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50 recent articles by Chris Herrington:
Dillon Brooks exited Grizzlies practice on Tuesday afternoon with a brace on his left knee and a cane in his right hand. It’s a disappointing turn in what had already been a disappointing start to the second season for the team’s unexpected break-out rookie of last season.
Ten games does not a season make, but it’s close enough to draw some preliminary conclusions. The Grizzlies have played four games at home and six on the road. Record-wise, they’ve played two of the league’s three best teams (Warriors, Nuggets) and three games against two of the league’s three worst (Suns, Wizards). What do we think we know so far? Here’s an annual taking of the temperature, now at a new home. Ten takes after ten games.
Winning big is fun, but winning close is better. The building back-and-forth tension is a richer, deeper experience, creating the kind of basketball games that keep you up, sifting through the string of moments lingering in your mind. These games seem longer, in a good way, because all 48 minutes matter.
After losing both halves of a road back-to-back, what will home-cooking mean for the Grizzlies big two? I mean Shelvin Mack and Dillon Brooks, of course.
Two quotes in the closing days of this year’s midterm election, both on the subject of the “migrant caravan” as a political motivator:
We’ll find out by Tuesday night whether there’s a “blue wave” in the midterm elections. But on Election Day eve, the Grizzlies ended their three-game West Coast road trip submerged by a familiar Golden wave.
For the first time this season, the Grizzlies found themselves in a single-possession game in the final five minutes.
Is it too early to think about playoff positioning? The Grizzlies secured at least a season-series tie with the Utah Jazz in Salt Lake City Friday night, beating the Jazz in their building for the second time in the season’s first seven games. The win moves the Grizzlies to 5-2 and tied with the San Antonio Spurs for fourth place in the Western Conference.
As the Grizzlies head out on a three-game Western Conference road trip, a quick look at a couple of the team issues of the moment and the matchups this weekend:
Andrew Harrison was waived by the Memphis Grizzlies, the team announced Thursday morning, a move apparently made to create roster flexibility for future needs.
One of the more memorable Memphis cultural moments of the past several years was Justin Timberlake’s 2015 induction speech for the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.
It was the pre-Halloween game at FedExForum on Tuesday night and the Grizzlies decided to come out dressed as the road-trip Washington Wizards.
Indie Memphis, which begins on Thursday, contains multitudes, with an endless number of films big and small, feature and doc, across multiple venues and multiple days.
Five games into an 82-game schedule is too soon to draw firm conclusions. The Grizzlies’ most-used lineup so far has played only 22 minutes and features two players (JaMychal Green, Chandler Parsons) out and likely to be for a while longer. They’ve played three games against teams widely projected to be among the league’s half-dozen worst.
Marc Gasol heard a pop and then went numb.
There’s a bit early in Primary Colors, Joe Klein’s written-as-Anonymous 1996 roman a clef on the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, that comes to me from time to time.
This was one of those games, for the Grizzlies, where the outcome that mattered most was not the final score.
Welcome to the first Grizzlies Mailbag of this season. This one was a test-run, with no guarantee of a follow-up, but I got more good questions -- on short notice -- than I had time and space to use.
For the first time in nearly a year, the Grizzlies can look at the NBA standings and see themselves in the black. The last time the Grizzlies had a winning record was November 15, 2017, when they began their day 7-6. With an unexpected road win against the Utah Jazz on Monday night, the Grizzlies move to 2-1.
The Grizzlies are hitting the road for a two-game West Coast trip a man short, with forward JaMychal Green likely out more than a month with a broken jaw suffered in the second half of Friday’s home opener.
For the second season in a row, Grizzlies forward JaMychal Green will miss significant time due to a random injury suffered in the team’s home opener.
It’s a first-quarter timeout at the Grizzlies home opener and Grizz, the mascot, comes through the tunnel with something in his hands. It’s an infant in costume, a bear-cub cutie. Grizz carries his cub to midcourt, “Circle of Life” from The Lion King playing. He raises the little one above his head, toward the rafters. The crowd -- appropriately -- roars.
A home opener is supposed to be a day of celebration, whatever the future holds, not a time for the biting of fingernails.
In the first half, Marc Gasol looked a lot like his team: slow of foot and uncertain of mind. Gasol got (a little bit) better in the second half, which was more than you could say for the team as a whole.
When Jaren Jackson Jr. takes the court Wednesday night in Indianapolis, he will become the youngest player to ever suit up for the Grizzlies, in Memphis or Vancouver. Jackson’s debut is perhaps the most intriguing thing about this season’s opener, but how much does a debut typically tell us?
On the cusp of this Memphis Grizzlies season, the franchise’s 18th in Memphis, the prevailing questions have been been about the team: How good can they be? How concerning were their preseason struggles? But let’s take a moment to talk about you.
