Cinco de Mayo

Code Beale Street Blue.

My last hope is that 1) this cursed, sad-sack, ****hole franchise packs up their **** and leaves town overnight or 2) the NBA just contracts them. Or 3) the bottom falls out on the attendance numbers, and the franchise seizes the opportunity to back out of the FedExForum deal. Any of these scenarios would free me from that obligatory root-for-the-guys-who-play-in-the-city-you-wound-up-living-in mentality without other people looking down their nose at me for abandoning the "home team."

After tonight, I could really care less about anything basketball-related. I don't care about the draft. I don't care who we draft. I won't like whoever we draft. Whoever we draft won't matter. He just won't matter. I don't care about the rest of the season, the Finals...nothing.

Twelve months of some of the worst basketball this franchise has ever seen...for this. And saying the Grizzlies played some awful basketball is really saying something. Besides three-year-old Charlotte, this is the least-successful franchise in basketball history. It has nothing to show for itself that every other team in the league can't claim themselves. In like a dozen years, the only thing this franchise can proudly say is "We made the playoffs." Where they've never won a game. In 12 tries. One All-Star in 12 years, and he doesn't even want to play for Memphis. I can't blame him because I don't want to cheer for Memphis at this point.

What makes this even worse is that Oden and Durant went to Western Conference teams. This means that Portland and Seattle are getting 20-year superstars. I was expecting to cheer for Oden until my mid-40s, and now he's in the Northwest Division playing for the team that had a five percent chance to get him. Every team in the Western Conference will be getting that much better than Memphis next year, and the Grizz got their *** handed to them last year. Out of every West team, only the Kings have a worse chance of improving their team AND a worse "franchise" player than Memphis has. Assuming we keep our franchise player, which I doubt.

Building through free agency is the worst thing we could do at this point. We can't build a team that just tries to scratch out a playoff berth and wins 40 games. We need a superstar, and in order to do that, we're just going to have to suffer through season after season until this franchise gets a break - ITS FIRST BREAK EVER - in the lottery.

But wake me when that happens. I'm having a hard time right now dealing with the inevitability that this league will be entering a new Golden Age - an era rife with amazing basketball being played - while I sit here, thumb up my ***, rooting for this bull**** Grizzlies franchise.

Memphis is doomed and cursed. My head really wants out, and while I'm really trying, my heart's about to follow.

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Yao Mania

Man, I feel your pain... not as a Houston fan, but from an ex-Vancouver Grizzlies fan of course. The motto for this franchise: "There's always next year".

But the Grizz will be fun to watch next season. Gasol's back, Gay will be improved, and more likely than not YJL will be the Grizz pick at #4. Pick up a good starting PG to run with these guys and you got yourself a good team for the future.

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BBF.com Profile and Discussion

Carbo04

I can't imagine how bad you and the Celtic fans feel right now. Hopefully something can go right for you guys though. Only San Antonio fans deserve torture.

GMJigga

Amen.

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Astral

Oden belonged in Memphis :/

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"You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star."
-Friedrich Nietzsche

B_&_B

No offense, but your franchise has been dead for awhile and I dont see it getting any better due to reasons on and off the court. I predict the Grizz will leave Memphis in the next few years.

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Cinco de Mayo

Make sure to not go too far out on that limb.

Memphis wasn't dead before tonight. If the Grizzlies wound up with the No. 1 pick, the team would have been right in the thick of things. When that No. 4 envelope opened, someone cued the fat lady.

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ATLien

I know
I know

Chan

Every team has it bad, Rawse. Some worse. Try watching your team trying to make the playoffs with no hope of title contention, and end up with a middle of the road pick for 3 out of the last 4 years. The playoff year was a feel-good story that lasted 2 weeks, and we knew it was everybody's contract year.

Watch your team try to make the playoffs, with no chance of winning, and all the while realizing the best young potential you have on your team is Luke Ridnour. Nobody develops. And at the end of the year, you hope all this bull**** you sat through last season would wash over. Then the GM picks Robert Swift, or Saer Sene. Another rookie that you won't get to see play.

At least Boston and Memphis have young talent to develop, so there is actually a point to playing basketball. In Seattle, it's the same group of vets for 3 years that are proven to be mediocre, play with mediocre effort, and end up with a mediocre record. This #2 pick is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Memphis will get theirs soon enough. For now, you have Gay and Lowry.

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I know I contradicted myself/look I don't need that now.

Cinco de Mayo

Seattle's had a rough patch over the last five years, but at the end of the day, when you watch those 30-52 teams, you still can look up and see a championship banner. You can still probably faintly remember Payton and Kemp taking on Jordan's Bulls in the Finals. A playoff series win is still fresh in your memory. Hall-of-Fame players. All-Star players. Retired jerseys. Division championships. And now Kevin Durant.

Memphis has none of that, never has had anything even resembling that, and there doesn't seem to be any hope on the horizon. We've only had seasons where we've won more than 28 games. I hope we get ours, but as history has dictated, whenever the franchise gets an opportunity, it flushes it or gets plain unlucky. No team in the league has as pathetic a resume as Memphis.

Seattle's ownership situation has been on par or even worse than Memphis', where we have a lame duck owner, a lame duck GM and no head coach since December. And a lame duck franchise player. I hope Durant is enough to keep the Sonics in Seattle...I can't see myself calling them anything else.

But right now, I'm at a point where I have to ask myself - if I didn't live in Memphis, a choice that initially wasn't mine, would I care at all about this team? Would I support them or would I pity them/laugh at them like the rest of the league's fans? I have to say the second one.

This franchise might as well be on the end of a keychain. It's a joke.

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ProudBFan

Understand your frustration, Rawse. Completely. We (Blazers) were EXACTLY in your shoes last season (dropping all the way from 1 to 4 in the lotto and feeling like the NBA had it out for us). But here is something for you to think about: This draft class is FRIGGIN DEEP. Your team is GOING to get a very, very good player at #4. No, he wont be Oden or Durant. But he will still be very good - the kind of player that MIGHT have been in Rookie of the Year contention this year had he come out last summer. Seems you had a LOT of hope hanging on this lotto (i.e., getting Oden or Durant). And I truly am sorry to see you so down in the aftermath, it is not the end of the road. You are going to get a very good player, West is going to make some moves, and you may very well end up with the #1 pick next summer and feel as elated then as you feel depressed right now.

Chin up, buddy. You are a GREAT fan (great fans bleed for their teams the way you are right now), and your team and fellow fans need you more than ever at the moment. Take it from a long-suffering Blazers fan (remember, we have been dragged through the gutter on a NATIONAL scale for 6 years now): the worse it feels right now, the better it will feel for sticking it out when it finally turns around - and as I mentioned above, there IS reason to continue hope it will.

Another piece of advice: When you cant stomach the team/franchise as a whole, focus on either the game (even as played by others, temporarily, if that helps you get through) or individual players (even if they happen to play for other teams). What I am recommending is changing your perspective - even if only temporarily - to help yourself find your love for the game again. Over the course of the last 6 years, I found it helped distract me from my teams troubles, preserve my love for the game itself, AND sharpen my eye for the kind of qualities / players I would like to see on MY team at some point down the road.

Take a break if you need to, but you know and I know that once a team is in your blood, great fans like you cant just turn around and walk away. They will forever be calling you back, you will forever answer that call. No matter how painful it may be. At times.

Best wishes,

PBF

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croco

I feel for you.

This was a golden opportunity and depending on how things go in the draft, Memphis might be looking into some terrible years.

xray