given his mileage. Mario Chalmers runs that productive Grizz bench with more confident playmaking than he ever exhibited in Miami. Perhaps most important of all, Conley and Randolph have stepped up to successfully anchor the team in Gasol’s absence.
All of which is a digression from the original point: These new-look Grizzlies are the most entertaining they’ve been since the first half of the 2014–15 season because their roster boasts multiple agents of chaos. P.J. Hairston earned two techs in his first two Grizz games but has already become a reasonably productive scorer and wing defender. Barnes and Chalmers are always coiled to spring, yet not in a way that has truly hurt the team’s performance. And Lance is Lance: He may never live up to the promise he showed in that triple-double-happy Indiana season, and still sometimes makes inexplicable Vine-immortalized bad plays. But his talent seems more in evidence than it has since that Pacers year.
Watching Memphis bully the sh*t out of teams is the NBA equivalent of listening to Gunplay — unpredictable, quite possibly violent, yet immutably compelling. It’ll be interesting to see how they hold up in the playoffs, but they’re making the most of an uncertain present and future in a way that many franchises have failed to in similar dire situations.
Perhaps no team is a greater standard-bearer for the dark side of unconventional roster construction than Daryl Morey’s Houston Rockets.
Last year’s Rox made the Western Conference Finals off a near-miracle comeback in the second round, where they were down 3–1 to the Los Angeles Clippers. The about-face stemmed largely from performances by vets most people had disregarded, like Josh Smith (seriously, remember him in Game 6?), Corey Brewer (who shot 27 percent from three that season) and the aged Jason Terry. Nobody saw that coming, and anyway it’s easy to forget that the 2015 WCF was much less one-sided than its five-game length would suggest. As constructed, that team could have won a championship.
What a damn difference an offseason makes. Since their 2015 playoff exit the Rockets have:
- Acquired Ty Lawson and all his…issues… in a trade that wouldn’t have been too bad had it not involved the loss of a first-round pick.
- Started the season 4–7.
- Fired Kevin McHale, their most successful coach since Rudy Tomjanovich. (There are few NBA coaches whose job I envy less than interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff.)
- Struggled to remain at .500 (usually being ahead or behind by a few games).
- Traded to get Josh Smith back, after letting him walk in free agency to the Repository For Players Who Defeated Doc Rivers in Playoff Series (aka the Clippers bench).
- Came thisfreakingclose to trading Dwight Howard, who’s still their second-best player. James Harden may have demanded this move, which Rockets CEO Tad Brown vehemently denied.
- Bought out Lawson.
- Signed Michael Beasley.
The Houston Rockets are royally fuc*ed, and it wouldn’t be surprising if they finished the season under 40 wins. But they’re not in the East, where a 43-win team can be a frisky playoff underdog. Even considering the relative underperformance of the West’s lower echelon, 42 wins still seems the minimum threshold for a playoff berth.
So, uh… what happened? The lengthy absence of Donatas Motiejunas certainly hurt, because that dude can play. Still, Lawson trade and Donuts injury notwithstanding, this is basically the same Rockets team that won 56 games last year — led by two elite stars with a swath of decent-to-good rotation players, several with weird reputations in this league, all of whom at last seem well-suited to the team’s Morey-inspired system.
That’s about as solid a foundation as you can expect without being the Warriors or Spurs. In practice, it’s been utter hell. If the current Grizzlies prove you can assemble a motley-ass squad of colorful personalities and achieve reasonable success in the (temporary) absence of a star, why can’t the Rockets do well according to the same logic when they have two active stars, one being the second-best offensive player in the league?
Oh, right. Teammates should probably like one other. Or at least care enough for reasons either personal (contract years) or altruistic (buying into a coach’s system) to play well in the absence of genuine camaraderie. And yet, NBA beat writers and columnists have expounded seven-figures worth of words wondering what the hell the underlying problem is. Is Bickerstaff in over his head? Had McHale already lost the locker room in training cam? Dwight Howard entering the decline phase that all big men eventually reach? All of the above? Or is it something deeper and more nefarious — the simple, sordid fact that these knuckleheads just don’t like each other, and wouldn’t buy into $50 Costa Rican timeshare, let alone a common basketball philosophy. To quote the excellent Fastbreak Breakfast NBA podcast, it’s a roster full of “all the dudes nobody wants to play basketball with,” and it had a stable shelf life of exactly two seasons.
Few recent NBA roster moves were less necessary than the trade for Lawson. The cold Daryl Morey pragmatism dictates that you obtain the best players available at all times. But why acquire a primary-ball-handler point guard with questionable defense when your team A) often uses Harden as the primary ball handler already; and B) plays him with a 1.5-dimensional point guard in Patrick Beverley who doesn’t need the ball in his hands? Beverly is perfect for Harden, which is precisely why the Lawson-Harden pairing was doomed to make zero sense.
One would think letting Josh Smith leave — however well he fit and willing he was to do it — would never come back to haunt you. It’s just Josh Smith, right? But guess what: You can’t let a productive bench player sign with the Clips, watch him completely disappear within a dynamic Chris Paul-led offense that demands reliable shooters (J-Smoove is not this), and then take him back while the team is free-falling and expect him to work out. Smith’s current 35-26-55 shooting line brings new meaning to “abysmal.” Whatever gear he found that made him crucial in that Clippers series, well…*extremely Heath Ledger as Joker voice* IT’S GONE. Making matters worse, whenever Smith plays poorly, he ends up sulking, compounding the Rockets’ collective malcontentedness.
Weirdness, attitudes, personality peccadillos — so long as there’s a deeper guiding chemistry, none of that should matter. Last year’s Rockets had that, only to watch it disappear, and in the absence of any truly franchise-altering moves (unless you count the loss of Pablo Prigioni, which, we don’t blame you). Houston’s culture turned so toxic so fast that the mind can’t help but reach for absurd, arbitrary guesses or feverish speculation to figure it all out. Hence the rumors of a Harden-Howard rift and the loud denials from the Rockets front office. Then they go and do something as head-spinningly inexplicable as buy Ty Lawson out only to sign MIKE BEASLEY.
Consider all of that, then remember the Francis-Bacon-painted-horror that is Houston’s salary sheet for this year and next — about $89 million for 15–16, so bad it almost surpassed the luxury tax apron— and…yeah, now’s a pretty bad time to be a Houston Rockets fan.
If a franchise either wins titles or realistically competes for them and entertains its fans, it can basically do whatever it wants. The Grizzlies aren’t in a great position to take the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and it’s unclear when they’ll be full-on title contenders again. But no one can say they aren’t loved by the people of Memphis. That’s why the fans are cool with the bananas roster and how the front office has dealt with a potentially insurmountable setback: There’s something there, be it in the blood or water or heavy Mississippi air, that binds even the Looney Tune-iest ties together.
To be fair, Houston and their fans still have two championships, won by two legendary teams, to fall back on. And the team has remained a perennial playoff mainstay close to ever since. But breaking points come for every fanbase, every roster, every front office. Could this year’s disaster signal the end of the Daryl Morey era and a reshaping of the team’s identity? The way things have gone and project to keep going, that might not be the worst idea.
