As I was dozing off in my bed at school, I decided to flip on ESPN and watch a little bit of the Clippers vs. Grizzlies game. Well, that ended quickly, the Clippers were down 21 points in the 4th quarter and it looked as if the Grizz would be taking game 1. As I woke up this morning, again I tuned into ESPN, reading the bottomline, I saw Clippers 99 Grizzlies 98. I squinted my eyes to see if I had read it correctly and sure enough the highlights came on right after it. I’m not going to lie, I was a tad upset I had missed one of the greatest comebacks in NBA playoff history, but on the other hand I’m not a huge Clippers fan anyway. But as a basketball fan you always love to see a huge comeback, despite a team playing so poorly throughout the game. And the result of it was another Clippers comeback — one of the greatest in NBA playoff history.
Games like this make you realize that you can never count out a team no matter the deficit. I know that about 98.5% of the time, the team dow 20 points is going to lose, but there is always that 1.5% that gives them a chance. It changes the way you watch sporting events. Instead of changing the channel, it gives you a glimmer of hope that you may watch something historical happen. This may be a drastic comparison, but it’s like what the Red Sox did in 2004. As a huge fan, I had even counted them out and started talking about how the Yankees were going to drill the Cardinals in the World Series. I know it is a little different, but it just shows you that you can never count anyone out.
The Grizzlies had a chance to take game 1 handedly last night and let it slip away. “Obviously, we gave it away, and everybody’s kind of down,” Rudy Gay said. “We’re still into it. It’s a long series, and we’re ready to fight. That’s all this means. We’ve got to fight hard.” After being up 21 points in the 4th quarter, the Grizzlies allowed the Clippers to slowly fight back. How did the Clippers come back from down 21 entering the 4th quarter? They made 8 more FG including 4 more 3-pt FG and grabbed 13 more rebounds than the Grizzlies. “We just got careless,” Memphis coach Lionel Hollins said. “We just lost a little bit of our discipline from a defensive perspective. But offensively, we just started walking it up and trying to throw it into the post instead of running it in. We ran earlier. We attacked. We were in transition earlier. We just stopped doing that and got conservative and it cost us.” It sure did cost them, it cost them game 1 of a crucial series. But like I said in my Western Conference overview, this will be the most fun and entertaining series to watch, and game 1 proved that.
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