Posts Tagged ‘Jason Levien’

Hollins’ Ouster Puts Memphis’ Brass Squarely On The Hot Seat

June 10, 2013  ·  10:22PM


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HANG TIME SOUTHWEST – RIP, GnG?

Lionel Hollins, the gruff, old-school head coach who delivered the embraceable blue-collar, Grit-and-Grind identity to the once-floundering Memphis Grizzlies, is officially out. And the organization’s new ownership group, led by young tech billionaire Robert Pera and his analytics-charged management team headed by CEO Jason Levien, is officially on the hot seat to keep a good thing going.

The apparent choice to replace Hollins has been his understudy, Grizzlies assistant Dave Joerger. Joerger is credited as the architect of Memphis’ stone-cold defense and would take over a club that won a franchise-best 56 games and appeared in its first Western Conference finals.

“On behalf of the Grizzlies organization I would like to thank Lionel for his service and hard work in helping this organization throughout his years in Vancouver and Memphis,” Levien said in a statement. “We have begun to identify our next head coach, who we feel can best move us forward.”

Where will the staunch Hollins, 196-155 in four-plus seasons with Memphis, land? Perhaps with the stylistically opposite Denver Nuggets. Reports out of Los Angeles have him on the Clippers’ long interview list for this week.

Lionel Hollins, Mike Conley

Lionel Hollins was key to the development of point guard Mike Conley.

But back to the Grizzlies. Memphis is a fragile small market and Hollins, along with key player acquisitions by general manager Chris Wallace – who took a back seat to Levien and is reportedly a top candidate for the GM job with the Sacramento Kings — turned a second-class citizen to its FedExForum co-tenant, the Memphis Tigers, into the pride of the city.

That’s rare stuff. Even so, Memphis’ attendance ranked 19th out of 30 teams this season. They played to 91.8 percent capacity. Only 13 teams played to fewer home fans (in terms of arena capacity) and only three were playoff teams — Indiana, Atlanta and Milwaukee.

“One thing I think is very unique about [our] market which helps us is that we’re the only game in town,” Levien, a former agent and former assistant GM with Sacramento, said last month in an interview during the second round against the Oklahoma City Thunder. “So if you’re in L.A., you’re competing with all these pro sports teams and all this other entertainment. If you’re Memphis, the FedExForum is the spot. The Grizzlies are the team. And even though it’s a smaller market, we need to do a better job of commanding that attention consistently, but we think that’s an advantage for us.

“The great thing about Memphis also is we’re in the Southeast. This is a basketball city, this is a basketball region. Even though SEC football is big all around us, people love basketball and a lot of that is the Tigers’ tradition. So we are very cognizant of the fact that we are growing on the backs of the Tigers and what they built here in terms of the love of basketball.”

The Grizzlies’ plan is to keep growing, to widen their fan base by expanding television deals into regional markets such as the recent TV and radio deal into Little Rock, Ark. To sustain and grow attendance and increase television reach — which often creates new sponsor opportunities, ticket sales and other revenue streams — Memphis must keep a winner on the floor.

Levien has major decisions ahead and tough ones in shaping a team under the constraints of the salary cap. A coach is No. 1. Then comes whether to re-sign defensive specialist Tony Allen. The free-agent swingman is affectionately called “The Grindfather” by fans who wear T-shirts bearing that name in the style of the “The Godfather” logo from the movies.

Will Levien shop Zach Randolph, who turns 32 next month and is owed $34.3 million over the next two seasons? Randolph became a beloved figure in Memphis as well as a two-time All-Star under Hollins, who deserves credit for sticking with and developing point guard Mike Conley and 2012 All-Star and 2013 Defensive Player of the Year Marc Gasol. Does Levien prefer the Grizzlies move away from the Grit-and-Grind foundation and to a more up-tempo attack to mirror the rest of the West?

Levien said he had begun earlier in the season the process of calling every season-ticket holder to share his vision for the club.

“The thing I’ve noticed in Memphis is they were down for so long they want to know that you want to win,” Levien said. “And If they think that you are serious about it, and that you have a process, and that you have a strategy and that you really want to win, I think they’re with you and they’re excited about that.”

Dismantling the structure of an operation that reached new heights is risky business. Mark Cuban took apart a championship team (his reason being to better deal with the changes of the new CBA) and two years later the Mavericks are out of the playoffs. Memphis doesn’t possess the longstanding fan goodwill (or deep-rooted corporate sponsorships) as Dallas does to sail through a public relations storm of a precipitous fall.

And its players that are locked up don’t want to even think about that.

“I’ve seen both ends of it,” Conley, who went 22-60 as a rookie, said during the West finals. “We were terrible, the support was pretty bad and now we’ve seen it hit an all-time high and I don’t want to go back to what it was before. Trust me. It would be huge if we could just stabilize what we have and just keep moving forward.”

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Posted in 2013 The Finals / Comments (48) /

Hollins Wants To Stay With Grizzlies … What’s The Hold Up, Memphis?

