The two teams tat drew the short straws in the top eight of the Western Conference meet up on Tuesday, April 15 in the NBA Play-In with the Golden State Warriors hosting the Memphis Grizzlies at Chase Center in San Francisco.
The game is scheduled to start at 10 p.m. EDT and will be broadcast on TNT and truTV. Fans looking to watch this NBA game can do so for free by using DirecTV Stream, which offers a free trial or with SlingTV, which doesn’t offer a free trial but has promotional offers available. You can also watch on MAX, which you can get access to through a bundle subscription with Disney+ and Hulu.
Despite winning three of the four regular season matchups, the Warriors were outscored by the Grizzlies by 29 points in their season series thanks to Memphis winning by 51 in its lone victory over Golden State.
The Grizzlies, who fired coach Taylor Jenkins in late MArch, are just 4-5 with interim Tuomas Iisalo holding the clipboard. They finished the season 48-34.
The Warriors also finished with a 48-34 record, but won seven of their last 10. Unfortunately for Golden State, the sixth seed Minnesota Timberwolves won eight of their last 10 and the fifth seed LA Clippers won eight straight and nine of their last 10, with the Timberwolves finishing one game better than the Warriors and the Clippers two games better.
The winner of this contest will face the 52-30 Houston Rockets in the first round while the loser awaits a meeting with either the Sacramento Kings or Dallas Mavericks to determine who the one seed Oklahoma City Thunder will host.
Who: Memphis Grizzlies vs. Golden State Warriors
When: Tuesday, April 15 at 10 p.m. EDT
Where: Chase Center in San Francisco
Stream: Sling; DirecTV Stream; MAX
What is DirecTV Stream?
DirecTV Stream offers practically everything DirecTV provides, except for a remote and a streaming device to connect to your television. Sign up now and get three free months of premium channels including MAX, Paramount+ with SHOWTIME and Starz.
What is SlingTV?
SlingTV offers a variety of live programing ranging from news and sports and starting as low as $20 a month for your first month. Subscribers also get a month of DVR Plus free if they sign up now. Choose from a variety of sports packages without long-term contracts and with easy cancelation.
What is MAX?
MAX is a streaming service that combines the catalogues of HBO and the various channels that make up the Warner Bros. Discovery Networks like CNN, Discovery Channel and TLC. The service is also partnered with Bleacher Report to provide sports coverage for anything covered by Turner Sports such as the NBA on TNT, the NHL on TNT, college basketball games on TNT and TBS and the Unrivaled 3x3 basketball league. You can also bundle your MAX subscription with Disney+ and Hulu.
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The NBA playoffs will, once again, be an international showcase of stars
By TIM REYNOLDS AP Basketball Writer
They’ll be watching in Canada, not just because of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, though the NBA’s scoring champion and MVP favorite who plays for Oklahoma City surely helps lure in fans who are north of the border.
They’ll be watching from Serbia and Greece, the homelands of Denver star Nikola Jokic and Milwaukee star Giannis Antetokounmpo. Alperen Sengun will have them watching Houston games in the middle of the night in Turkey, too. Fans in Cameroon will be tuned in to see Pascal Siakam and the Indiana Pacers. Defending champion Boston features, among others, Kristaps Porzingis of Latvia and Al Horford of the Dominican Republic.
Once again, the NBA playoffs are setting up to be a showcase for international stars.
In a season where the five statistical champions were from five different countries, an NBA first — Gilgeous-Alexander is Canadian, rebounding champion Domantas Sabonis of Sacramento is from Lithuania, blocked shots champion Victor Wembanyama of San Antonio is from France, steals champion Dyson Daniels of Atlanta is from Australia, and assists champion Trae Young of the Hawks is from the U.S. — the postseason will have plenty of international feel as well. Gilgeous-Alexander is in, while Sabonis and Daniels (along with Young, obviously) could join him if their teams get through the play-in tournament.
“We have a tremendous number of international players in this league,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this season. “It’s roughly 30% of our players representing, at least on opening day, 43 different countries, so there’s much more of a global sense around our teams.”
By the end of the season, it wound up being 44 different countries — at least in terms of countries where players who scored in the NBA this season were born. For the first time in NBA history, players from one country other than the U.S. combined to score more than 15,000 points; Canadian players scored 15,588 this season, led by Gilgeous-Alexander, the first scoring champion from that country.
Gilgeous-Alexander is favored to be MVP this season. It’ll be either him or Jokic, which means it’ll be a seventh consecutive year with an international MVP for the NBA. Antetokounmpo won twice, then Jokic won three of the next four, with Cameroon-born Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers winning two seasons ago.
“Shai is in the category of you do not stop him,” Toronto coach Darko Rajakovic said after a game between the Raptors and Thunder this season.
In other words, he’s like a lot of other international guys now. Nobody truly stops Jokic, Antetokounmpo, and Doncic either.
And this season brought another international first: Doncic finished atop the NBA’s most popular jersey list, meaning NBAStore.com sold more of his jerseys than they did anyone else’s. Sure, that was bolstered by Doncic changing jerseys midseason when he was traded by Dallas to the Los Angeles Lakers, but it still is significant.
The Slovenian star is the first international player to finish atop the most popular jerseys list — and the first player other than Stephen Curry or LeBron James to hold that spot in more than a decade, since soon-to-be-enshrined Basketball Hall of Famer Carmelo Anthony did it when he was with New York in 2012-13.
“We’re so small, we have 2 million people. But really, our sport is amazing,” fellow Slovene Ajsa Sivka said when she was drafted by the WNBA’s Chicago Sky on Monday night and asked about Doncic and other top Slovenian athletes. “No matter what sport, we have at least someone that’s great in it. I’m just really proud to be Slovenian.”
All this comes at a time where the NBA is more serious than perhaps ever before about growing its international footprint. Last month, FIBA — the sport’s international governing body — and the NBA announced a plan to partner on a new European basketball league that has been taking shape for many years. The initial target calls for a 16-team league and it potentially could involve many of the biggest franchise names in Europe, such as Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City.
It was a season where four players topped 2,000 points in the NBA and three of them were international with Gilgeous-Alexander, Jokic and Antetokounmpo. Globally, time spent watching NBA League Pass was up 6% over last season. More people watched NBA games in France this season than ever before, even with Wembanyama missing the final two months. NBA-related social media views in Canada this season set records, and league metrics show more fans than ever were watching in the Asia-Pacific region — already a basketball hotbed — as well.
FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis said the numbers — which are clearly being fueled by the continued international growth — suggest the game is very strong right now.
“Looking around the world, and of course here in North America,” Zagklis said, “the NBA is most popular and more commercially successful than ever.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article
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