How The Vancouver Grizzlies Were Set Up To FAIL

By joining Basketball Canada there is the potential to have a truly beneficial relationship for the good of all organizations and basketball across the country. We're not saying we're going to go out and set the world on fire, but we just want people. to know every night they take the field against the Grizzlies they are going to be in tusca 6 seconds Byron Scott 2 seconds yes, the first game was won for the Grizzlies the Coua Grizzly selects Ryant Reeves from Oklahoma State University do you think he will Becoming a factor right away will take a couple of years.

Well, with big people, it takes time and you have to be willing to wait for them and let them develop, and as an expansion franchise, I can't think of a better place. For BC Big Country Brian Reeves to be the Vancouver Grizzlies, select Steve Francis from the University of Maryland. I intend to do everything in my power to make this franchise a success in Vancouver. The founders have been very supportive of the team and the owners are false. accusing them of not supporting the team, so come on, save our Grizzlies. I would say one of the biggest disappointments of my life has been not being able to make things work in Canada.

Nobody likes to go through what we are going through. this relocation 1994 a late-season players' strike disrupts Major League Baseball and leads to the cancellation of the World Series for the first time in 90 years The death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain by suicide shakes the world of music and the NBA with its global popularity skyrocketing. its recent decision to expand to Canada in April, less than 7 months after awarding an expansion franchise to Toronto, the NBA Governors agreed to award a team to Vancouver, British Columbia, with both teams scheduled to begin play in the season 1995-96. It's a great day for Canadian Basketball as an organization in the sense that we are bringing two very key members of the basketball community into the organization as well as contributing members.

Toronto made sense, it's Canada's largest city, the country's cultural and financial center, and home to the NHL's most visible franchise and a major league baseball team that had just claimed back-to-back World Series titles. Plus, Toronto was a basketball city back in the day when the short-lived Toronto Huskies were one of the original franchises of the Basketball Association of America, which was a 4Runner. It occurred to the NBA that professional basketball would eventually return to Toronto, but Vancouver is a different story. Vancouver is by no means a small city, it has over half a million residents and, in fact, has the fourth highest population density of any city in North America, except for the NBA.

By standards, it was a small market, a small market with no real tradition or affinity for basketball. Vancouver loves the city and British Columbia is a great baseball province in general, but basketball doesn't really exist there, however, Vancouver had two things that made it extremely attractive to the NBA. willingness to pay an expansion fee of more than $15 million and a new Arena When the NBA agreed to award a franchise to Vancouver, the team's original owner, Arthur Griffiths, already had plans to build a new Arena for his hockey team , the Vancouver Canucks. This new 20,000-seat stadium in downtown Vancouver, which would eventually be called General Motors Place, eventually became a multi-use facility that Griffiths used to house his two franchises, the Canucks and the Vancouver Grizzlies, a nickname that It was completed in the summer of 1995.

If it were not for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's objections to the way the team would have been called Mounties, however, they chose a nod to the majestic and ferocious bear that roams the northwest of the Pacific, so he was put in charge of managing and shaping. these Grizzlies who were placed on the shoulders of Stu Jackson, the former New York Knicks head coach who had spent the previous years on the sidelines at the University of Wisconsin, however, this would be his first attempt at leading a team that Jackson He had no prior executive experience. When the Grizzlies named him president and general manager upon joining Baseball Canada, there was the potential for a truly beneficial relationship for both organizations in basketball across the country and it was a decision that many in Vancouver would come to regret.

Jackson eventually came to embody the Grizzlies'

fail

ures, but the truth is that the Grizzlies were never given a real chance to succeed and his extremely brief and extremely glorious NBA career is ultimately a reflection of how many obstacles put the league in its path from day one. Naturally, the Grizzlies ended up with little more than scraps in the '95 expansion draft. The only All-Star selected in the entire draft was BJ Armstrong and he went first overall to the Raptors before refusing to report to Toronto and being traded to Golden State. The Grizzlies' biggest names ended up with Greg Anthony, 34-year-old Byron Scott, 30-year-old Edwards Blue and 31-year-old Beno Benjamin.

