Officially, attendance was listed for the Los Angeles Clippers at Memphis Grizzlies game last night at 10,012.
The only way that number was over 10,000 is if you took every person in the arena, counted every person whose number was stored in their cell phone, and multiplied it by two.
At one point in the first quarter, the game was going from right to left on the TV. I paused it during the possession and counted eleven people in the stands on the far side of the floor. The game shifted back down to the right side of the floor. I counted roughly the same amount of people.
They were the best seats in the house, and I had a tough time finding 30 people who were sitting in them.
What a joke of a franchise the Grizzlies have become.
They signed Allen Iverson this offseason, clearly in an effort to sell tickets, and it actually had the reverse effect. They botched the Iverson situation less than five games into the season, and the fans (if this is even possible) are actually less interested in Grizzlies basketball than ever before.
If I were a Grizzlies fan, I wouldn’t be interested in them either. At some point, you have to say enough is enough.
A quick stop at www.basketball-reference.com shows that the Grizz are dead last in attendance. They are 3-8 this season, and their wins have come against the Raptors, Timberwolves, and Clippers.
What’s the incentive to go see this team play?
They have no star power at all. Rudy Gay has the potential to be the third or fourth best player on an elite level team. O.J. Mayo is good, but he still hasn’t figured out a way to make anyone else good. I wouldn’t root for Zach Randolph under any circumstance.
Yet the Grizzlies are banking on these three guys to sell tickets.
It’s not hard to see why people don’t want to watch this team play. Look at the first round picks this team has made this decade: Hasheem Thabeet, Kevin Love (traded on draft night for O.J. Mayo), Mike Conley, Kyle Lowry, Hakim Warrick, Marcus Banks, Drew Gooden, Shane Battier, and Stromile Swift.
With the exception of the O.J. Mayo deal, every single one of these players has been either a bust or has maxed out as a role player. Not one of them has or has ever had any marketability attached to them.
There are two factors you need to consider when drafting in the lottery: Will this player make our team better? Will our fans get excited about this player?
The answer to the first question goes all the way up to management. In hindsight, it’s easy for us to look at the picks and say, “Nope, they didn’t make you better.” That’s the GM’s fault, but at the time, maybe some of them seemed like good picks.
But the answer to the second question, “Will our fans get excited about these players?” that’s an easy one to answer: Absolutely not.
You could maybe make the argument that some of these players plugged a hole for the Grizzlies roster at draft time, but there’s not one player there that would get people buzzing about the team.
Why not draft a foreign player and try to spin him as the next best thing? Why not roll the dice on a high schooler and tell your fans, wait a few seasons, he’s gonna be a star. Even if it’s not true, it’ll get people interested in watching him develop.
The Grizzlies traded for Pau Gasol on draft night in 2001, and guess what, it worked. Not only did he lead this team to their only three trips to the playoffs, but he had people showing up for games. They weren’t setting any attendance records, but they weren’t last in the league either.
Naturally, Memphis would not try to copy this formula again, and look where they are now.
The last four seasons, the Grizzlies have finished 30th, 30th, 29th, and 30th in the league in attendance. They have an average of 23 wins in that span, and they are on pace to win 22 games this season.
It’s time to do something different. Bringing in Iverson was a start. It failed miserably, but it least it was something.
Every offseason Memphis needs to try something radical, not only to win games again, but to get people to show up. If not, it’s time to move the franchise to some place that cares.
The economy is bad enough around the NBA, we don’t need Memphis and their apathetic (for good reason) fans killing the revenue sharing and making it worse.
It’s time for this franchise to move forward or move elsewhere. It’s embarrassing to watch an NBA game with high school-type attendance.
Keywords: Memphis Grizzlies, NBA
