There was a 20-minute window on Thursday night when the Vancouver Grizzlies looked like they very much belonged in the NBA Playoffs. And yeah, we said Vancouver. That was the uniform they wore for this one, and the name across that uniform’s front. You want to be Memphis, make a uniform you like.

Then again, maybe Memphis should stay in their Vancouvers. Because other than those 20 minutes, give or take, in the first half Thursday night, their team has gotten out-and-out Wizarded by the Oklahoma City Thunder. That a Grizzlies team that tailspun its way into the playoffs would get wiped out by the top seed in the Western Conference isn’t a surprise, but they’re getting wiped out in a weird way, and Thursday night’s 114-108 loss to the ‘Der was both the worst and weirdest of the three losses.

It was the worst because it was the closest, and the weirdest because those 20 giddy minutes featured Memphis at its sweetest, between the general cleverness of Ja Morant and the more specific shooting display of Scottie Pippen The Younger. In losing Games 1 and 2 by an aggregate 70 points, including a 131-80 mega-loss in Game 1, the Grizz had looked utterly unworthy to have advanced from the children’s table of the play-in tournament and therefore geometrically overmatched. 

To their credit, though, the Grizz jumped back at the Thunder in the first 20 minutes of Game 3 in a convincing way. They blitzed OKC and made a highly temporary statement about the longer term future of a series that nobody was looking forward to more of. Pippen TY had 23, Morant 15 and five, and the Grizzlies made the Thunder look like, well, the Vancouver Grizzlies. NBA games are 48 minutes long, which puts even the most dominant 20 minutes of basketball in perspective, but the Grizz led 69-40 at one point, a score so absurd even in this deeply absurd postseason that it felt mostly like a screwup in the TNT graphics department.

Then Morant was arsed out of the game and maybe the series in a collision with Oklahoma City’s Luguentz Dort—literally, in this case, as Morant landed on his behind Jimmy Butler-style, and with similarly dire results. After missing the two free throws he’d earned, Morant left the game like a car that took a right when the track was demanding a left. Morant’s departure essentially removed Memphis’s raison d’etre in this series, and made that big lead feel, well, slightly less assured. The prognosis on Morant’s left hip injury was also Butler-like in that his next game will not necessarily be on Saturday, as it will for his teammates. Which means it might not happen until next season.

Oklahoma City outscored Memphis from that point by a margin of 74-39, which means that they have now made an ubermockery of what figured at the beginning of the series to be merely a standard-issue mockery. Other than those 20 minutes and change, Oklahoma City has won the series by 105 points, which in this tortured alternate universe makes it the most lopsided series in NBA postseason history. Only one playoff comeback in history has ever been bigger; no Grizzlies team has ever scored fewer points in a playoff game than the 31 these Grizz managed in the second half.

We don’t have anything more pithy to report about this game or the series as a whole. Memphis announced a crowd of roughly 1,000 less than capacity, which suggests that the good citizens of Memphis suspected how it was going to go. Still, they couldn’t have anticipated this. The 20 minutes of accomplished basketry the Grizz and their fans got is more than either had any reason to expect, and those 20 minutes were the height of the Memphis Grizzlies experience, if only because the contrast between those 20 and the surrounding 124 is so stark. Those other 124 amount to the most absurd sweep in NBA playoff history, with one game still to play (tip o’the tam to the 2010 Magic-Hawks series for the previous leader). But those 20 minutes—the Memphis Grizzlies disguised as the Vancouver Grizzlies, who were in turn disguised as the sparky and cohesive Grizzlies team that approached the top of the Western Conference standings earlier this year—were real, too.

And while there is still more of this catastrophe to play Saturday evening, if it is played without Morant, we can safely assume that Memphis will have only those 20 minutes and Taylor Jenkins’s smoking carcass with which to remember 2025—a season that began so rich with possibilities, and that ended so preposterously. Maybe this will teach the Grizz to step up their uniform game so that they don’t have to reach back to the duds they wore when they were someone else entirely. Those Vancouver teams were deeply bad, but at least their kits looked sharp, even on Bryant Reeves. These Grizz did their Canadian antecedents no favors by hauling them out for this. Either steal those threads with pride or figure something else out, lads. The color wheel is your friend; treat it that way.

It is fair to say that the Grizzlies probably would not have blown that 29-point lead had Morant not been injured, nor would the Grizzlies have seemed nearly as paralytic as they did when play resumed. They made only 11 more field goals the entire night, and it is probably to their credit that they still almost looked capable of cheating fate and winning until Chet Holmgren’s 25-footer with 2:40 left tied Thursday’s game at 108. The Grizzlies ended up missing their last seven shots as the panic settled in their souls and their fate settled upon their chests. They had shot their bolt, and the recoil was an absolute bastard.

However strange the route on Thursday night, this result surprises nobody; Oklahoma City is as loaded as any potential champion since the 2017 Curry/Durant/Thompson/Green Warriors. But “potential” remains the operative word, because the Thunder have not shown they are as dominant against the entire league in spring as those Warriors did. Hell, that 2010 Magic team that squashed the Hawks in the second round didn’t even reach the Finals. If we are taking testimonies, though, the Grizzlies are willing to certify that Oklahoma City is the real deal, times 105, and they have the footprints on their Vancouverite torsos to prove it.