When David Stern recently sat down with Bill Simmons of ESPN, and talked Grizzlies. Regarding the Grizz, the commish had this to say “I wish we hadn’t had the Vancouver experience,” […] Great city, and we disappointed them and we disappointed ourselves.” No kiddin’ Dave!
The Vancouver Grizzlies experiment was a disaster from the time they decided to pick expansion teal as their color of choice and don’t BS me about that “Naismith Blue” crap either. Then they never fought for the name they originally wanted the “Vancouver Mounties”, which would have been kick @ss for the headlines alone. The headline list would have been endless, awesome and involved a man on a horse almost every time. How cool would that have been!Â
After that, they selected Bryant “Big Country” Reeves as the face of the franchise with their first draft selection and this was a bigger mistake than holding on to Nortel stock. Eventually, more crappy choices lead to more crappy choices and the Vancouver Grizzlies packed up to move to Memphis in 2001 and they have been fully sucking in US dollars ever since.
It’s really too bad that Vancouver failed, because with Seattle moved to OKC, another team on that part of the map wouldn’t hurt these days.
