Grizzlies – Syndication Server

Reluctant bison calf pushed into river by its momma as herd flees bears

Video footage shows a herd of bison taking an escape route from grizzly bears that included two difficult river crossings for the newborn.

A family of grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park sent a herd of bison running to escape, and in the herd were several newborn about to experience a river crossing for the first time.

While most of the calves jumped right into the water, one hesitant calf needing a bit of prodding. It’s mother pushed it off the bank and into the water, as seen around the 2:20 mark of the video captured by Ron Sterbenz.

Sterbenz told USA Today/For The Win Outdoors that the bison mom “was done with her calf hesitating to cross so she head-butted him right into the river.”

The incident occurred in Lamar Valley last month .

“It is always amazing when you remember that for many of these calves they were just born a few days before,” Sterbenz told For The Win Outdoors. “Most of them had never swam or seen a river until that day. They were being chased off the ‘Amethyst Bench’ area in the Lamar Valley and towards the Lamar River by three grizzlies, one sow and her two 3-year-old cubs, all three clearly wanting to have a bison meal.”

Also on FTW Outdoors: Man gets out of car to chase bear in Yellowstone; gets vilified (video)

The video also shows the difficulties newborn bison face while crossing a river.

“At the end of the herd were also two smaller calves who were frightened and delayed crossing until they were the last two,” Sterbenz said. “They barely made the first crossing and immediately faced crossing an even larger, faster moving branch of the river.

“After struggling for some time even the moms began to panic. Amazingly, at about the last part of the river before they would be washed away, they find a sandbar just shallow enough to keep their little noses above water. In the end they just barely make it, exhausted, cold and tired. They are still forced to run and catch up to the herd.

“We were sure they would take a break on the island and if not, we thought we would see a drowning or two from the panicked crossing.”

Instead, they managed to cross and see another day.

Watch: Meeting between Yellowstone grizzlies has unexpected outcome

When a male grizzly bear approached a grizzly sow and its two cubs in Yellowstone National Park, tourists watching the encounter felt a battle brewing.

“When a lone male moves in to meet a female, as this one did, it can be super aggressive [and] confrontational,” Ron Sterbenz, who witnessed the unusual encounter, told USA Today/For The Win Outdoors. “I expected this one to be a fight or flight situation.”

But neither occurred. Sterbenz posted a lengthy video of the out-of-the-ordinary meeting:

“What happened was much different,” Sterbenz explained. “The female laid down with her cubs close by, and it was the cubs who first attacked the male. The female then went after the most aggressive cub not the male, until the cub moved away.”

Then it was a staring contest. Eventually, one cub playfully approached the male (who earlier spent more than a minute scratching its back, doing so before an unimpressed crowd).

“The unsure male didn’t move at all,” Sterbenz said. “The cub then casually moved away towards its sibling and it was the female’s turn to inspect the bear close up. Zero aggression at all from the male or female. Not at all what we expected.

Also on FTW Outdoors: Bear ‘swims for its life’ after getting swept away in raging rapids (video)

“We knew this could go bad very quickly, but…the aggressive grizzlies are anything but aggressive. I have never seen behavior like this from a male seeking a female and such an interaction with one of the cubs at the end.

“My guess is that it is young male, as he doesn’t look very stocky yet and perhaps not the meanest bear in the park; he looks too young to have fathered these two cubs as they are already 2-year-olds.”

Photo courtesy of Ron Sterbenz.

Why Dillon Brooks impending free agency has his agent furious

Dillon Brooks’ agent called Shams Charania out for his report on the Grizzlies forward

A few days ago it seemed like the relationship between Dillon Brooks and the Memphis Grizzlies was unofficially done. The forward will be a free agent this summer and it’s unclear whether he’ll be back in Memphis next year after playing such a pivotal role with the team over the last few seasons.

The Grizzlies had reportedly made clear that the team would not be bringing Brooks back “under any circumstances,” according to The Athletic’s Shams Charania. That led to everyone in NBA circles speculating about what would come next for Brooks’ career.

