Tony Allen celebrates a Grizzlies score against the Miami Heat Tuesday night at FedExForum. The Griz won, 99-90, in overtime.

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By Chris Herrington of The Commercial Appeal

After the most entertaining set of back-to-back games of the season so far, a ripple of joy has returned to Griz land.

The 112-96 win over the Lakers on Sunday was the best kind of laugher, a low-stress home-team rout full of fun bits of business. There was the spectacle of Kobe Bryant’s farewell tour and its attendant groupies, who got a glimpse of vintage Kobe in the first quarter (14 points) only to have their calls for their hero go unanswered in the fourth quarter and go home unhappy.

Kobe’s ticking clock gave an extra bit of oomph to merely the visual of certain match-ups, against Tony Allen, whom Bryant has named his most effective defender, and against Vince Carter, perhaps the chief highlight rival of his generation. Outside the Kobe sphere, there was the cross-generational match-up of Zach Randolph and Julius Randle, a second-year forward who replicates Randolph’s frame, strength and throwback game if perhaps not quite his soft touch.

There were big plays.

Vince Carter, miffed about a no-call, received the ball and angrily drove down the lane for a throwback throwdown:

JaMychal Green issued a comically dismissive citation at the rim:

This might be the funniest block of the year pic.twitter.com/NJtKiKm1Jk — Michael Pina (@MichaelVPina) December 27, 2015

And Jeff Green continued what’s becoming something of a trademark, with an explosive chase down block:

Jeff Green got Nick Young. https://t.co/ewpnHE9WqN — Justin Russo (@FlyByKnite) December 27, 2015

In the end, for the diehards among us, there was some truly special “garbage time,” where Jarell Martin made his home court debut and scored his first NBA bucket, the likes of Robert Sacre and Ryan Kelly featured prominently and we got a point-guard anti-duel for the ages between Russ Smith, making what would be his last Grizzlies appearance, and Marcelo Huertas, a thoroughly overmatched veteran Brazilian import who is this year’s winner of the NBA Player Who Looks Least Like an NBA Player Award.

The 99-90 overtime win over the Miami Heat on Tuesday night, by contrast, was tense and passionate, a proverbial “playoff atmosphere.”

Even though, 10 minutes in, Marc Gasol had already slapped both his own butt and Zach Randolph’s (after a bit of vintage high-low action), the game sat at a low boil for a while, with a 47-47 tie at halftime.

The game took off with a delirious 7-0 Grizzlies run to end the third quarter, which included two athletic Jeff Green buckets and two Marc Gasol blocks (both on Chris Bosh) sandwiched around a Mario Chalmers three-pointer.

The fourth quarter included both a mini-meltdown, a 9-0 closing Heat run to force overtime, and, in the midst of it, a classically ludicrous Tony Allen sequence, where he was (justifiably) called for a flagrant foul for tripping Dwyane Wade only for Wade to miss both free throws and commit a turnover, after which Allen calmly walked back, one finger in the air, proclaiming “First Team.”

Overtime was pure thrills for Grizzlies fans.

Jeff Green had an exclamation putback:

And Marc Gasol dominated, with 7 points, 3 boards and 2 big fist-pumping, cussing blocks. In the midst, there was this:

Marc Gasol with the shimmy https://t.co/5iJdfeY9O7 — AP (@Ananth_Pandian) December 30, 2015

Taken together, these games served as a much-needed reminder of how fun NBA hoops is, even -- especially, sayeth Pick-and-Pop -- in the midst of the long regular season.

(Related) Tweets of the Week:

Memphis fast breaks are like a cartoon of an out of control, old timey train chittybangin down a precipitous cliff 1" above the rails. — grizzlam (@grizzlam) December 30, 2015

Style Wars: But Tuesday night was another thing as well. What was set up to be a tidy 10th game since Dave Joerger’s starting lineup switch, which had begun on the road, against the same opponent, instead became -- due to Matt Barnes' two-game suspension -- a shift back to convention, in fact all the way back to the team’s opening-night starting lineup of Mike Conley-Courtney Lee-Jeff Green-Zach Randolph-Marc Gasol.

The intensity of what happened to be a winning experience inspired a lot of exultation about a “return of grit and grind,” but that’s perhaps a rather willful conclusion.