May 30, 2013  ·  9:39AM





HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – This is where the coaching carousel business starts to get a little silly.

The Grizzlies are coming off the greatest overall season in franchise history which included their first trip to the Western Conference finals. They have a solid roster and an excellent coach in Lionel Hollins, who has publicly expressed his desire to stick around and try to take the Grizzlies to that next level.

“Hopefully, I will be here,” Hollins said. “I love the guys. I love this city and the fans and everybody associated with the team. But we’ve got to be very, very realistic in what the future holds.”

When a man speaks like that, you have to wonder what’s not being said. What’s the hold up for the Grizzlies?

The Grizzlies are not going to publicly negotiate with their soon-to-be free-agent coach. And Hollins would be wise to use whatever leverage he has to get the deal he wants (and deserves). There are, after all, only four coaches in the league who can say they took their team to the postseason’s final four.

While a handful of teams around the league, including the Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Clippers (L.A. owner Donald Sterling was reportedly at Game 1 of the Western Conference finals observing Hollins) are searching for the right coaching fit or the next Hollins or Frank Vogel, the Grizzlies have the guy that fits perfectly with their roster under contract until June 30.

If it’s just numbers they are dealing with in the negotiations, fine. Both sides want the best deal possible, and there’s still time to haggle over details. But if there is more going on here, if there are some philosophical differences between Hollins, Grizzlies CEO Jason Levien and his front-office staff, there is no telling where things are headed.

If the Grizzlies think that a different coach can get the same things out of Zach Randolph, Marc Gasol, Mike Conley and the rest of a team that, up until being swept by the San Antonio Spurs, looked like a team built to compete for a championship, they better be sure.

Proven commodities in the coaching ranks don’t always pan out in every situation (just ask the Los Angeles Lakers how that Mike D’Antoni thing is working out). Hollins has already shown what he’s made of. He didn’t take over an elite team, but the Grizzlies have become exactly that under his stewardship.

Why anyone would want to tinker with that chemistry, with that tangible success, is beyond me!

Hollins wants to stay in Memphis. He loves his team, the city and the direction the franchise is heading in with the new ownership and management.

Sounds like a slam dunk.

What’s the hold up?

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Posted in 2013 Conference Finals: Spurs-Grizzlies, HT News / Comments (18) /

Small Markets Scrap For Success

May 23, 2013  ·  10:57AM

memphis-fans

HANG TIME SOUTHWEST – When a couple small-market Western Conference teams battled for seven grueling games in the semifinals of the playoffs two years ago, who could have foreseen that they would meet again this postseason — after each was forced to deal with the inescapable repercussions of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement?

Rudy Gay was injured and out of that postseason two years ago. But at only 24 and locked into a lucrative contract, the No. 8 pick of the 2006 NBA Draft was a central figure for the fast-rising Memphis Grizzlies. Yet on Jan. 30, 2013, Gay, the team’s leading scorer, was traded to Toronto.

In Oklahoma City, the Thunder were coming off a loss to the Miami Heat in the 2012 NBA Finals when, days before this season began, Thunder general manager Sam Presti dealt former No. 3 pick James Harden, just 23 and an integral part of the team’s success, to Houston.

In a postseason marked by a surprising domination of small-market teams — all four teams remaining in the playoffs are in the bottom half of the league in market size — the second-round showdown between the Grizzlies and Thunder (won by the Grizzlies in five games) demonstrated just what many teams have to do to thrive in the era of the still-new CBA.

“With the rules set up the way they are, there’s minimal room for error,” said Jason Levien, the first-year CEO of the Grizzlies under a new ownership group led by one of the world’s youngest tech billionaires, Robert Pera. “You’ve got to be very thoughtful in your approach to how you build your team, how you build a roster, and you’ve got to keep the cap and the tax in mind.”

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Avoiding the taxes

Cap and tax are at the forefront of the strategy the Oklahoma City management team is using under the ownership of billionaire energy mogul Clay Bennett. Presti, who has managed to re-sign superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, plus emerging power forward Serge Ibaka, to long-term deals that fit within the team’s cap structure, chose to hold firm to a policy of not commenting on matters related to the CBA.

In Memphis, where the Grizzlies will look to start digging out of a 2-0 hole against the San Antonio Spurs in Saturday’s Game 3 of the West finals (9 p.m., ESPN), Levien has defended the trade of Gay (for veteran small forward Tayshaun Prince and youngsters Ed Davis and Austin Daye) as being made to improve the team.

While that might be true — Memphis won a franchise-best 56 games after a strong start with Gay — the Grizzlies also got out of the $37.2 million owed to Gay over the next two seasons. Memphis will pay Prince, Davis and Daye a combined $26 million over that span ($22 million if Daye is not retained beyond next season). With Zach Randolph, Marc Gasol and Mike Conley owed a combined $40.9 million next season, keeping Gay and a payroll under the tax line (this season it was $70.3 million) would have been a near-impossibility. (more…)

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Posted in 2013 NBA Playoffs / Comments (3) /

Two Coaches With Everything To Lose

April 24, 2013  ·  4:52PM

LOS ANGELES – Opposing playoff coaches Vinny Del Negro and Lionel Hollins have a lot in common. Both men have improved their clubs’ winning percentage each season as coach. The last two soared over .600 for consecutive top-five finishes in the rugged Western Conference.

