Ja Morant didn’t play particularly well this game. That’s fine; rookies have bad games pretty much all the time. If anything, we should be encouraged by this performance, because he did something that many players never figure out how to do.
Which is: put up a good statline while sucking.
Most players, when they suck, they just end the game with 5 points and 2 rebounds. Not Morant. When he sucks, he scores 20 points. When he sucks, he gets 6 assists. I can think of tons of players who would be happy to have those kind of stats in a “good” game, never dreaming of getting them in a sucky one. And when I think “20 points and 6 assists in a disappointing performance”, you know who I think of?
LeBron James.
Yeah, I’m going there. You can’t stop me from going, because guess what, I’m already here, and I’m looking around, and all I see are things that indicate that Morant compares favorably to LeBron. Call the cops all you want. They won’t do anything. It’s not illegal to be where I am, where hype for Morant eternally flows like a beautiful shimmering river.