But, as it turns out, that may not be completely true. While it seems unlikely Brooks will be back with the Grizzlies at all this season, a few nuggets of information have surfaced since, not only refuting Chararnia’s reporting but also calling him out for it.

So, with that said, let’s try and get to the bottom of everything to get a sense of what’s really going on when it comes to Brooks’ impending free agency this summer.

Dillon Brooks doesn’t deserve the treatment he’s getting from the Grizzlies or from you

Dillon Brooks is the last NBA villain we’re going to see for a while

Let me start this off by saying that I wouldn’t classify myself as a Dillon Brooks fan. In fact, I’m probably the opposite.

He’s a good player, but I don’t love his game. His shot selection is terrible and there are times where he just doesn’t need to be guarded on the offensive end, as we saw in the Grizzlies’ series against the Lakers. He probably — no, definitely — thinks he’s a bit better than he is.

With that being said, he’s still an extremely valuable player to have on your team.

He’s proven himself to be one of the better villains in the league. It doesn’t matter who he’s going up against — he’s confident. He will trash-talk you. He irrationally thinks he’s better than you. That’s a healthy thing for him as a competitor and for the league as a whole.

That’s why he’s such a fantastic defender. There aren’t many players in the NBA as committed to quite literally locking down the opponents best player and he does it pretty well.

Peep this wild stat from a deep profile on Brooks from ESPN’s Tim Keown.

“Brooks has matched up in the half-court defensively 922 times against this year’s All-Stars, the most of any player. He has held those All-Stars, from Tatum to Curry to Durant, to a 45.7% effective field goal percentage, which ranks first among the 72 players to record 400 such matchups. (League average, for comparison, is 54.6.)”

That’s good. This is what you can quite literally call lockdown defense. There are only a handful of players this good in the league at defending such a range of talented scorers in the NBA from Jayson Tatum to Steph Curry to Kevin Durant and more.

That’s why I was so confused by the report that Memphis is choosing not to bring Brooks back “under any circumstances.”

I’m sorry, y’all. But that is weird.

Now, there are legitimate reasons that Memphis would not bring Brooks back. For example, that shot selection thing is a real problem. But for the reporting to say that Brooks won’t be back under any circumstances? I’m sorry. That just doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.

But that’s kind of been par for the course for Brooks over these last few weeks if we’re being honest. It all starts with him trash-talking LeBron James — or “poking the bear” as we love to call it — and it just continuously devolved into something very different in the days and weeks following.

After Brooks called LeBron James old, it almost felt like the entire NBA and all of its fandom came to James’ defense as if someone really needed to defend the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.

You had Stephen A. Smith saying that James needed to bust Brooks. Then, Doris Burke kind of went in on Brooks’ talent during a live broadcast.

Doris Burke Fr cooked Dillon Brooks 😭 https://t.co/JyL7fZlju5 pic.twitter.com/vlgjBQCbvm

— andrew leezus (@AndrewLeezus) April 23, 2023

That stuff is mostly fine. It’s an honest analysis and critique. Is it harsh? Sure. Maybe even a step too far in some moments. But it is what it is.

Where things really started to go too far was with the jokes. Every single Grizzlies loss somehow turned into a referendum on Brooks as a player and led to jokes flying in from across the internet. It got to the point where Brooks very clearly felt targeted. And that’s not what happened — he started this with his trash talk and it just escalated. But perception is everything and Brooks had clearly had enough. That didn’t stop everyone from pressing harder and harder to the point where things bordered bullying.

Fast forward to Tuesday when reports came that Brooks was told to kick rocks by the Grizzlies and all most people had to offer up were jokes.

There’s no real acknowledgment of the human element here. Brooks isn’t a person to most people — he’s just a caricature. Someone most folks will never meet in their own worlds.

But, the reality is, he’s a dude who just experienced a failure. He had a bad series and wound up losing his job for it after having a pretty solid year and a very good run with the Grizzlies. If that feels harsh, it should.

