Ja Morant
Ja Morant is, at his best, the most athletically gifted point guard the NBA has seen in a generation. He plays the position like someone who figured out the rules don’t apply to his body: he elevates past defenders who are half a foot taller, hangs in the air long enough to reroute the ball around a shot-blocker, and finishes through contact at a rate that makes advanced-metrics analysts argue about whether the floater counts as a superpower or a crutch. He was, in 2021-22, the most exciting player in the Western Conference. He’s also spent two of the last four years not playing basketball because of his own choices. Both things are true and neither one cancels the other.
Dalzell, South Carolina, and the unrecruited kid
Temetrius Jamel Morant was born August 10, 1999 in Dalzell, a small town in Sumter County, South Carolina, population around 3,000. His father, Tee Morant, played semi-professional basketball for years in various regional circuits, and Ja grew up in the gym. Not the soft version of that story: Tee let his son play full-contact pickup with grown men from a young age, and the games were not gentle. The footwork, the ability to absorb contact and still finish, the comfort in traffic around older, bigger players: those traits were drilled in for years before anyone outside Sumter County paid attention.
No major program recruited Ja Morant coming out of high school. He was not a blue-chip prospect. He played at Crestwood High School in Sumter and averaged strong numbers at the prep level, but the recruiting trail was quiet. When Murray State assistant coach James Kane watched him at an AAU event in 2017, it was not a hotly contested recruiting battle; Murray State was essentially the only Power Five-adjacent program that came calling with a scholarship.
Murray State
Murray State is in Murray, Kentucky. It is not the University of Kentucky, not a power-conference school, and not a program that typically produces top-five NBA draft picks. When Morant arrived in fall 2017, the Racers played in the Ohio Valley Conference, a mid-major conference without the television footprint or recruiting depth of the SEC or Big 12.
His freshman season (2017-18) was good: 12.7 points and 6.5 assists a game, Murray State went 26-5. His sophomore season was something else entirely. He averaged 24.5 points and 10.0 assists a game, which made him one of only five players in NCAA Division I history to average at least 20 points and 10 assists in a single season. He shot 49.9% from the field. He led Murray State to the OVC regular-season and tournament championships, and the Racers went 28-4. When they beat Marquette in the first round of the 2019 NCAA Tournament (Morant had 17 points, 11 assists, and 8 rebounds), the national audience caught up with what the NBA scouting community had already figured out.
He declared for the 2019 NBA Draft after his sophomore year.
2019 NBA Draft
Zion Williamson was the consensus first overall pick going into June 20, 2019. The New Orleans Pelicans took him first. The Memphis Grizzlies, with the second pick, took Morant. R.J. Barrett went third to the Knicks.
The Morant pick looked like a good fit in real time and proved to be an excellent fit within a year. Memphis was rebuilding after the long, winding-down end of the original Grit and Grind era; they needed a legitimate star-level engine. Morant was 19 years old and 6 feet 3 inches (in shoes), a size that, in any previous era, would have been a limiting factor for a point guard who wanted to finish at the rim against NBA-caliber shot-blockers. That limitation turned out not to apply to him. His leaping ability and body control are in a category by themselves.
2020 Rookie of the Year and early Memphis
Morant averaged 17.8 points, 7.3 assists, and 3.9 rebounds a game in 2019-20, finishing comfortably ahead of Kendrick Nunn in Rookie of the Year voting. He hit a pull-up buzzer-beater against Golden State in January 2020 that went viral before “went viral” felt like a cliche; the way he pulled up off a dribble drive and buried the midrange with nothing riding on it except his own confidence is still one of the cleaner distillations of what he is as a player.
The 2020-21 Grizzlies went 38-34 and got into the play-in tournament, where Memphis beat Golden State before losing to San Antonio. Morant averaged 19.1 points and 7.4 assists and played 63 games despite a knee injury that cost him several weeks in the middle of the season.
2021-22: the peak
The 2021-22 Memphis Grizzlies finished 56-26. That was the best record in the Western Conference and the best single-season record in franchise history. Morant averaged 27.4 points, 6.7 assists, 5.7 rebounds, and 1.2 steals a game. He made his first All-Star team. He was second in Most Improved Player voting (behind Dejounte Murray). He scored 47 points against Oklahoma City in February 2022, a career high at the time.
