VGVancouver Grizzlies

Franchise history

The Grizzlies joined the NBA as a 1995 expansion franchise alongside the Toronto Raptors, giving the league its first teams in Canada. Vancouver never came close to competitiveness in six seasons: the franchise never reached the playoffs and posted the league's worst winning percentage of the stretch, bottoming out at 8-42 in the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season. Early draft picks Bryant Reeves (1995) and Shareef Abdur-Rahim (1996) became the faces of the expansion era, with Abdur-Rahim in particular developing into a genuine scoring threat, but neither could lift the roster out of the league's basement.

The low point of the franchise's draft history came in 1999, when second overall pick Steve Francis refused outright to play for Vancouver and forced a trade before ever suiting up; the team turned him into a multi-team deal and instead built around point guard Mike Bibby, drafted second overall in 1998. Weak attendance, compounded by a sharply depreciated Canadian dollar that undercut the team's revenue relative to its NBA peers, made the franchise financially unsustainable in Vancouver. Owner Michael Heisley moved the team to Memphis, Tennessee for the 2001-02 season after the NBA Board of Governors approved the relocation in 2001.

Sources

• Vancouver Grizzlies — Wikipedia
• Memphis Grizzlies — Wikipedia