It has been a mission of patience tracking the revival of Steven Adams and his NBA career. Finally recovered from his long term knee injury and looking resplendent in red for the Houston Rockets... progress has been slow

The moment is near. Steven Adams is on the verge of making his NBA return after 21 long and boring months without his basketballing presence.

The news came through at 12:41pm on Friday in the same way that all NBA news comes through: via a tweet from Adrian Wojnarowski.

It’s just not the same without Steven Adams. Even since he first got injured diving for a loose ball late in a game back in January, the NBA has been missing its heartbeat

It was a season like none other for Aotearoa’s finest basketballing export. For half of it he was an unstoppable rebounding machine even by his own high standards. Then he got injured.

The Memphis Grizzlies came to an inglorious conclusion as they were bounced in the first round by a seventh seed. Steven Adams didn’t play a single game after the month of January and that whole situation has been kept annoyingly murky

They said it’d be 3-5 weeks before Steven Adams could return from his knee strain. The All Star break fell at roughly the four week mark but he wasn’t quite ready to go at the end of it. The fifth week also went by. Then a sixth and then a seventh.

It happened on the final play of a two-point loss to the Phoenix Suns. The Memphis Grizzlies were trying to avoid a second straight defeat having had their 11-game winning streak broken a few days earlier

There were 16.1 seconds remaining in the game between the Memphis Grizzlies and Cleveland Cavaliers when Steven Adams supplied with the game-winning field goal. Cometh the moment, cometh the Funaki.

The Memphis Grizzlies hit the skids recently and it was not a pretty sight to see. A spell of seven consecutive wins flittered away in a hurry with four defeats from five games from in the back half of December

Steven Adams is a clutch-time basketballer. Probably not to the level where he’s gonna be in contention to win the new The Jerry West Trophy awarded to the Kia NBA Clutch Player of the Year, but…

Something very consequential happened between the first Kiwi Steve write-up and this second one: Jaren Jackson Jr returned to the basketball court. JJJ missed the first 14 games of the season as he recovered from offseason foot surgery…

We are now a couple of weeks into the new NBA season. The dust has settled. The trends are emerging. The cream is already rising to the top. The sample sizes aren’t quite so small.

The focus of this Memphis Grizzlies off-season can be summed up in one word: continuation. A young team, many of them drafted by the organisation, who had their first proper playoffs run last time out...

The time has come for this beloved annual tradition to swing back around again. Another edition of the Quotable Steven Adams, an oral history of the season that was told through the words of Aotearoa’s lone active NBA baller

Even if things got away from the Grizzlies in the end, this was a resurgent series for Steven Adams. After being benched for match-up reasons in round one there were no doubt folks out there wondering if his style of player is even viable at all in the playoffs in this day and age. Well, he swatted that one out of the air in a hurry