PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE MURPHY / NBAE VIA GETT Y IMAGES
Memphis is a rarity in the world of modern professional sports: a one-horse town. We don't have an NFL team (despite a few serious attempts). We love our Redbirds, but they're not a Major League Baseball team. And while Nashville somehow has an NHL franchise, the Stanley Cup will not be paraded down Beale Street. But damn, do we have an NBA team.
The Memphis Grizzlies may have arrived 21 years ago, but the romance feels brand new, like sunshine on Saturday morning. And in 2022, the Griz took a culture defined by grit and grind and added considerable grace (thanks to a sky-walking All-NBA talent) with a dose of greed (leading the entire NBA in steals). For winning their first Southwest Division title — the youngest team in the NBA's 76 seasons to win 55 games — and lifting a city when it needed lifting, the Memphis Grizzlies can add one more banner to their collection: Memphis magazine's 2022 Memphians of the Year.
The Grizzlies’ legacy in Memphis — as both a franchise and a way of life — is the embodiment of the phrase bloom where you are planted. In the years since 2001 — when a stumbling, six-year-old Vancouver Grizzlies operation under owner Michael Heisley moved more than 2,400 miles southeast — the Griz have become a beloved institution without so much as reaching the NBA Finals. There have been winning seasons (12 of them) and a few best left tucked in the record books. Led by the “core four” of Zach Randolph, Mike Conley, Marc Gasol (our 2015 Memphian of the Year), and Tony Allen, the Grizzlies reached the Western Conference finals in 2013. But in 2022, a new notch seemed to be carved. The Grizzlies posted the NBA’s second-best record (56-26) despite their star attraction (one Temetrius Jamel Morant … we call him Ja) missing 25 games with injuries.The Grizzlies may have arrived in Memphis in 2001. It feels like they arrived for the rest of the NBA-watching world in 2022.
Read the whole story in our December issue — on newsstands and heading to subscribers’ mailboxes. You can also take a visit to the studios of Memphis artists, learn about the “vinyl revival” of records in our city, discover who won the Inside Memphis Business Innovation Awards, learn from Vance Lauderdale about a very famous student who attended the Keegan School of Broadcasting, and much more. Go here to subscribe.
