The Los Angeles Lakers ended the Memphis Grizzlies‘ season on Friday with a dominant 125-85 victory in Game 6 of their first-round series and Ja Morant had to face the music.
Morant and the Grizzlies had talked a lot of trash not only in the series but during the year. After being bounced from the postseason, Morant caught some extra flak online for a comment he made during the year about the Western Conference as a whole.
“I’m fine in the West,” Morant said in December during an interview with ESPN’s Malika Andrews, pointing out that the Grizzlies’ biggest competition for a title would come from the Eastern Conference.
The Grizzlies went out with a thud that will be hard to recover from. The 40-point loss to the Lakers in Game 6 was the largest postseason loss in franchise history. As for his comments, Morant didn’t regret it.
“I don’t mind. I don’t care,” Morant told reporters after the game. “I said it. I deal with it.”
The Grizzlies finished as the No. 2 seed in the West and had reason to be confident, despite their lack of a resume in the postseason. But Morant had a whirlwind season that was defined by his problems off the court. He wants to be better going forward.
“I’ve just got to be better with my decision-making,” Morant said. “That’s pretty much it. Off-the-court issues affected us as an organization pretty much. Just [need] more discipline.”
It would have been easy for the Lakers to play into the Grizzlies’ hand and get into a trash-talk war during the series. Memphis pest Dillon Brooks was at the center of some controversial comments, calling LeBron James “old” after Game 2.
But Brooks did not back up his bravado with his play, averaging 10.5 points in the series, shooting a miserable 31.2% from the field and 23.8% from beyond the arc. On top of that, he didn’t answer the bell after being eliminated, leaving before talking to the media.
James and Anthony Davis set the tone for the Lakers when it came to keeping their cool during the series.
“Obviously, that’s how a lot of times guys kind of get themselves going. When guys are constantly talking and you don’t say nothing back … they’re going to eventually stop,” Davis said on Friday after the win. “People are going to talk. We’ve had some trash talk on the court in the series, but all the talk in the media and all that stuff, we just go out and let our game talk and play basketball. We try not to get in a back-and-forth with guys.”
GettyLeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers.
The Lakers started the season 2-10 and there were doubts that they’d even make it to the playoffs. But winning a single series isn’t their end goal and James knows this is just the start.
“We’ve got a young ball club with not much experience in the postseason,” James said. “So I try to give my knowledge about what I’ve been through, what they could expect.
“As hard as this series felt and as hard as this series was, it gets even harder when you move a level up.”
The Lakers will play the winner of the series between the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings in the Conference Semifinals. That series is heading to a Game 7 after the Kings won Game 6 118-99 on Friday.
“We stay in the same time zone,” James said. “We stay in the same state. It’s an hour flight to each place, less if it’s Sac, a little bit more if it’s to the bay. So, that definitely helps.”
