“Cry Me a (Mississippi) River…”
May I present to you The Worst NBA Free Agent Contract from the Summer of 2016? Before you start typing B-a-z… know that there’s at least one guy whose deal is way worse, and he doesn’t suit up for your Atlanta Hawks. Courtesy of tonight’s opponents, the Memphis Grizzlies (9:00 PM Eastern, Fox Sports Southeast in ATL and MEM, 92.9 FM in ATL), I present to you the max contract of one Mr. Chandler Parsons!
Yes, Kent Bazemore shoots only 34.3 percent from the three-point line, a value not helped by going 1-for-4 in last night’s win over the Raptors in Atlanta. But imagine if he shot worse than that (34.0 FG%, 26.4 3FG%) from the whole entire floor!
Yes, Baze is an overeager defender (1.2 SPG, 0.8 BPG) that gets burned by talented stars (minus-42 during three homestand losses) on occasion. Yet, imagine if he was never associated with the notion of defense (0.6 SPG, 0.1 BPG) at all!
Yes, Kent claims he has been recuperating from knee soreness since the offseason. Still, imagine if your starting swingman’s career, through three NBA towns, has been defined by his inability to bounce back from injuries. Imagine if he hadn’t played more than eight consecutive games this season, missing 32 of your 65 games, contributing over 20 minutes in barely half of those 33 games, and 25 minutes in just one (contributing two points in that one game, at Brooklyn).
Yes, Bazemore was handed a four-year, $70 million deal last July (year #4 a player-option gimme), and the early returns have not been promising. But imagine if Bazemore was playing worse than he is currently, and was owed $72.3 million in the NEXT three seasons alone! Guaranteed dough, with no options either way. To say nothing of the $22.1 million he would be raking in this year, the 15th-highest salary in the league.
Imagine, further, if one of his teammates is the NBA’s second highest-paid player, after signing the biggest contract in league history last summer, and if another teammate makes just a shade less than him. And imagine if a four-game losing streak dropped their team down to 7th place in their conference. Imagine if that third loss was at home, against Brooklyn, by 13 points. Such is the life for Mister Parsons these days. What do you have to say for yourself?
“I suck right now. There’s no sugarcoating it,” he told postgame media after making one basket in 20 minutes of last Saturday’s 123-108 loss to the Rockets, who have been doing quite fine without either of Parsons or Dwight Howard in their rotation.
A longtime DM target of over-excited Twitter followers, the part-time fashion model and full-time “Ho Hound” (as deemed by ATL reality star Todd Chrisley, whose daughter is dating Parsons, after he dumped his former Victoria’s Secret model girlfriend over the winter) has elected to shut down all his social media platforms. This, after posts about his All-Star Break trip to Cancun drew Grizzlies fans’ ire, and his play since then (10-for-35 FGs post-Break) showed the time off didn’t help much.
But the hard reality for Memphis (36-29, 14-15 since January 1), and first-year coach David Fizdale, is they have little choice but to trot Parsons out there. With persistent soreness in his own knee, Chandler sat out of Thursday’s home game against the Clippers. The resulting 114-98 deficit proved to fans that the Addition By Subtraction rule doesn’t apply here.
Without Parsons, Fizdale’s alternate options at the wing include James Ennis, Andrew Harrison, or long-in-the-tooth Vince Carter and Tony Allen. Parsons serves the team not only as a 6-foot-10 swingman but also as a small-ball four. Just as Bazemore can miss shots and try-to-defend at three positions, Parsons can miss shots and not-defend at three spots on the floor. Versatility has its price.
“I’m just going to continue to work, continue to grind,” said Parsons. Oh, yeah, about the “grind” thing. With several championship rings on his fingers from his Miami assistant coaching days, Fizdale is taking great pains to indicate that the “Grit and Grind” philosophy isn’t going away, but that for Memphis to ascend to higher heights, the status quo regarding past coaches’ rotations needs to be directed to The Round File. He’s bending over not backward, but forward, to assert his point.
“That’s the problem, the whole image of this group is that if we’re underdogs and don’t win it, that’s okay. No!” contended Coach Fiz. “I won’t settle for that. I’ll continue to shuffle (lineups) until I find something that works best, that gives us the best chance to hold the trophy. And if people don’t like it, they can kiss my (synonym for donkey).”
