The Game 1 of this series was a contest between two elite teams, where one of them was fully ready for the game, while the other looked like they were playing a regular season game, with no scouting report from the opponent. This was exactly what it looked like. Of course San Antonio was the prepared team, while they made the Grizzlies look like a high school team.
Regarding the matchup between the Grizzlies' offense and the Spurs' defense. Gregg Popovich and the Spurs were super ready for Memphis and this will continue throughout the whole series. On their series against Oklahoma City, Memphis benefited from the fact that coach Scott Brooks refused to double team the Grizzlies' frontcourt players, allowing Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph to crush them to post up plays. In practical terms, this could actually have been a nice plan for the Thunder who has a good interior defense, but as soon as Randolph started to outplay Ibaka, Oklahoma City needed to adjust and they didn't, so they shot themselves on the foot with that. But on this series against San Antonio, the Spurs made everything to avoid Randolph from getting the ball in good spots, but as soon as that happened, the Spurs would send a double team to stop him! Of course this takes risks as their weakside defense was exposed, with the Grizzlies getting good looks at the perimeter, but Popovich doesn't care about giving good looks to a bad jump shooting team like the Grizzlies, while Randolph doesn't have the great vision/passing skills that Marc Gasol has to crush them. The Grizzlies' starters tried to avoid as much as possible to shoot from long range, as their gameplan was to pound down low the Spurs, but San Antonio was brilliant in preventing that from happening. Note that Quincy Pondexter shot 5-9 3pts and he was the only player from Memphis that took advantage of that space given to his team on the outside.
But the major problem for Memphis was really how San Antonio pounded them on offense. It was even hilarious how Memphis's defense ended up doing exactly what the Spurs wanted them to do! As expected, San Antonio ran a lot of pick and rolls (22.6% volume of pick and roll ball handler plays), with a great 8-17 FG mark and their intention was to especially involve Zach Randolph on the pick and rolls to expose him, as he is a poor pick and roll defender. But worse than that for the Grizzlies was how they overhelped on the Spurs' player that had the ball, something that allowed San Antonio to use their nice ball movement to get the ball into the open player, who would then make a nice long-range shot. This is why all 14 treys made by the Spurs were assisted! Mike Conley and Tony Allen weren't aggressive on fighting through screens and this game ended up being a drive and kick festival by San Antonio. This was the key of this game and even though I took San Antonio on the spread, I never expected the Grizzlies to be so poorly prepared for this game. Memphis will need to defend in the same way that the Pacers did on their series against the Knicks: stay home on the shooters and stop gambling on defense while looking for turnovers!
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