That inaugural roster wasn't good, but that wasn't the problem expansion teams have. It wasn't supposed to be good, the problem was the barriers the NBA put in place to effectively slow the Grizzlies' growth. For expansion 95, the NBA decided to create some new rules for its two new franchises. First of all, neither Toronto nor Vancouver would receive a top-five pick in the 95th entry draft and by getting this, neither team would be eligible to pick first overall in the 96th, 97th or 98th NBA drafts, regardless. How bad they were in their first seasons, why were the League owners salty about the Orlando Magic? who joined the league in '89 had taken advantage of a series of early general booms until achieving very rapid dominance with the number one overall pick in '92, Orlando selected Shaquille O'Neal and with the number one overall pick in '93 , Magic selected Chris Weber, who was immediately traded to Golden State for Penny Hardaway for 9394, Magic was a team with 50 wins in just its fifth season, the rest of the NBA did not want the same thing to happen with their new teams Canadians, so they paralyzed Toronto and Vancouver. to a large extent, but that wasn't all besides that, during their first two seasons, the Grizzlies and Raptors were only allowed to spend a maximum of 2/3rds of the main salary cap seriously, so just to summarize over several years From the beginning, the Grizzlies were not allowed to pick first in the NBA draft and were limited in how much they could offer free agents, many of whom were already reluctant to come play in a remote Canadian city. and rainy with a heavy tax rate.

It looks like it's set up to

fail

, but Vancouver's basketball operations team didn't do itself any favors. Days after filling out most of their roster through the expansion draft, the Grizzlies held onto the sixth overall pick in the 95-inning draft, and while the real difference makers were gone by the time they selected, including a teenage phenom named Kevin Garnett, who went fifth overall to Minnesota, the Grizzlies could have taken Damon Stmy to eventual Rookie of the Year 9596 and an integral piece in the Raptors' early years, future All Stars like Michael Finley. and Theo Ratliff were also on the board, however, the Grizzlies ended up taking Bryant Reeves, aka Big Country, a hard-hitting 7-foot center out of Oklahoma State Stu.

You said you wanted a big man and you got a big meaty one, yeah we got one of the biggest obviously we're very excited to have a big country in our fold and you know he's a guy that we think will really hold up through the season of the NBA. He has an excellent offensive game, great size, which is a rare commodity in this league. and plays bigger in the biggest games, he would also eventually come to embody the Grizzlies' failures at the time, although both in the Grizzlies front office and throughout Vancouver, anticipation abounded that they had their team, they had their new Arena and were ready to make it to the NBA.

Basketball thrived in Van City, it just never seemed as excited as Vancouver was. Everyone knew that the 9596 season wasn't going to be a banner year for the Grizzlies, whose championship odds for their inaugural season were great, plus 75,000, but no one could have done it. He anticipated how terrible that first season would be, especially considering he started on an incredible and unexpected level in his first regular-season road game in Portland. The Grizzlies won with a strong fourth quarter and a 29th double double by Benjamin at a 9280 Victory and two days later, in their first game at General Motors Place, the Grizzlies presented themselves to their home fans like a storybook.

Big Night Big Night, the first Grizz show, it's time to play, it's time to get serious, okay guys, this is our home court, we have a nice big crowd here, let's have fun playing hard for the second game in a row, the Grizzlies showed An impressive fightback erasing a 14-point deficit in the fourth quarter to force overtime against the Timberwolves and with time expiring in the extra frame, Chris King produced a central memory for Grizzlies fans will be Byron Scott to the end to enter and exit. In this game vanc is two and0 incredible, well from there things got real quickly after their improbable 2 and0 start, the Grizzlies didn't win. their next game until mid-December going through a 19-game losing streak, but here's the craziest part it wasn't even their longest losing streak of the season from mid-February to early April.

Vancouver suffered 23 consecutive losses, an NBA record at the time. The team was not only bad, it was atrocious and by the end of the season those early highs were a distant memory, in total the Grizzlies won just 15 games in 9,596 and finished with the worst record in the NBA and six fewer wins than the Raptors, and although there was no The facet of the game in which this ragtag group excelled: their offense was historically Ina. The inaugural Grizzlies were the first team in more than 40 years to average fewer than 90 points per game. Now, for his part, Reeves, the most important component of the team, became solid.

His rookie numbers averaged over 13 points and seven rebounds per game, but it was very clear that at the NBA level, the big country was more of a contributor than a star, this was the type of team, in other words, that needed desperately a first overall pick. a Cornerstone franchise player to build around and, by rights, having posted the worst record in the league, the Grizzlies should have had the best odds of winning the 96-inning draft lottery, except, as I mentioned, they didn't allowed them to win the lottery instead of Vancouver. He ended up with a third overall pick after the 76ers and Raptors and saw the draft's best player, a Georgetown phenom named Alen Iverson, go first to Philadelphia.

