Picked up the road win against Cleveland and now it's back to New Orleans to take on the Memphis Grizzlies again; yet another important game for all the obvious reasons. If we win this one, we guarantee that we at least tie the season series against Memphis, which is important for playoffs related reasons. As always, a game against a team like this is worth double value because it both adds a win to us, and a loss to them.
Here's the injury report:The @PelicansNBA/Mavericks game on March 4th has been added by ESPN. Tip-off has moved to 8:30pm CT.
— Daniel Sallerson (@dsallerson) January 31, 2020
Pretty much clear, aside from Kenrich and Darius. So that's great. Meanwhile, we are all aware of Jaren Jackson Jr being suspended for this game for the Grizzlies; this is a large boon to us, as JJJ is very good.
The Grizzlies just hit .500. They are 24-24, having gone 11-3 in the month of January up until now. They've been playing well, and they've picked up some good wins during this span, including victories over Denver and Houston. In both cases, there was some injury, but Denver still had Jokic and Houston still had Harden, so it's still worth noting.
We played the Grizz recently so I won't go deep dive on the stats, but a quick reminder: 18th in ORtg, 20th in DRtg, 4th in FG%, leads the league in assists, mediocre at everything else. Ja Morant is good at basketball, but last time we played Memphis he was held to 16 points on 35% shooting. Without JJJ to attract defensive attention and pull our bigs out of the paint, driving could get even more dangerous for him tonight.
Let's try and get the win! #WBD