Within the context of the game, the Grizzlies sputtered down the stretch with a big lineup that featured not only Randolph but also Tony Allen. The explosive overtime featured a lineup (Conley-Mario Chalmers-Allen-Jeff Green-Gasol) that included two point guards and only one big man, the kind of lineup without real precedence during the Grizzlies' recent golden age.

Perhaps the argument about big vs small has been something of a misleading one over the past few weeks.

All the talk of “grit-and-grind” versus “small-ball” oversells what’s been happening with the Grizzlies. Dave Joerger isn’t a basketball Martin Luther, nailing his theses to the backboard, gleefully tearing down a style trademarked to the point of fetishization. He’s not Mike D’Antoni or Don Nelson, intent on coaching a certain way. He’s a flexible pragmatist with an aging, imperfect roster of role players built around a couple of multidimensional stars who have mostly underachieved this season.

The moves he’s made -- and this isn’t to say they have all been the right ones -- have been designed to mask weaknesses, enhance strengths, stanch bleeding and wring whatever he can from what he has.

The decision to move Randolph to the bench was a dramatic one, but not one primarily geared toward altering a style or testing a theory. It was a response to a couple of glaring realities: That Randolph’s declining foot speed defensively was being too easily and painfully exploited by offenses increasingly built to do so. And that these defensive problems were compounded when Randolph shared the floor with Jeff Green. (The concomitant switch of Tony Allen for Matt Barnes was an acknowledgement that Barnes had emerged as the team’s best two-way wing player and also a way to inject some of the size and scoring lost with Randolph’s move to the bench.)

The evidence is building that Randolph and Green just don’t fit, and moving Randolph to the bench was one way -- not the only way -- to use both while scaling back their shared playing time and improving overall team peformance, especially on the defensive end:

Jeff Green and Zach Randolph, Together and Apart Before Lineup Switch During "Small Ball" Period Green/Randolph total minutes 57.7 per game 57.1 Green/Randolph minutes together 16.4 11.8 Overall team defensive efficiency 104.5 99.6 Defensive efficiency with Green/Randolph lineups 110.8 112.2 Overall team net rating -5.5 +3.0 Net rating with Green/Randolph lineups -13.6 -6.7

These trends continued in the Miami game, even with Green and Randolph once again in the starting lineup together. With Matt Barnes out and the game going to overtime, their combined playing time went up, to 71 minutes, but they still only played 22 minutes together, only the tenth-most-used two-man combo in the game for the Grizzlies. In that time, they put up the worst defensive rating of any combo to get at least 20 minutes together, and the Grizzlies were scoreless down the stretch of regulation with both on the floor.

Whether this nine-game stretch with Randolph coming off the bench was a success or failure is very open to interpretation. At 4-5, the Grizzlies had a worse record than before but a better point-differential and net rating, generally more predictive measures. They faced an easier schedule in the sense of playing no games against the league’s 2-4 elite teams and a couple against its two terrible ones (Sixers, Lakers). But it was also a stretch in which every loss was on the road, four against playoff teams and the other against what should be a playoff contender (Wizards). The Grizzlies were more consistently competitive in this stretch. In the last game before the lineup change, they were run off their home court by the Charlotte Hornets. Afterward, they took the Hornets into the final minute in Charlotte.

With Barnes still out one more game and the next opponent, Utah, sporting more traditional lineups, I’d expect the Grizzlies to go big again. After that?

Ultimately, for this year’s very much transitional team and especially for its head coach, the question is less which than when. Not which style to play, but when to play each style. This team has shown itself incapable of reaching previous heights with full fidelity to one approach, but might just have a shot, or at least its best shot, with the right blend.

If the change has been less about discarding one style and embracing another than about seeking out the right balance of styles, then Joerger’s great challenge going forward is managing reduced certainty and increased flexibility. Of late, individual players -- Barnes and Lee, Conley and Gasol, Randolph, Green and a suddenly peppy Tony Allen -- have started to perform better and more consistently. Look at Tuesday night’s box score and substitute Matt Barnes and a healthy Brandan Wright for Vince Carter and Ryan Hollins and you’ll catch a glimpse of what this year’s Grizzlies could be.

The Grizzlies will have tantalizing throwback moments, as they did for stretches against the Heat. But they can’t fully turn back the clock. Now, with the ability to play so many different kinds of lineups, the trick for Joerger will be to find the right mix for each moment. His ability to do so, and his team’s willingness to buy into this new mutability, will be the story of the Grizzlies going forward.



