While the Memphis Grizzlies pushed through their only practice on Day 3 of their training camp, six gleaming F-18 jets painted in the distinctive livery of the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels carved up the cloudless San Diego sky.
The precision flight team was practicing for their headliner performance in the Miramar Air Show this weekend. As anyone who’s seen the Blues perform will tell you, their precision is the product of discipline and leadership.
The same holds true of NBA basketball.
Without leadership and a strong guiding force, a basketball team can become a disjointed mess littered with isolation and “me-first” one-on-one play. Coaches can only do so much as leaders. They can game-plan and yell and cajole and motivate, but the on-court leadership within a team is every bit as important, if not more so.
For many teams, there is one unquestioned leader. Anyone want to dispute that Chris Paul runs the Clippers or that Kobe Bryant is the Lakers’ alpha male? But what of the Grizzlies?
Coach Dave Joerger told a small gathering of reporters today that the leadership comes from Mike Conley, Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph – three widely disparate personalities that will somehow have to ensure that the Grizzlies locker room remains fixed on the ultimate prize.
Conley is soft-spoken and the least likely to kick over a garbage can in a locker room tirade. He is, however, gracious and clear-headed and able to bridge gaps and mend fences as needed. Gasol is the most outwardly passionate of the three, for whom losing a pickup game requires punting the ball into the far reaches of the court. His emotions run hot and he demands perfection of himself and his teammates, a quality that is at once endearing and maddening, especially when he is critical after a win. Randolph somehow vacillates between the Conley-Gasol poles. He’s soft spoken and prefers to lead by example until he’s pushed and then can erupt with Gasol-like intensity.
This leadership triumvirate is unique, but according to Joerger, effective. “Because it’s not just one guy saying something,” he said, “it’s all three of them.” The implication is that when you have three leaders of varying styles and stripes, their concurrence on important issues will carry the day as effectively as a single Kobe Bryant.
That style of leadership sounds fine in principle so long as all three remain on the same page, which isn’t always easy. There’s the juggling of the perpetually shifting emotions that accompany hot streaks and slumps during the marathon season along with the unseen peripheral issues – family, friends, contract status and the like. It doesn’t figure to be a turbulence-free journey, but the continuity of the Mike-Marc-Zach trio is one reason for optimism in Memphis this season.