Ja Morant is playing with fire and the consequences are piling up
Ja Morant isn’t simply playing with fire. He’s showing how little he cares if he gets burned — or if the house goes up along with him.
It’s clear now with the superstar guard’s second go-round being caught on camera with a gun in his hand that he didn’t learn his lesson the first time.
The pistol-packing player for the Memphis Grizzlies pulled out a handgun while dancing in the driver’s seat of a car while a passenger was broadcasting on Instagram Live over the weekend.
The seconds-long snippet immediately went viral on social media, and the Grizzlies announced shortly thereafter that the All-Star guard was suspended indefinitely from team activities. The suspension comes just weeks after Morant was penalized for this very same infraction.
Recent reporting suggests now opposing NBA owners are concerned with the image Morant portrays as one of the young faces of the rapidly growing professional basketball league. His suspension is expected to carry into the beginning of the 2023-24 NBA season, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
And it’s equal parts immature and careless for a player who recently signed a $200M contract extension, only to lose a chunk of that money via suspension for brandishing a weapon in a nightclub in Denver after a March 3 game against the Nuggets.
Morant just finished an apology tour for that incident two months ago.
“It’s not who I am,” Morant said in a nationally-televised sit-down interview with ESPN’s Jalen Rose. “I made a bad mistake. I can see the image that I painted over myself with my recent mistakes. But in the future, I’m going to show everybody who Ja really is, what I’m about and change this narrative that everybody got.”
The only thing added to the narrative since there has been consistency, with Morant’s off-court decisions becoming as reliably disappointing as his team’s postseason performance. The Grizzlies’ star has racked up more team suspensions involving guns this calendar year (two) than playoff series victories since entering the NBA in 2019 (one).
The two-time All-Star’s been spotted with a gun twice on social media. He also rode in an SUV that shined a red laser at a group of Indiana Pacers associates following an altercation in Memphis after a Jan. 29 game. A Pacers’ security guard present at the time said the red laser was “100 percent a gun.”
“We felt we were in grave danger,” said another person present on the night in question.
The Grizzlies’ star also finds himself embroiled in a lawsuit after an altercation with a high school basketball player after a pickup game at his house. In that lawsuit, the teenage player alleges Morant emerged from his house and clutched a weapon but did not show it.
And four days before that alleged incident, the head of security at a Memphis mall filed a police report, alleging Morant was part of an altercation and made a threat on his life.
Morant was also involved, alongside both his father, Tee Morant, and former Grizzlies forward Dillon Brooks, in a courtside altercation with Hall of Fame tight end and Fox Sports TV host Shannon Sharpe during a Jan. 20 matchup against the Lakers in Los Angeles.
He also garnered the wrong kind of attention for throwing up Crip gang signs on-court to celebrate during Grizzlies games. It’s a bad look for the league, and a well-known Los Angeles-area Crip, known as Bricc Baby, condemned Morant’s actions in a recent interview.
“He ain’t [rocking] with the gangland like that. You throwing them [signs] up, that’s gonna cost you,” he said. “What you wanna do? Pay the crips for the rest of your life?
“You ain’t even from this [life] in no way, shape or form. Start being real with yourself. You a basketball player. You wanna come step into this field? We can show you a whole lot about this.
“Stop throwing [gang signs] up. [The Crips] don’t f—k with you.”
The sentiment underlines the most baffling thing about Morant’s recent behavior: So far as anyone can tell, Morant told the truth in that interview with ESPN’s Rose. This really isn’t who he is. It’s a posture, a pose, a childish fascination with playing pretend in a world that can very quickly turn real.
Now the superstar guard is entering the first season of a five-year, $193M contract extension and already creating chaos off the court.
“My job now is to be more responsible,” he said after completing counseling in Florida following his first suspension last season. “More smarter, and don’t cause any of that no more.”
One suspension wasn’t enough to learn the lesson. There’s little reason to believe two will do the trick. Around this point, a question should be going through the Grizzlies’ minds as they contemplate what to do with their franchise cornerstone: When a person has shown that they aren’t afraid of going up in flames, just how desperate do you have to be to stay under the same roof?
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