The 10 Most Annoying Teams to Play Against When They're Short-Handed
The Grizzlies aren't the only team that suddenly gets more terrifying when they're down to scrubs and assistant coaches. Here are the 10 scariest!
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I was annoyed Monday night when I heard that Joel Embiid and Seth Curry were sitting against the shorthanded Grizzlies in Memphis. I generally dislike it when coaches rest their star players in relatively winnable games only to play them in a harder contest their next time out -- to me, especially when you're in the midst of a tough stretch of games (as the Sixers will be until the year has three "2"s in it), you push for the easier game and lay down for the harder. Cowardly, no doubt, but this is the Process Sixers we're talking about: If you still have any intestinal fortitude left after eight years of this mishigas, you should probably stop watching the games at 4x speed.
Then, about five minutes into the game, it struck me with a burst of white light: Wait a minute. The Grizzlies. Shorthanded. In Memphis? [Overused Kristen Bell meme voice] "This IS the hard game!!!"
In the entirety of franchise history, the Sixers have never beaten the Memphis Grizzlies during in Memphis, and they've double-never beaten them when they've been missing some dudes. Playing the Grizzlies when they're shorthanded is about as good an idea picking a fight with Daredevil outside of a raging Terminal 5 show -- the one deficiency will just make the rest of the team stronger. (I don't know Daredevil mythology well enough to definitively translate what would happen if he was suddenly down multiple senses, but I have to assume his sense of taste would be off the fucking charts.)
Naturally, the Grizzlies pantsed the Sixers for about 44 of the 48 minutes of game action last night. It was a face-rubbing reminder of all your least-favorite tendencies of the non-Joel/Seth Sixers -- like listening to your 12 oldest friends each tell their most obnoxious and oft-repeated joke for two hours and 15 minutes. Oh right, the one where Andre jumps five minutes too early for a rebound and gives up an easy putback, ha ha ha, never gets old. The refs seemed to sense the stink early and wisely blew fewer whistles than I've maybe ever heard in a first half before; this game was never going to be watchable and those 10:00 Central time zone reruns of Seinfeld weren't gonna catch themselves.
Anyway, the Grizzlies aren't the only team that suddenly gets more terrifying when they're down to scrubs and assistant coaches. Here are the 10 scariest -- keeping in mind that this isn't necessarily about this exact season as my weighted general impression of the team over the last 3-5 seasons; the older and deeper into Sixers fandom I get, the less my feeling about a team has to do with their exact roster makeup, rather than how much I reflexively grumble when I see their name on my League Pass info. Sorry.
First, though, five teams whose shorthandedness could not scare me less:
1. Los Angeles Lakers. If it isn't the Main Guy (or sometimes Second Main Guy) who's out it doesn't really make a ton of difference regardless.
2. Oklahoma City Thunder. If they're playing shorthanded they're probably actively trying to lose anyway.
3. New Orleans Pelicans. If they're playing shorthanded they're probably passively trying to lose anyway.
4. Sacramento Kings. Will never win another game against the Sixers no matter who's on the court.
5. Boston Celtics. Officially out of subs who are good enough to be particularly annoying. (Maybe the occasional Payton Pritchard.)
And now, in countdown order, the top 10 whose shorthandedness -- in a one-or-two-game sense, not talking about teams who've played all season without core guys -- means a night of real quick triggering on the remote or cursor. (Note: Although the Hornets played the Sixers impossibly tough in back-to-back shorthanded road games just a week ago they do not appear on this list; until they actually end a regular season game with more points than the Sixers I cannot officially bump them out of the Kings tier.)
10. Phoenix Suns. A team full of guys who you feel like the team might be better off without every once in a while -- to go small without DeAndre Ayton, to go pass-happy without Devin Booker, or to go middle-school-kids-overrunning-the-substitute-teacher without Chris Paul.
9. Portland Trail Blazers. This absolutely shouldn't be the case -- the Blazers have barely been a real team the past year or two even with Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum present and accounted for -- but how many times have we played them over the past half-decade when some semi-bust guard of theirs ends up hitting their very highest ceiling for exactly 35-40 minutes of PT? At least we saw this year that this one swings both ways, when the Joel-and-Tobias-less Sixers dispatched the mostly-full-strength Blazers at the Center in November.
8. Dallas Mavericks. Always tougher with Luka out for some reason? Better without Kristaps in general? Stats may not necessarily back up either, but anecdotal gut-check leans strongly in both directions.
7. Cleveland Cavaliers. An inexplicably Kryptonian team for the Sixers ever since LeBron left -- all it means when one of their high-upside guards is out is that the other is gonna go off, along with Dean Wade and maybe Dwyane Wade too if he's still around. Will be interesting to see how this translates now that the team is actually (maybe? probably?) good again, though.
6. Utah Jazz. Not fun no matter the hand situation, but with all their shooters and ball-handlers, they'd have to be down at least a six-piece of wings before it made a difference to our ability to guard them. Beating them without Donovan Mitchell or Rudy Gobert wouldn't be that much fun anyway.
5. Milwaukee Bucks. Jazz East -- feels like these guys are never not ermanently down two or three key rotation guys and I can't remember a time it's actually mattered. (To be fair, we've also played them at full strength maybe twice since Jrue was still a Sixer.) Prospect of playing them without Giannis is even scarier; the threes would be raining until global warming permanently eliminated condensation as a thing.
4. Miami Heat. Makes basically no difference who's actually out there, pt. 1: Maybe missing both Jimmy and Bam makes a difference; one and at best we're headed for an irritatingly close victory; both in and the rest of their lineup could be fleshed out with the 50-something dudes from 2 Live Crew for all we care.
3. Toronto Raptors: Makes basically no difference who's actually out there, pt. 2 -- particularly now that Kyle Lowry has decamped to our No. 4 team. The Raptors locker room could get simultaneously hit with the rock and roll pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu and they'd still be able to patch together a roster of dudes to grab every loose ball, win every battle on the boards, and hit every shot that mattered down the stretch. The Raptors might be a .400 team against the rest of the league -- they basically were last year -- and against us, we're still always stationed somewhere between the third Kawhi doink and the fourth Kawhi doink.
2. Atlanta Hawks. The team on this list that, more than any other, is fairly demonstrably better when some dudes are out -- when all of their eight starting-caliber wings are healthy at once, one of them always seems to do exceptionally well, which just sends the other seven into a month-long funk. They'd miss Trae Young for even a game or two, perhaps, but you know Sweet Lou would hear the Meek Mill at the prospect of getting to light up his former squad for an extended run. Would probably be No. 1 if we hadn't just beaten them twice, at least once with Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot as a starter.
1. Memphis Grizzlies. Yeah, they're No. 1. I don't even know how scary this team is at full strength, since I don't think we've ever played them that way and we have taken advantage of it precisely zero times. They've got it all: Dudes who out-athletic you, dudes who out-shoot you, dudes who out-effort you, dudes who dunk you back into the ABA '70s. The dudes this time weren't the same as the dudes last time, and they won't be the same as the dudes next time. No matter: as long as the Sixers are coming to Memphis while the Grizzlies are shorthanded, Philly can get its revenge game back in blood.