Call it a leap if you’d like, but this year has felt more like liftoff. MichaelVPina on Ja Morant’s (JaMorant) sudden ascent to NBA superstardom:
For nearly five hours a day, Morant prioritized his game and his physique. He’d lift weights, endure balance and coordination training and sharpen his vision with headsets designed to enhance cognition and response times.
To brace himself for a season of downhill drives, they’d re-create the contact he’d face in an actual game. Dribbling off ball screens, Morant felt four to six hands on him at all times before he was pounded at the rim with a pad, often wielded by his dad. They wouldn’t move on to the next drill until he made seven or eight out of 10.
. Morant limped along the baseline to Memphis’s bench and was carried to the locker room. At halftime, the entire team walked into the training room to console him. Given his high pain tolerance and the fact that there was no contact involved, everyone who could see the look on his face feared the worst. “I didn’t want to keep playing that day,” Jackson says. “I just kind of was over it. I wasn’t in the mood.
When the Grizzlies went 10–2 while Morant nursed his knee, nobody on the roster felt confused about whose team it was. “It’s not him trying to come back and fit in,” Grizzlies guard Desmond Bane says about that stretch. “He’s a superstar, and we’re the pieces that are fitting in around him.” Anthony Tolliver, a 13-year NBA veteran who played for the Grizzlies during Morant’s rookie season and still talks to him today, saw leadership traits in Ja that reminded him of a young Steph Curry, a Warriors teammate in 2009. “He’s confident, but he’s humble,” Tolliver says about Morant. “And that’s a great combination to have.”