The Memphis Grizzlies and the Art of Losing Meaningfully

The stated purpose of every NBA team is to pursue a title. This is obvious year-round in a back-of-the-mind kind of way, but it becomes especially apparent at this time every season, when the league's experiments—the frictionless Hawks, the hearty and hobbled Bulls, the top-heavy Clippers—face their referendums. Can they win? Dropping from the playoffs earlier than expected, for many of these teams, represents not only a single missed opportunity but raises the likelihood of a broader cutting of bait. Somebody decides that a failure to advance demonstrates an inability ever to do so as constructed, and a team, however innovative or interesting, is made over as a result. Perennial semifinal berths are worth little, in the grand scheme, at least to those with say-so.

For this reason, the teams that attract a certain brand of basketball diehard—those good but imperfect bunches that make up the playoff brackets' middle seeds—tend not to last long. Within a couple seasons, they become recognizable contenders, demonstrate some unfixable and potential-capping flaw, or are picked apart by contract realities. The five-seed is a motel room on the way to somewhere else; nobody wants to live there.

But then there are the Memphis Grizzlies, who concluded their annual rumble through the playoffs' early rounds on Friday. Since their upset of the San Antonio Spurs as an eight seed back in 2011, the Grizzlies have belonged almost yearly to their conference's second tier. A solid and intermittently inspiring team, they have never had more than a morsel of true title hope. They have been a maxed-out sub-contender, and have seemed more content than most to stay that way. Where league convention calls for adjustments, they have stood pat.

If this approach is out of keeping with NBA mores, though, it also signals something about the team's unstated purpose. The Grizzlies have become, over their run, the West's foremost mettle-appraisers, not so much vying for titles of their own as vetting prospective champions. In an increasingly uniform basketball landscape in which space, speed, and shooting are the valued commodities, they do not assume the superiority of the new customs. They make teams prove it.

In a series that was hard-fought if never quite in doubt, the Golden State Warriors managed to pass the test the Grizz pose to all their opponents. The first three games of their Western Conference semifinal left Golden State trailing Memphis two games to one, a count that inspired optimism among some self-styled John Henrys. The Grizzlies' early success was taken to be proof of old-school primacy, as it often is; the Warriors were derided as too jumper-reliant, too small in the frontcourt, too clever, too soft, or other otherwise not yet ready. Then, Golden State found the form that had let them glide through their historic regular season, and they won each of the final three games by double digits.

The righting of the Golden State ship had numerous components: the game effort of do-everything forward Draymond Green against Marc Gasol, the reversions of Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson to their resplendent norms, the Andrew Bogut-on-Tony Allen gambit that turned Mr. FIRST TEAM ALL-DEFENSE into an offensive anchor before a hamstring injury made him a non-participant. By the time the buzzer sounded at the end of Friday's deciding game, the teams had returned to their pre-series stations. The Warriors were again title favorites, the Grizzlies again and as ever inflexible aspirants.

Still, the series resonated in a way that not many six-game semifinals do. The same could be said of any of Memphis's playoff losses over the last few years, all of them at the hands of more liquid, zeitgeist-adherent squads. Part of that resonance comes from familiarity; the Grizzlies' habits are commonly known and easily observed. Zach Randolph kind of warbles subwoofer-ly next to the rim, Gasol shimmies and spins in spots only marginally farther out, Mike Conley pads around and tosses in floaters, and Allen cuts and guards with the urgency of a movie extra fleeing a tidal wave. They have done this for years, and despite some changes—a new owner, an enlightened front office, a coaching change a couple seasons back, and a few peripheral roster moves—the only real observable improvement is that the Grizz now do it all better. They take the strategy to heart, whatever the hell that strategy is.

The teams that vanquish the Grizzlies, for their part, go on not depleted but fortified. They have beaten the top of the line in NBA brawn, have proven their worth in an entire genre of basketball by reckoning with its absolute version. They are explorers with Antarctica in the rearview; everything else looks breezy. The Rockets will present their own challenges for the Warriors, but they will likely inflict fewer bruises.

This Memphis team has grown more miraculous every year, simply by virtue of its continued existence. It is sometimes put in the context of other stylistically resolute non-champions—a kind of negative, for example, of the Nash-D'Antoni Suns—but it differs in a key aspect. Those Suns teams, and the early 2000s Kings and Trail Blazers and even the current Bulls, seemed amendable. One minor tweak, a free-agent addition or the recovery of an injured player, might have pushed them over the top.

The Grizzlies, meanwhile, have been uniquely staunch. The talents of their four principals—Randolph, Gasol, Allen, and Conley—have something to do with this, but so does a stubbornness that, in the context of today's pragmatic NBA, seems almost admirable. The prevailing common sense might have called for getting rid of Allen in favor of a modern floor-spacer, or even jettisoning the beloved Z-Bo to make room for players who might orbit the Conley-Gasol pick-and-roll more conventionally. The Grizzlies did neither. This may have curbed their promise, but it certainly earned them their constituents' adoration.

Gasol is a free agent this summer, and due either to his leaving or to the team's remaking the roster to bring him back, the Grizzlies may look different next year. It will be hard to blame them for making changes, and it will be hard not to hope they don't. No other NBA team makes falling short feel this much like winning.