NBA: The spectacular rise and many, many falls of Ja Morant

Beasley decided not to jump. Morant jumped over him.

The indelible sight of Morant treating a professional athlete as if he were invisible and throwing down the dunk of the year was also the play that may have flipped the Memphis Grizzlies’ series with the Timberwolves. And they now have a 3-2 lead because of another bit of magic from Morant a few minutes after he managed to vault another NBA player.

This one happened in the final seconds of a tied game, when Morant was given the simple directive to get a bucket and did exactly that. He took the inbounds pass, beelined toward the hoop, catapulted himself while contorting his body in the air and used his outstretched left hand to kiss the ball off the backboard for the game-winning layup.

What followed was the only part of the Morant experience more common than watching him taking flight: wincing as he crashes back to earth. Nobody levitates like Morant. Nobody is more familiar with the other side of gravity. In this series, Morant hit the deck on nearly 25% of his attempts within 3 feet of the basket, according to a Wall Street Journal review of his aerial habits, including the triumphant shot as he tumbled into the front row.

These two plays — one ferocious dunk and one buzzer-beater that fell through the net as he fell to the court — neatly encapsulated the magic that happens in the brief moments that Morant appears to defy the laws of physics.

But that’s part of the appeal of a breathtaking player who also makes fans hold their breath. In this era when the game has been warped by shooting very far away from the basket, there is something undeniable about a little guy attacking the rim and humiliating the giants who get in his way.

The spectacular audacity of Morant is one of the many reasons that he is already remarkably popular. There is a generational shift happening across the NBA in this moment when LeBron James didn’t make the playoffs and Kevin Durant didn’t make it out of the first round, and young talent like Morant, Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Doncic and Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum are taking their place as the next faces of the league.

In fact, on the NBA’s social media channels this year, clips of Morant racked up more views than any player other than James and Stephen Curry, which is a bit like challenging vanilla and chocolate on a list of ice-cream flavours.

Morant, 22, is only in his third NBA season, his first with fans in the arena for the entire time, but he’s quickly becoming a major star in the league’s smallest market. It isn’t because he’s a human Instagram highlight but for reasons that transcend eras and platforms: His team is winning. The Grizzlies came out of nowhere to ascend the Western Conference standings this season, grabbing the No. 2 seed and positioning themselves for a deep run in the playoffs with the violent speed of their best player.

This is a brazen Grizzlies bunch that oozes Morant’s bravado. They’re an entire team that embodies his knack for leaping over NBA players, no matter who they are or how tall they might be, and doing everything in his power to slam the ball on their heads. They’re brash, ambitious and young enough to believe there is no reason they can’t win a championship right now.

It isn’t entirely because of Morant, but it wouldn’t be possible without him.

While it’s hard to look past his dunks — if others are posters, his are murals — his dazzling highlights don’t capture the totality of his game. His repertoire of finishing moves around the basket allows him to score in the paint as much as big men like Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo. He came to Memphis with experience making his teammates better and injecting them with confidence from his days at Murray State. And he’s already been anointed by Draymond Green as one of the league’s smartest players.

What he does with his basketball mind became unforgettably clear to Matt McMahon, his coach at Murray State who is now at Louisiana State, during one game when Morant was a sophomore in college. On a play for a teammate named Tevin Brown to get a 3-pointer, Morant noticed that his defender was denying him the ball, he explained to McMahon during the next time-out. He smelled an opportunity to make him pay. The next time Murray State had the ball, they ran the same play for Brown. But this time, Morant had a wrinkle in mind.

“Ja cuts backdoor and then jumps over a 6-foot-8 guy for one of the great dunks in college basketball history,” McMahon said. “Just like he drew it up.”

It was a visceral reminder that if Curry looks like everyone and does what everyone can do better than anyone, Morant looks like everyone but does things that nobody else can dream of doing. He doesn’t always succeed. Sometimes he eats hardwood. Then he pops up, tries again and dares the other team to get in his way.

The irony behind the world’s leading expert at dunking on much larger men is that Morant could barely dunk before his senior year of high school. Despite playing on the same AAU team as Zion Williamson, the No. 1 pick in the draft when Morant was No. 2, he was lightly recruited and discovered only when a hungry Murray State assistant coach went looking for a snack while scouting another player. His quest for some food led him to a nearby gym, where instead he found something far more delicious.

It wasn’t long before Morant was feasting on Murray State’s competition. He used a matchup with Marquette in the 2019 NCAA tournament as his excuse to flush a two-handed jam in the face of 6-foot-9 forward Joey Hauser, and he didn’t seem to notice a 6-foot-11 centre when he finished a particularly nasty slam over Belmont’s Seth Adelsperger, who is now a graduate student researching his master’s thesis. “Ja certainly has been making some incredible plays!” he wrote in an email.

But the person on the other side of the most incredible Morant play this season was San Antonio Spurs centre Jakob Poeltl, who seemed to believe that being 7-foot-1 would give him a chance against someone who is close to a foot shorter than him. As it turned out, he was very wrong. Poeltl made the admirable but unfortunate decision to protect the rim from Morant‘s wrath. His earnest attempt at professionalism backfired when he became flyover country.

Beasley knows how it feels to be personally victimised by Morant after their encounter on Tuesday night, when it seemed like only one person in the Memphis arena didn’t need to collect their jaw from the floor.

“I wasn’t that excited about that dunk,” Morant said. “It was over a guard. That’s pretty easy.”

– Wall Street Journal