Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Training Camp Begins This Month

Someone start the official countdown clock. Pre-season NBA action is 5 weeks away and training camps opens in less than a month!

Training camps open early this season to correspond to the earlier start of the NBA season. As most people remember, last season opened on Halloween and this season the Grizzlies second game of the year is on Halloween. The earlier the start of the season, the earlier the start of training camp. It makes sense.

The good news this season is that training camp won't be interrupted by a trip to Europe. That site seeing, media crazy, league sponsored events that disrupts training is fine for experienced teams with veteran players but has proven a tough nut to overcome for less experienced teams that are looking to build cohesion among the team during training camp. In other words teams like San Antonio and Phoenix don't get to bothered by traveling around the world during training camp but for teams like Memphis is can be disastrous.

So it is a positive that the team doesn't have to worry about a trip this year. With an amazing number of new faces (at least 7 new players among the 13 rostered invites) to implement into Coach Iavaroni's offensive system and Coach O'Neill's new defensive schemes the last thing the Grizzlies needed was to travel to Spain, France, England or China in the middle of their training.

BallHype: hype it up!

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