Coming into Friday night's matchup against Minnesota's surging squad, the Memphis Grizzlies found themselves amid quite a strong string of outings as they had won three of their last four contests and were registering in with the fifth-best net rating (7.8) in the entire association during this stretch.
With this, the hope was that they could swoop into this home bout with momentum on their side and scrape out an astounding upset victory against the top-seeded T-Wolves.
Though things were rather close through the first two quarters of play, with Taylor Jenkins' squad going blow for blow with the league's best team and trailed by just five at halftime (60-55), in the third period Minnesota out-dueled Memphis 38-24, giving them a 19-point edge that proved too difficult to overcome.
In the end, the Grizzlies fell by a final score of 127-103 and, in turn, find themselves sinking to a lowly 6-15 on the season.
While several factors played into the team's unfortunate demise on the night, following the game star big man Jaren Jackson Jr. delved into what, in particular, caused the game "to get away" from them during the second half.
Grizzlies' Jaren Jackson Jr. talks third-quarter struggles vs T-Wolves
"Secondary rotations... little game plan stuff people won't really see. Rotations, they hit some shots. Maybe some turnovers but really just defensively and rebounding."Jaren Jackson Jr.
OH MY GOODNESS, @KarlTowns.
— Minnesota Timberwolves (@Timberwolves) December 9, 2023
🔨 🔨 🔨 pic.twitter.com/td3Y5u9anr
As Jackson noted, the Grizzlies struggled mightily in both the defensive and rebounding departments, allowing the Timberwolves to shoot 60 percent from both the field and from distance in the third while being out-rebounded 54-28 on the night as a whole, 15 of which being offensive and 20 coming from center Rudy Gobert alone.
As for the performance of Memphis' star big, the 24-year-old had a sound outing from an offensive perspective, dropping 21 points on 50 percent shooting from the floor and 75 percent shooting from distance, but struggled in virtually every other area of the game, pulling down a lackluster 2 rebounds (measuring in at 6-foot-10, this is unacceptable) and committing five personal fouls compared to registering just one block.
While Jackson's prediction of December being a "good" month seems to be off to a relatively good start, Friday's overall efforts were far from desirable.
Hopefully they can make up for their poor showing during their next game this coming Monday when they play host to the Dallas Mavericks.