OKLAHOMA CITY — Santi Aldama didn’t need to watch the full game.
All it took was rewatching two quarters of basketball to get an idea of what went wrong in the Memphis Grizzlies’ 51-point loss on April 21 against the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Aldama, along with teammates and coaches all dived into the film a day after the historic 131-80 beatdown. That didn’t make the feeling any easier to stomach.
“It stinks for sure,” Aldama said. “It’s one of the toughest games to watch back in my career.”
However, all hope is still not lost. While the film showed several mistakes, Memphis feels like the issues presented in Game 1 are correctable.
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Defensive assignments, coverages and spacing were among the highlights. Each of those are areas Memphis has emphasized since the beginning of the season.
“It’s all small stuff that we can fix,” power forward Marvin Bagley III said. “We just got to fix those things and do it how we can, and I think a different outcome will happen.”
Game 2 is April 22 (6:30 p.m., TNT, FanDuel Sports Network) at the Paycom Center.
Diving into Game 1 film study
Tuomas Iisalo wishes he could have a short memory like his players, but as a coach, it’s not that simple. He believes players have a faster ability to recover after losses, while the losing feeling will marinate in his head through his extensive process of watching film.
Iisalo and the coaching staff all watch the film separately before coming together. Through that process, coaches can form their own analysis and breakdowns on what went wrong and when it happened.
As Iisalo simply put it, “a lot went wrong” in Game 1. After the individual film breakdowns, Iisalo gathers all the coaches together, where they look for the commonalities in their individual assessments. The goal then is to present the information to the players in a way that it’s easy to receive with a 48-hour preparation window.
Turnovers and rebounding stood out as much as anything from Game 1. Iisalo pointed out that Memphis was outscored in large part due to turnovers creating easy scoring opportunities for OKC, and second-chance points.
Those two areas are at the top of the list for improving heading into Game 2.
“That for sure is unsustainable for us,” Iisalo said.
Damichael Cole is the Memphis Grizzlies beat writer for The Commercial Appeal. Contact Damichael at [email protected]. Follow Damichael on X, formerly known as Twitter, @DamichaelC.