Alas, with their third pick, the Grizzlies selected a talented big man in Sher Abdul Rahim, who averaged more than 21 points and eight rebounds per game and earned Pack 10 Player of the Year honors in his only season at Cal and although Reef became an All-Star and the most successful player in Vancouver history, that's certainly a pick that Jackson I'd like to bring back a pick that contributed to the franchise's Doom trajectory because you know who else was available in the number three Stefan Marbury Ray Allen Steve Nash and a teammate named Kobe Bryant oh of course at the time no one knew that Kobe would become Kobe and Allen and Asash would become Hall of Famers so the Grizzlies and the The basketball world at large was excited about Abdul Raheim and optimistic that he would be an integral piece in Vancouver's likely long quest for respectability.

Center, you have your power, which could also increase it to three, so you have a great start for the Vancouver Grizzlies in the short term, although Vancouver thought they would at least take a step forward in their second season, they clearly were not winners. team yet, but with Abdul raheim and Reeves forming their frontcourt, they weren't going to be an absolute disaster again, well bad, surprisingly despite Abdul rahee making the all-rookie first team and an even better, smooth season from Reeves , the Grizzlies were worse at 9697. Compared to the previous year for the second consecutive season, they finished with the worst offensive rating in the League, while their defensive rating ranked 27th among the 29 NBA teams.

They won consecutive games just once all season and endured four separate losing streaks of at least seven games. the longest was a 15 game appearance, it's no surprise that their mid-season coaching change didn't reverse their fortunes, in fact the team was slightly better with the coach inoriginal boss Brian Wyers than with Stu Jackson, who named himself head coach in January. The Grizzlies finished 14th and 68th, finishing with the league's worst record for the second consecutive season and cementing their dubious place in NBA history since the league adopted an 82-game schedule in 1967, although only one other team had had it again. consecutive seasons with 15 wins or less.

They were denied the number one pick in the ensuing draft despite their worst record in the League and once again missed out on a future Hall of Famer instead taking Tim Dunan first overall in '97 or even Chanty Bips, who went third, the Grizzlies chose Antonio fourth. Daniels, the Bowling Green point guard who lasted one season in Vancouver before being dumped five picks later for the way the Raptors drafted Tracy McGrady, but that miscalculation wasn't the Grizzlies' only mistake that offseason, a couple of weeks after the draft, Jackson signed his first one. The biggest contract of his tenure signed Reeves to a six-year extension worth $65 million, that deal would age like milk still at 9798.

Three of Vancouver's starters were recently selected in the top six of the draft . No, it wasn't Iverson or Duncan, but you'd think. that some of that pedigree and talent would begin to translate into more wins than one would think, although the Grizzlies continued to stink, winning only 19 games in his third season as Daniels was a huge disappointment, hence the offseason change, although the New head coach Brian Hill managed to get his offense into respectable territory, his defense remained a complete disaster with the Grizzlies. finishing 28th in the league in points allowed per game and defensive rating was one of those nights where, you know, you couldn't buy much, you know, I think in the first half we shot 35%, we got a lot of good looks , but uh.

You know, we just couldn't get anything to drop and it was a rough night all night for me, it just wasn't working out and his continued struggles were followed by another draft blunder by Jackson in 1998, the Grizzlies ended up with the second pick. overall, their highest pick yet, but instead of taking Vince Carter, Dirk Nowitzki, Paul Pierce or even Anton Jameson, Vancouver selected Mike Bbby, a solid player for sure, but not the kind of transformative talent that the Grizzlies need and that was available and Surprise, when the 9899 shortening campaign began, the Grizzlies were still bad, terrible in fact, that's when the wheels really started to come off first.

Steve Francis, would be Savior and an eventual three-time NBA All-Star refused to show up in Vancouver afterwards. The Grizzlies took him second overall in the '99 draft, which frankly is still a surprise because he seemed elated after his name was called on draft night with the second pick in the 1999 NBA draft. Vancouver selects Steve Francis from the University of Maryland. Steve Francis 300 for all your family, here tonight the draft in your hometown, how has it been these last few days? It's been very exciting for me, you know, before the draft, I always wanted to be a professional basketball player and I'm glad I was selected to participate in Yeah, I wouldn't even say Vancouver or Grizzlies after being drafted epic, anyway, A stubborn Francis was eventually sent to Houon in a three-team Mega deal in the process in which he became known as Persona. stands in Vancouver and Grizzli fans did everything in their power to make life miserable for Francis when he returned to Vancouver as a member of the Rockets, but in 1999 and 2000, booing Steve Francis was about the only thing that could compel Vancouverites to go see the Grizzlies.