Nobody’s out to apply pucks to the posterior of Fizdale, but they will apply a foot or two if his team cannot shake their current slide. It does suck that the team with the NBA’s sixth-highest salary base is struggling this late in the season, but one similarity they share with the Hawks (also 36-29) is they are leaning on their longstanding veterans to help pull them out of their rut.
“The teams that don’t have a culture, they will break in moments like this,” said Coach Fiz. “The teams that do, they weather this stuff, and they’re better on the back side for it. I’m expecting this team to be better on the back side for this.” Fizdale seems laser-focused on backsides.
Memphis needs a quick turnaround to avoid being stuck in the 7-seed position, first-round fodder for either Kawhi’s Spurs or the returning KD’s Warriors. Opening the playoffs as a 6-seed in Harden’s Houston doesn’t sound too hot either, even for a Memphis team that built its NBA identity as The First-Round Underdog That Could. A win tonight would go a long way toward a more desirable 4/5 matchup with the similarly gritty but under-experienced Utah Jazz, who are currently 5 games up on Memphis with 17 left to play.
Our Hawks finally caught a break from the constant three-point bombardment last night, with Toronto clanking 21 of 25 attempts. Might Atlanta be charmed enough to make it two games in a row? The Grizzlies went 7-for-20 on three-pointers in the loss to the Clips, 3-for-15 if you removed bench guard Troy Daniels (13 points in 16 minutes) from the equation.
Money Mike Conley (team-highs of 40.8 3FG%, 1.3 SPG and 6.2 APG) is doing all he can to hold up his end of last summer’s free agent non-bargain. But the depth challenges have been troublesome, at his positions and others across the lineup.
Behind him on the depth chart is rookie Wade Baldwin IV, who gets only 12.9 minutes per game more than Wade Baldwin III. After Conley and center Marc Gasol (career-highs of 20.4 PPG and 4.4 APG), Memphis’ next leading assist man is Andrew Harrison (2.8 APG), a 2015 second-rounder getting his first taste of NBA action this season. Last month’s vet addition was roasted on Thursday by a fan who missed a car-winning halfcourt shot. “Still had as many points on one less shot than Toney Douglas (2.7 APG, 16.7 3FG% in 21 games) tho”, the fan tweeted.
To help Fizdale get the Grizzlies offense (18th in O-Rating) off the ground, Gasol is taking the 2014 Paul Millsap approach to shooting three-pointers out of the blue. A longtime solid long-range two-point shooter, Gasol shot just 12-for-66 in his first eight NBA season, but has lofted 228 shots from deep this season, and is hitting them fairly well (38.6 3FG%; 39.3% since the All-Star Break).
Gasol will try to lure Howard out of the paint to contest, but is more likely to have Paul Millsap switching to cover him and make not only his shots, but his pinpoint passes, tougher to execute. Millsap’s fullcourt activity will be crucial for the Hawks to pull off wins on back-to-back nights for the first time since mid-January.
Zach Randolph (team-high 8.3 RPG) was benched at the outset of the season to allow JaMychal Green (7.3 RPG, second-most on team; a Randolphian 20-and-10 @ HOU last week) a chance to step up. Now both Green and Z-Bo share the pine; the booty-offering Fizdale has turned in recent days to Brandan Wright, the butt of many local jokes after appearing in just 23 games over the past two seasons.
Millsap played 36 minutes (7-for-13 FGs) in the win over Toronto yesterday. But with Conley blanketing Dennis Schröder (last 7 games: 21.9 PPG, 5.4 APG, 50.9 FG%, 96.4 FT%), Allen and Carter trying to keep up with Junior Hardaway (3-for-5 3FGs and six assists vs. TOR; 20 straight games of double-figure scores), and Gasol desperate to keep Howard (8 straight games of double-figure rebounds) away from the rim, Sap’s offense against Memphis’ unsteady rotation of power forwards could give Atlanta a needed edge.
Memphis desperately needs a win tonight at the Fed Ex Forum, and on Monday versus red-hot Milwaukee, to salvage their own homestand. Atlanta knows all about that kind of pressure. Which team can control the tempo to their liking and “grind” out the win? The postgame Baze Gazes are indeed very costly, but require not nearly as pretty a penny as a Parsons Pose.
Let’s Go Hawks!
~lw3
