He was bodying up Blake Griffin under the basket, frustrating him so much with his constant pressure that Griffin was called for a technical foul for slapping away Randolph’s hands. Zach Randolph got going early and scored 6 of the team’s first 8 points. The Grizzlies led going into the fourth quarter, playing ugly, gritty basketball, banging bodies with the Clippers in the paint. Same choke under pressure, same bad defense and lazy offense, same song and dance, dooming the Grizzlies to lose the series?
Blake Griffin even got another fancy dunk that’ll probably be on SportsCenter. They suffered another terrible fourth quarter of shooting, going 1–13 in the first 12 minutes of the final frame, and gave up several costly threes while Marc Gasol and Tony Allen sat on the bench. The Grizzlies gave up another lead and lost another one-point game on a Rudy Gay missed jumper at the buzzer.
Sitting here now, I feel like there are several narratives that could be written for this game, all of which would cover different aspects of the game, different storylines, different ways in which the Grizzlies could have gotten a win, different ways in which things went wrong.
