Gay has long been the whipping boy of basketball nerds and analytic aficionados because of the way he has generally defined inefficiency for most of his career. Rudy Gay became an efficient basketball player. If you're paying a guy nearly $20 million a year to be your star player, that's not exactly a trend that'll instil confidence in your fanbase.īut when the Sacramento Kings brought Rudy in to ride out his contract on their bottom-feeding team, something interesting happened. It was starting to look like the best way to win when Rudy Gay was on your team was to have him miss games or to trade him. They then turned a terrible 6-12 start to the season around and finished with a franchise-best 48-34 record. Within a year of trading for Gay, the Raptors also decided that they would be fine without him and his pay check, trading him away to the Sacramento Kings for spare parts at the end of 2013. The Grizzlies have rattled off two 50-win seasons since the trade and haven't looked back. The Grizzlies eventually decided that they would be fine without Gay and his bloated contract, trading him to the Toronto Raptors in the early stages of 2013 for spare parts. After seeing how good Memphis had the potential to be on its own, one couldn't help but wonder if they even needed Gay at all to be competitive, despite the fact that they had just locked him up for five years and $82 million the summer before.
Kendall Marshall dished 10 assists and Johnson grabbed 12 rebounds.During the 2011 NBA Playoffs, the eighth-seeded Memphis Grizzlies took down a 61-win, first-seeded San Antonio Spurs team in six games without the services of Rudy Gay, their second-leading scorer from that season. Nick Young added 17 points and Kent Bazemore had 14 points to go with six assists. Jodie Meeks led the Lakers with 21 points and Jordan Hill went for 18 points, 15 rebounds and four blocked shots. McCallum has played 227 minutes (45.4 per game) in his last five games, including becoming the first player in the NBA season to play all 48 minutes in the Kings’ loss at Dallas on Saturday. McCallum and McLemore, with the backcourt very thin, combined to play 91 minutes-McCallum logging 46 and McLemore 45. DeMarcus Cousins was steady with 20 points and 10 rebounds in just 21 minutes due to foul trouble, McLemore scored 12 points, Travis Outlaw added 11 off the bench and Jason Thompson ripped down 12 rebounds. Gay was 12-for-24 on the night while McCallum dropped in 27 points on 12-for-22 shooting and also had five assists. On McCallum’s miss, his rookie backcourt running mate- Ben McLemore-grabbed the offensive board to essentially seal the deal. to within one before McCallum made one of two at the line with 24.1 seconds left.
But Gay hit a pair of free throws with 1:18 left to put the Kings back up five and Wesley Johnson missed a layup with 29.9 seconds left that could have gotten L.A. Sacramento led by 11 after three periods, 87-76, but the Lakers tried to make it interesting down the stretch, twice getting the deficit down to three points. The Lakers did not have Pau Gasol (vertigo) or Steve Nash (nerve root irritation) with them in Sacramento, while Xavier Henry (torn ligament in wrist) and Chris Kaman (sore right calf) did not dress. The teams were both short-handed in this one the Kings played without backup center Aaron Gray, who was not with the club due to a stomach illness, and point guard Isaiah Thomas missed his fourth straight game with a bruised quad. in the game was they were 5-for-11 from long range in the period.
The Kings (27-48) did most of their damage in the second quarter, when they shot 15-for-21 while holding the Lakers to 9-of-27 shooting. For the Lakers (25-50), it is just the second time since moving to Los Angeles from Minneapolis in 1960 they have lost 50 games in a season they lost 52 games in 1974-75.