Chris Herrington

Memphis Commercial Appeal

Sometime next season, Zach Randolph will return to FedExForum in a Sacramento Kings uniform. He will snap on his headband, rub his soft mitts together, step across the sideline onto the court, and the building will come undone. Shane Battier Poster Night will be a distant memory.

Amid this bedlam, Randolph will spot Marc Gasol, his longtime in-the-paint life-partner. The Big Trains From Memphis will be rumbling toward each other on separate tracks. They’ll exchange pounds, hugs, and maybe a trace of a tear. Then they’ll exchange hip checks and jabbing elbows. One will sail home a soft jumper over the other, then backpedal, laughing and slapping himself on the butt. We’ll exhale and enjoy the bittersweet spectacle. We’ll love Z-Bo like family and root for the Grizzlies to beat him, because that’s how it works. As Marc Gasol reminded us last night with a self-retweet, it’s bigger than basketball:

But the game will remind us that it’s that too, a game, and it will go on.

Paul Pierce played 15 seasons and won a title with the Boston Celtics. He appeared in his last NBA game this spring, playing 22 minutes and scoring six points, wearing the red, white and blue color scheme of the Los Angeles Clippers.

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Hakeem Olajuwon played 17 seasons and won 2 titles with the Houston Rockets. In his final game he dream-shook his way to 8 points for the Toronto Raptors.

If those players and other title-winning Hall of Famers like them could end their career in uniforms different from those in which they started, then no-one should be that surprised that Zach Randolph’s eight-year Memphis run -- the majority of NBA careers don’t last this long -- has come to an end. And I don’t think many really are.

We’ve had time to prepare for this departure, even if many hoped it wouldn’t come until Randolph was done playing for good.

The last time Randolph was approaching free agency and his return was uncertain, I wrote for ESPN about what he meant to Memphis, and how he brought the colorful culture of one of the city’s favorite sports (professional wrestling) to its other favorite sport (hoops). There, I envisioned a post-career Memphis return, a premonition I hope still materializes one day down the road:

… a decade or more from now. The Grizzlies will be in the playoffs again, and during a third-quarter timeout it's not Jerry Lawler making an entrance but Randolph. Maybe he'll perform the Blake Griffin choke-slam of 2013 with a plant in a Clippers jersey or have a stare-down with a Kendrick Perkins look-alike. Maybe, poetically, it will be a co-conspirator in a Blazers jersey who knocks off Randolph's headband and cowers in the presence of his mean-mugging, provoking a mass “Z-Bo” chant for old-time's sake and again turning FedExForum into a Monday night card at the Coliseum, Southern Heavyweight Title on the line and the hometown hero about to rally.

This spring, after Randolph, for old time’s sake, returned to the Grizzlies starting lineup to once again lead a homecourt playoff win over the San Antonio Spurs -- a grit-and-grind full circle moment -- I joined colleagues Ron Tillery and Geoff Calkins in a group appreciation. I remembered a night in San Antonio when Randolph performed the finale in perhaps the franchise’s most epic regular season game, and another in Dallas, when he slipped into a zone and launched impossible rainbows one after another. Sensing that an end was once again looming, I offered what ended up being an only slightly premature eulogy to an era:

Individual memories are a flood, but what crystallizes is a kind of ideal. Basketball is an arena of personal style, and few players are as distinctive. So here’s to the jab-step and jutting hip. The thorny elbow and suction rebound. The ripple of #feed50 anticipation at FedExForum when Randolph seals his man near the hoop and a pass comes in low and true. The sartorial sacrament of the headband, the dislodgement of which inspires oh-no-he-didn’t gasps. Here’s to the mean-mug after a bully-ball bucket and the faint strut as he walks back toward the huddle. Here’s to Zach Randolph, the greatest of Grizzlies.

Those memories: The playoff heroics, off-court generosity, and quotes and interviews that loom so large in the franchise lexicon are shared among us. I’ll forego another recitation here. We’ll be repeating them to each other for the rest of our days. We know.

But Zach Randolph played more than 20,000 regular season and playoff minutes in a Grizzlies uniform, so we all have other Randolph's, less fully shared, that we remember.

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In addition to those Dallas and San Antonio games, when I close my eyes, I see Randolph welcoming Tyler Hansbrough, playing for Randolph’s home-state Indiana Pacers, to the NBA with a hard lesson in rookie humility followed by a final word of instruction and encouragement.

I see him driving straight through the chest of Anthony Davis for a hoop and harm, then strutting in a nearly full, perfect circle back to the free-throw line.

I see him fighting off three guys for an offensive rebound and putback to beat the buzzer and beat the Trailblazers, bumping chests and slapping butts (his own) all the way back to the bench.

I see him goofing on Tony Allen in the locker room (“Tony is my guy, but he cannot drive”) and asking me about my kids while he hunts down leftover Media Day pizza.

I see that first season in Memphis, before the playoffs, before the phrase “grit and grind” was ever uttered, when Randolph slapped together 30-20 games and I wondered if this was what it was like to watch Moses Malone in his prime.

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Matching Sacramento’s two-year, $24 million deal, when the Grizzlies had only about $19 million in wiggle room, would have likely meant cutting off a chance to retain fellow free agent JaMychal Green, nearly a decade younger and a cleaner fit in both the team’s current starting lineup and their desire to modernize their style of play. The second year on the Kings deal would have made it more difficult for the Grizzlies to pivot from their present course as the conference shifts violently around them.

Given what Randolph means and how good he remains, should the team have gotten creative, moving contracts to create the room to keep Randolph and Green both? Perhaps. But all things end. Some are glad that it was Sacramento. It would have been more painful to see Randolph playing with a contender. But I’ll miss seeing him in the playoffs, somewhere the Kings -- we’ll get to the Grizzlies later -- are unlikely to be. But Randolph earned one last big payday, and good for him for getting it.

The future always beckons. Will Tony Allen follow Randolph out the free agency door? Will the Grizzlies get a deal done with Green? Does the signing of Kings castoff Ben McLemore make sense? Does the increasing westward movement of elite talent suggest the Grizzlies should themselves change course even more dramatically? That can all wait for the next Pick-and-Pop, which will soon follow. For now we salute Zach Randolph, who gave Memphis more than it could have imagined, and still has more to give the game.