All of a sudden, that bit of perspective we gained after Giannis Antetokounmpo’s talk about failure is gone out the window. We’re right back to square one with jokes and ridicule for missteps that these athletes make. We revel in the consequences they suffer because, after all, the NBA is an entertainment product first.

And, look, the league is better with villains. We love a good foil. We need people to shake things up in the league. It’s awesome and entertaining when that happens.

We’ll always have agitators. Folks like Draymond Green, Jae Crowder and more still exist. There are also guys coming up like Jose Alvarado and Jeremy Sochan who fit snuggly into that role. But it’ll be a while before we get someone who goes full-on villain as Brooks did.

We only have ourselves to blame for that.

LeBron James took more shots at the Grizzlies on social media after the Lakers destroyed Memphis

LeBron James is not letting up on the Grizzlies

If there’s one thing we’ve come to learn about LeBron James in his *checks notes* 20 years in the NBA, it’s that the dude is incredibly petty.

Everyone remembers when he wore the Ultimate Warrior shirt with a Kermit hat after coming back from a 3-1 series deficit against the Warriors in the 2016 Finals. This dude lives for these moments.

So it’s not shocking at all that James is still taking shots at the Grizzlies after the Lakers beat Memphis by 40 points to close out their series in Game 6. It’s not enough that James beat them. Nah. He’s going to make sure it’s felt.

He didn’t shake hands with the Grizzlies players at all after the game. But we already knew that, though.

Today, he continued the shenanigans. First, he posted on Instagram with a quite from rapper Mystikal — “If you ever see me in the forest with a Grizzly bear, help the bear.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CroMTEqJP0O/?hl=en

If that wasn’t enough, he also hopped on Twitter to quote a JAY Z lyric from his song “Trouble.”

Unlike you little 🤬I'm a grown ass man
Big shoes to fill 🤬, grown ass pants
Prolly hustled with your pops, go ask your parents
Its apparent you're staring at a legend
Who, put a few little 🤬in the they place before
Trying to eat without saying they grace before! 🤫👑

— LeBron James (@KingJames) April 29, 2023

Yeah, this is a pretty direct response to Dillon Brooks calling Bron old. He very much did not like that.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — this is amazing theater. Sports is better with rivalries. This is definitely going to go down as a pretty good one. We need more.

LeBron James didn’t shake hands with the Grizzlies after the Lakers absolutely destroyed Memphis by 40

LeBron James ain’t rocking with the Grizzlies.

The NBA is so much better when there are teams and players who seem to genuinely not like each other.

That’s definitely the vibe that we’re getting with the Grizzleis and Lakers.

You can’t tell me that the Lakers aren’t reveling in the fact that they just completely decimated Memphis by 40 points to put them out of the playoffs. And that they weren’t laughing hysterically in the locker room about Ja Morant’s “fine in the West” comments from months ago.

Obviously, things got a bit tense between these two sides after Dillon Brooks called LeBron James old. James, very obviously, did not appreciate that coming from the other side.

So, after the Lakers took out the Grizzlies by 40 points, James didn’t even bother to show his opponent any respect. He didn’t shake hands with the Grizzlies at all.

Instead, he went straight to the locker room after taking care of business. The game wasn’t even over yet — there were still 14 seconds left on the clock before the final buzzer.

Dude didn’t care.

LeBron James left the floor with 14.1 seconds remaining in the game. Not yet clear why he didn't stick around for the final buzzer. pic.twitter.com/Zebzb7AlLw

— Sam Quinn (@SamQuinnCBS) April 29, 2023

That’s the pettiness I absolutely love to see. Shaking hands after the game is a sign of respect. It’s very clear, LeBron doesn’t respect the Grizzlies. At all.

It’s not just this series, either. The tension between these two sides has been brewing for months — since the Shannon Sharpe debacle, really. You know what the vibes are.

If you didn’t, LeBron just made it crystal clear here. He ain’t rocking with those dudes. It is what it is.

Give me this series again next year, please. We need part 2.