Jeff Green Awakening For Grizzlies Just In The Nick Of Time
By Aaron Mah
In an unexpected twist, Jeff Green has salvaged the Memphis Grizzlies’ season by leading the team in scoring while coming off of the bench.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, Jeff Green was considered a cornerstone of a franchise that housed “the team of the future”, alongside perennial All-Stars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.
Fast forward to 2016, however, merely mentioning Green in the same sentence as the Slim Reaper and the Human Turbo Button seems somewhat an unhinging act.
The artist formerly known as Uncle Jeff is certainly not short on talent – his ability to glide towards the basket, and length to finish with authority amongst the trees routinely gave Boston Celtics’ legendary (and albeit, a tad bit chauvinistic, in a cute old, drunk-uncle type of way), Tommy Heinsohn, flashbacks of James Worthy – but, for whatever reason, Green has never been able to sustain his spurts of aggressiveness.
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Whether it’s an inherent lack of a relentless motor, like Westbrook, or the desire to improve season in and season out, like Durant, the former Georgetown Hoya has fallen awfully short of optimizing his All-Star capacity.
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Green, now a forward on the Memphis Grizzlies, was having perhaps his worst season as a pro, enduring career-lows across the board on all of his counting stats, over the first three months of this year.
Struggling to fit within the Grizzlies’ grit and grind motto – specifically, starting alongside Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph – coach Dave Joerger decided to shake things up; first, by swaying away from their agrestic identity by going small — explicitly by inserting Matt Barnes into the starting frontcourt in place of Randolph, which saw mixed results — then, recently, bringing both Green and Barnes off the bench, and starting Tony Allen and Zach at the forward slots.
Since the change to come off the bench was made nearly a month ago, the Grizzlies have gone 9-1, and Green is leading the team in scoring (19.0 points per game) despite only playing 28.0 minutes a contest.
In serving as the team’s resident sixth man, and swiss-army knife of sorts off the bench, the 6’9” pterodactyl may have just found his niche in the league – taking advantage of the mismatches he presents either as an oversized 3 or stretch 4.
Although he’s not averaging the 33-plus minutes per game he’s accustomed to, his incumbent role allows him to remain aggressive whenever he steps foot on the floor, enjoying a usage rate of 27.2 percent over the past 10 games and scoring on a blistering TS% (true shooting percentage) of 63.9 percent.
The move, and his play, may seem immaterial when analyzing the NBA landscape in a macro-view, but what his injection of energy has done for the Grizzlies, who looked like a team in transition at times this year, is most definitely worth mentioning.
As many started to question whether Memphis should “tear it down” and homogenize themselves in alignment with rest of the 3-point crazed league, Green-as-the-sixth-man experiment has delayed such a full-out, drastic change by enabling Joerger to stay rugged, while giving the team the option of versatility.
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Don’t look now, but as we enter the All-Star break, the Memphis Grizzlies are comfortably fifth in the Western Conference playoff race, gradually entering the second tier of the West (with the Los Angeles Clippers) and separating themselves from the likes of the Dallas Mavericks, Portland Trail Blazers and Utah Jazz.
And while he will never live up to his unjust early-career prophecy, Jeff Green may just end up being the pendulum-changing ingredient for the stubbornly-archaic Grizzlies.