Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Memphis Grizzlies WATCH FREE: LIVE STREAMING ONLINE NBA PLAYOFF Game from FedEx Forum at 8:00 PM ET, Durant and Westbrook: Who Will Take More Shots?
The Grizzlies are happy to be back in Memphis, where they finished the regular season by winning a franchise-record 14 straight games.
They brought home-court advantage with them.
The Grizzlies evened this first-round Western Conference series by winning 111-105 in overtime at Oklahoma City on Monday. Being the visitor Thursday night in a hostile arena for Game 3 isn't a concern for the Thunder, who went 25-16 away from Oklahoma City for the NBA's second-best road record in the regular season.
"Everybody's going to be there. They're going to have T-shirts. They're going to be swinging towels," Kevin Durant said. "It's the playoffs. It's going to be hostile, but we've been there before."
Yes, the Thunder certainly have. But they have exactly one win in five previous postseason games in Memphis, and they needed three overtimes to pull that out in the 2011 conference semifinals. Memphis took both matchups in last year's semifinals en route to winning the series in five.
Memphis went 5-2 at home in the 2013 playoffs, when San Antonio, in the conference finals, was the only visitor to win.
Grizzlies coach Dave Joerger also has cautioned his team not to simply assume being home will make everything work. That 14-game winning streak that helped them reach the playoffs as the seventh seed also is meaningless. Joerger said it's time to start over now, and the team that sets the tone for its style quickest has won each of the first two games.
"We just keep slogging along and we feel always that if we get you in a possession game, we feel like that over the course of 48 minutes that we can grind you down," Joerger said.
The game will also be live streaming on www.nbalivestreamfree.net