Brother v. Brother

I went to my first Memphis Grizzlies game last night. Although it was, at the final buzzer, still a 105-96 loss to the l.A. Lakers, it was one of those games in which the final score only tells half of the story. The Grizzlies led for all but about the last 2 minutes of the game. The FedEx Forum was packed. My friend and I had seats only 10 rows off the floor. (Seriously, we were so close I could hear every word of Kobe’s whining to the refs.) And, for about a hot second, I really believed the game might go into OT.

But the real story of the game last night was the epic matchup between a couple of Giant Spaniard Brothers, Pau and Marc Gasol (pictured above). Pau Gasol played for the Grizzlies last year and won the NBA Rookie of the Year award before being traded to the Lakers. Now, the Grizzlies have his younger (and only slightly less formidable) brother Marc, who actually played high school basketball here in Memphis when his older brother was still a Grizzlie. There were a couple of nice one-on-one matchups between the Gasol brothers during the game, which were fun to watch. I suppose nobody ever gets too big to overcome the pure pleasure of schooling his brother on the court… not even these very big guys.