When former Grizzlies head coach Dave Joerger needed a bucket, he’d yell “Turn Four,” a call for Zach Randolph to get the ball. When we need to mull over the big questions at key moments in the Grizzlies season, we use it to call a Daily Memphian quorum.
There are different levels of NBA fandom. Some care about their team and some care about the entire league. There’s no right or wrong way to be a fan, but the following NBA-wide deep dive is for the latter kind.
If you want to really know your country, Memphis is a good place to start. Artists such as Howlin’ Wolf and Elvis Presley brought American culture together and sent it around the world from a studio only steps from where a slave trader was celebrated in a city park. Martin Luther King Jr. marched for economic justice, climbed to the mountaintop, and was taken by an assassin’s bullet, all within a triangle separated by a couple of miles.
Former Memphis Tigers standout D.J. Stephens has been signed to a two-way contract by the Memphis Grizzlies, the team announced Monday evening.
During the decade-long Mike Conley and Marc Gasol era, a dearth of three-point shooting elsewhere on the roster has consistently plagued the Grizzlies. Only once in this stretch have the Grizzlies finished in the Top 20 in three-point attempts and only twice in three-point percentage, never higher than 17th on the accuracy front.
Score one for the grown folks.
It was a week of sobering news and a news-making Presidential visit. Because the opening items underscore reckonings that came, alternately, from us and to us, I kept it light on the rest of this week’s 10.
A tale of two Media Day scrums: Jaren Jackson Jr. sat encircled, with microphones, recorders, and TV cameras surrounding Castle Jackson like an impenetrable moat. He held court with a big smile, talking about rap albums and Netflix shows, essaying the locker-room generation gap for which he’s the poster manchild in a manner that tiptoed the line between guileless and knowing.
The Grizzlies preseason just started, and by Sunday morning it will be more than half over.
The Grizzlies made their preseason debut Tuesday night in Birmingham with a 131-115 loss to the Houston Rockets. Scores don’t really matter in the preseason, but here’s a chain of thoughts on things that might:
Editor’s Note: This is the third of a five-part series previewing the Grizzlies roster.
Editor’s Note: This is the second of a five-part series previewing the Grizzlies roster.
Welcome back to The Memphis 10, the only place where you'll find Marsha Blackburn and the Oblivians hanging out together.
Marc Gasol in the kitchen. Mike Conley making Christmas mischief. Jaren Jackson Jr. in motion. A title around your waist.
Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of five Grizzlies roster previews. Other stories will appear in the coming days.
After talk comes action. On Monday morning, the Grizzlies assembled in the Don Poier Media Center near the eastern edge of FedExForum for an audience of Memphis (and Japanese) media. On Tuesday morning, suited and high-top-sneaker booted, they migrated west to the Forum practice court to assemble for their head coach.
As near as anyone can tell, people have been frying food since the Middle Ages. I like to think that this unknown date, when a first fritter was dunked in boiling fat, was our true moment of civilization. Around the world, perhaps nothing fries up as nicely as a chicken. Setting aside vegetarians and the extremely health conscious, it is everyone’s favorite food. Right?
The Memphis Grizzlies will hold their annual Media Day gathering on Monday, and will hit the training-camp hardwood the next day. Many questions will be asked amid Media Day scrums, but the most important ones won’t be answered on that day or even, fully, in the days and weeks that follow. But it’s a start.
On Saturday, the Brooks Museum of Art will be active inside and out. The work of renowned Barcelona sculptor and artist Jaume Plensa will make a Memphis debut as his “Talking Continents” exhibit opens to the public. Meanwhile, a secretive, week-long “Outings" project installation from French artist Julien de Casabianca will begin at parts unknown across the city.
The heritage of Hi Records brackets this first weekly list, with the sound of Al Green and the image of guitarist/songwriter Teenie Hodges making unexpected appearances. Elsewhere, our criminal justice system bears watching, next year’s mayor’s race gets weird, and our food trucks get some pub.
From a competitive standpoint, the Memphis Grizzlies’ 2018-2019 schedule is the kind of unremarkable to which NBA schedule-makers aspire.
What did you do this summer?
Welcome to The Memphis 10, which, starting this Thursday, will be a (mostly) weekly collection of observations – commentary, criticism, news, links, songs, etc. – on the week in Memphis.
The Grizzlies’ seven-year playoff streak ended hard last season, and with shocking quickness. The unraveling included a fired coach, one star hitting the pine after 12 games, another star left alone and unhappy, the odd non-trade-then-disappearance of a veteran free-agent-to-be, and waves of discomfort for a fan base that had grown accustomed to consistent, if limited, success.
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