The Age of Innocence starring Ja Morant
By: Jimmy
8/4/2020
Not long ago I created a term to describe the moment when a professional athlete truly understands professional sports is more profession than sports. I call it ‘losing your sports innocence’, when the athlete realizes business decisions surmount decisions made on the court/field, when they realize the game in it’s pure form that they dreamed of playing at a professional level is merely a business disguised as a sport.
Last Thursday on ESPN’s The Jump Ja Morant was being interviewed about the NBA restart and the way the altered format will affect his team’s playoff seeding. His team (the Grizzlies) entered the Bubble with a 3 ½ game lead over the Trailblazers for the 8th and final playoff spot in the Western conference. Under the new format his team would have to have a 4 ½ game lead at the end of the 8 seeding games to earn the 8th playoff spot outright. If they don’t have this lead they will have to compete in a play-in game or games to solidify that last playoff spot in the West.
Ja expressed he felt it was unfair that the lead his team built over the course of the regular season may be irrelevant if they do not have this 4 ½ game lead, but also stated, “you know, we can’t control that.” He goes on to say, “I feel like it’s an extra chip; you know, more fuel to the fire, more motivation for us.”
I’ll admit, I definitely admire the young man’s attitude about this and his willingness, as leader of the team and soon-to-be Rookie of the Year, to turn something he deems unfair into something that can make he and his team perform better under these circumstances.
He is right, it is unfair to his Grizzlies that their 3 ½ game lead may prove irrelevant. But when he has a young NBA superstar (Zion) on a team (Pelicans) behind his in the standings and Zion is the very reason why the restart included 22 teams instead of 16, then he knows business decisions that favor Zion and the Pelicans outweigh that of he and his Grizzlies. This was further evidenced by the fact that Zion and the Pelicans played the first opening night game of the NBA restart whereas the Grizzlies game was not even nationally televised.
In virtue of playing in Memphis he is playing in one of the smallest markets and consideration for his franchise has never driven the decision making of the league as would the Lakers or the Celtics.
As an NBA athlete, especially one who is a superstar in the making and thus will one day become a business unto himself and perhaps even a market unto himself, he has to understand that before one becomes this superstar they have to overcome obstacles to earn their place within the pantheon of great NBA players. Sometimes these obstacles exist on the court and sometimes they exist off the court.
Until Ja is a bonafide superstar who moves the needle in the NBA in the same class as Lebron, Giannis, or Harden then some decisions will be made that may negatively impact his team and seem unfair on the court, but very fair off the court as it pertains to growing the business of the NBA.
Young players hopefully learn and learn early that there are two types of ‘fair’ in the NBA. There’s ‘basketball fair’ and there’s ‘business fair’. You, the reader, know the difference between the two. And now so does Ja Morant.