The team’s identity that season was the “Grit and Grind 2.0” framing that Memphis media ran with: young, aggressive, undersized in some spots but compensating with pace and attitude. Desmond Bane emerged as the second-best player. Jaren Jackson Jr. anchored the defense. The Grizzlies beat Minnesota in the first round of the playoffs and then pushed the Golden State Warriors to six games in the second round before losing. Morant scored 47 again in Game 3 of that Warriors series, his second 47-point game in three months.
2022-23 and the suspensions
The 2022-23 Grizzlies started as legitimate Western Conference title contenders. Memphis went 51-31 heading into the postseason and was widely viewed as the most dangerous lower seed in the bracket.
Then the season unraveled off the floor.
On March 4, 2023, video circulated from an Instagram Live stream showing Morant waving what appeared to be a handgun at a nightclub in the Denver area. He was immediately pulled from game action. The NBA announced a suspension of eight games. Morant returned in late March, played eight games, and then, in May 2023, a second Instagram Live video surfaced showing him again with what appeared to be a firearm. This one came during the Grizzlies’ first-round playoff series against the Los Angeles Lakers. Memphis lost in six games. Morant did not play in the series after the second video emerged.
The NBA’s total suspension across both incidents was 25 games, all of which were served in the 2023-24 season. Morant issued public apologies after each incident and entered a counseling program. Commissioner Adam Silver publicly criticized the conduct while also describing the league’s handling as an attempt to balance accountability with the possibility of rehabilitation rather than a permanent punishment.
The suspensions were consequential for the franchise. Memphis had built their entire offensive structure around Morant’s ability to attack the rim and create for others; there is no “run the same offense without him” option. The Grizzlies went 27-55 in 2023-24, a record further damaged by a torn labrum in Morant’s shoulder that ended his season after just 9 games played. He had surgery in early 2024.
Recovery and return
Morant came back healthy for the 2024-25 season. Memphis was still rebuilding, the roster turnover from the contending years had been significant, and the Grizzlies finished somewhere in the lower half of the Western Conference standings. His individual numbers (21-23 points, 7-8 assists per game in the games he played) were a reminder of what the ceiling looks like when he’s functional, but the team context had changed significantly.
The 2025-26 season has been the cleaner return. The Grizzlies finished 46-36, good enough for the sixth seed in the Western Conference in 2026, and are in the 2026 playoffs. Morant has been, by most accounts, a more controlled version of the player who lit up the league in 2021-22: still capable of explosive performances, still one of the most dangerous finishers in the league, but more deliberate in shot selection and less prone to the reckless stretches that sometimes cost him and the team.
Style of play
Morant plays at a gear that most point guards don’t have. His first step from a standstill is abnormally fast for his size, and he accelerates through contact in a way that’s different from the “strong PG who trucks through” model; he uses his body control to redirect in mid-air and finish on angles that look physically impossible until the ball goes through the net.
His floater is the most reliable version of that finish: he releases it off one leg, often at an angle, and it arcs high enough to clear most shot-blockers without requiring him to get all the way to the rim. His driving layup package is arguably the best in the league. He’s also a legitimately capable passer, with the vision and timing to find shooters early in transition and set up rollers in half-court sets.
His weaknesses are real. He’s 6-foot-3 on a good day, which limits his defensive ceiling against bigger guards. His three-point shooting has been inconsistent across his career (around 33-34% for his career to date). In seasons where he’s been healthy and engaged, those limitations don’t define him. In seasons where the team has been bad and his shot has been off, they become more visible.
At his peak, there isn’t a more compelling point guard to watch in the NBA. The question the rest of his career has to answer is how many healthy, fully-engaged seasons he can put together in a row.
Gear
Shop official Ja Morant and Memphis Grizzlies gear on Fanatics, or grab a card blaster for his pre-suspension peak cards which are undervalued right now.
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Sources
- Basketball-Reference: Ja Morant.
- ESPN, Ja Morant suspension coverage (2023): initial 8-game suspension; NBA’s 25-game total announced May 2023.
- The Athletic, Memphis Grizzlies beat coverage, 2019 through 2026.
- NCAA.com, 2019 OVC Championship results and Murray State 2018-19 season statistics.
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