Both won 56 games this season to set each franchise’s record for most wins.

And, finally, job security: Neither man has it.

In a rare, but not unprecedented occurrence, the first-round playoff series between Del Negro’s Los Angeles Clippers and Hollins’ Memphis Grizzlies, a rematch of last season’s seven-game, first-round thriller won by L.A., features two lame-duck coaches.

While both have produced excellent seasons by any measure, one will be going home earlier than hoped. And despite public stamps of approval this week from their superiors, neither coach’s future is certain, and prior to Monday’s Game 2, neither was pretending otherwise.

“Would I liked to have had a contract before this? Of course,” said Hollins, now in his fifth consecutive season and third stint as the Grizzlies coach, a relationship that dates back to the franchise’s roots in Vancouver. “But that’s a decision that’s made and you go and do the best job you can, and it’s not like it had to be done before the season is over. It’s just like players, you can extend players early or you can wait till later. Guys become free agents and they go out in free agency and sometimes it gives you leverage and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Del Negro, who guided the Clippers to the franchise’s first Pacific Division title and first 50-win campaign in his third season and second with All-Star point guard Chris Paul, has been one of the most scrutinized coaches since Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf hired him without any coaching experience five years ago. Del Negro lasted two .500 seasons there before being fired and then hired by the Clippers.

L.A. advanced to the West semifinals last season, but with Paul and Blake Griffin banged up, was swept by the San Antonio Spurs. Del Negro said this season’s goal is to go deeper, which implies a goal of achieving another franchise milestone, a first conference final. It would take finishing off Memphis and then likely ousting the reigning West-champion Oklahoma City Thunder.

“I believe in what we’ve done here,” Del Negro said. “I think my assistant coaches have done a phenomenal job and I’ve had great support from ownership and the front office … and everybody to try and put the best team out there possible.

“Right now the focus should be on the playoffs, should be on the players and the commitment that they’re putting in to help us be successful. And all those things (contract situation) will get answered at the end.” (more…)

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Posted in 2013 NBA Playoffs, HT News / Comments (13) /

Grizzlies Need To Stay The Course

January 29, 2013  ·  11:59AM





HANG TIME HEADQUARTERS – Members of the Memphis Grizzlies need to turn their phones off, stop answering emails and cut off all lines of communication with their colleagues around the league in regards to Rudy Gay.

Seriously, enough is enough.

We’re talking about the longest-tenured member of the team, a player that, even when he’s struggling with his shot, finds way to produce for one of the best teams in the league.

While it’s easy to see why so many people are interested in trading for him, it’s hard to understand what the Grizzlies are thinking when they dangle Gay out there for other teams to paw at on the trade market.

All that consternation about Gay not being able to co-exist with All-Star power forward Zach Randolph has been put to rest. The Grizzlies have one of the best young cores in the league. They have their big man tandem in Randolph and Marc Gasol, Gay on the wing and a still-improving young point guard in Mike Conley. And they have the right man pushing the buttons in coach Lionel Hollins.

For the Grizzlies’ advanced-stat happy front office, take the words of your head coach to heart when and their stat-happy between now and the Feb. 21 trade deadline:

“Analytics has a place, (but) it can’t be the end-all, be-all,” Hollins said on a local radio show. “I’m trying to still figure out when the Oakland Athletics have won a world championship recently, with all the analytics they have.”

No matter what those numbers tell you about Gay, his performance and contributions to this team, trust your eyes. Whatever issues these Grizzlies have — and like all teams, they have them — they don’t revolve around Gay. He’s on the short list of elite-level players at his position.

That said, I applaud the Grizzlies for taking a long-distance view of things and recognizing that with the bulk of their payroll tied up in Randolph, Gasol, Gay and Conley, future roster flexibility is limited. How they’ve come to the conclusion that Gay is the expendable member of the core four, however, is beyond me.

He’s 26 and just now entering the prime of his career. There is still plenty of “upside” where Gay is concerned. What’s not to like about him and what he brings to this team?

Look around the Western Conference and you’d be hard pressed to find a better and more balanced core four than what the Grizzlies have, especially when you consider the age, ability and production of a team’s top four players.

Grizzlies CEO Jason Levien seems to agree with that sentiment, given what he’s said to local reporters recently. That’s why the Grizzlies made that multiple-player deal with Cleveland to clear more than $6 million in payroll and avoid the luxury tax threshold that forced them to consider trading Gay in the first place.

They accomplished both of their objectives with that deal, getting their books in order and giving themselves future flexibility.

Now the Grizzlies’ brain trust has to do the hardest thing in the world for a crew fresh on the front office scene, they have to stay the course with the nucleus of this team and resist the urge to tinker with the foundation of this team just because they can.

Stay the course!

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Posted in HT News / Comments (63) /