After four miserable seasons and no SA in sight, the fan base's interest had waned that year as the Grizzlies reeled off 22 wins. Less than 600,000 fans turned up for the shift. Styles gave Vancouver the third-lowest attendance figure in the league and, oh yeah, remember how he said Reeves' contract aged like milk that year after largely dropping off the previous season, he averaged less than nine points per game amid growing concerns about his weight, athleticism and durability, he would play only one more season in the NBA after that, but at the time, the Vancouver Grizzlies had bigger problems (see in 1999, even though they had not elapsed not even half a decade since its foundation).

John Macau, who had purchased the Grizzlies from their original owners years earlier, was looking to sell after all, the Canadian dollar was weak. Taxes were high and the franchise's prospects were bleak both in the short term on the field and in the long term financially given Vancouver's relatively small corporate base. In 1999, in fact, Maau struck a deal to sell the Grizzlies to billionaire and Missouri native Bill Lori, but the deal collapsed. After the league made it clear that it would not allow him to move the team to St Louis, the writing was still on the wall and, believe it or not, just days after the Lor deal fell through, Macau agreed to terms with another buyer , Chicago-based billionaire Michael.

Heisley, who comparatively seemed more inclined to try to make the Grizzlies work in Vancouver. I intend to do everything in my power to make this franchise a success in Vancouver. Nice words, unfortunately for Vancouver fans, they were not true at the beginning of the 2201 season later. An offseason of personnel changes that saw Jackson resign as president at GM Heisley was already laying the groundwork for the relocation in October. Heisley claimed his new team would lose a record amount of money next season and pointedly said he was unwilling. suffered significant losses for a long time and indeed later that season as the Grizzlies continue to languish in the basement of the Western Conference and struggle at the box office.

Heisley received permission from the NBA to begin exploring relocation options among the cities that pushed hardest. Louisville Kentucky Anaheim California and New Orleans Louisiana, which actually got an NBA team shortly after when the Charlotte Hornets moved to the Big Easy in the end, although the city that managed to nab the Grizzlies was Memphis Tennessee Bluff City, which is not significantly larger. market than Vancouver, but it had a couple of key elements going for it: the promise of a new publicly funded Downtown Arena that would eventually be called the FedEx Forum with naming rights purchased by one of Memphis' biggest corporate powerhouses and B a basketball tradition much stronger than Vancouver.

Vancouver Memphis is first and foremost a football town, but the University of Memphis basketball program is an unmistakable point of pride and the city had a professional basketball team for a brief time in the '70s, before the merger of the NBA with the American Basketball Association. Memphis had an ABA team and that was enough for Heisley to decide on Memphis and in the summer of 2001 the NBA unanimously approved the Grizzlies' move to Tennessee, marking the League's first move since the king of KC to Sacramento in 1985. I would say that one of the biggest disappointments of my life has been not being able to make everything work Canada, the Memphis Grizzlies would begin play at the beginning of the 20012 2002 campaign, by the way, before their new start in Memphis, the Grizzlies effectively blew up their roster by trading Abdul Raheem. the franchise's all-time leader in points and rebounds and BBY the franchise's all-time leader in assists in exchange for Abdul Rahim the Grizzlies acquired the rights to Atlanta's third overall pick in the 2001 draft, a 21-year-old Spaniard named Pal Gasol just so, although as quickly as they arrived, the Vancouver Grizzlies left and, although their time in the NBA was extremely brief, their incredible ineptitude makes them impossible to forget.

In six seasons in Vancouver, the Grizzlies compiled a record of 101 and 359, their highest mark. The number of wins in a season was 23, only once did they finish higher than last place in their division and achieved the worst record in the League three times, at no time were they anything more than terrible, however in hindsight it is undeniable That this team was destined to fail, sure mismanagement played a role and Vancouver's draft record was particularly abysmal, but the NBA simply put up too many structural barriers for the Grizzlies to overcome as a professional basketball team in any remote area.

Canadian city, the Grizzlies were already facing an uphill battle, but the NBA still did everything it could to make life difficult for them, but despite the Grizzlies' deep struggles, their six-year run left an indelible mark on Van and ultimately helped turn Hockey Haven into a basketball town today, more than 20 years after the Grizzlies. last game in Vancouver, the city still longs for NBA basketball. A 2024 poll showed three to five BC residents were strongly in favor of Vancouver bringing back an NBA team and NBA commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged the city's continued interest in 2023, perhaps one day Vancouver .

They'll get another chance at an NBA franchise and hopefully get a fairer Shake the second time around.