Because of the nature of my work, my slavish devotion to all things role-playerish and scrublike, I don’t often get to see performances that really wow me. I see a lot of performances that are pretty okay, a role-player getting hot and hitting a bunch of shots usually. But I don’t get to see performances full to the brim with legitimate highlight (as in, the kind of literal highlight they used to show on ESPN) plays. Those kind of performances are performed by the actual stars of the league; if role-players could do those things, they wouldn’t be role-players.
That whole big paragraph is meant to try and ease you into the mind-blowing nature of the highlights you are about to witness. That may be a little hyperbolic, but Ja Morant made a TON of sick plays tonight. There are so many replays in this video. Normally I don’t like showing extraneous replays, but these are anything but extraneous. You need these replays to give you an even better idea of what Morant was doing.
This vid would have been sick enough with just the first 21 points and those 11 assists. But then Morant decided to let the Hornets back into the game so he could CUT OUT THEIR COLLECTIVE HEART and EAT IT live on TV. Game-winners are the thing that relatively unknown players can do to increase their status in the world of casuals. Is ESPN going to ever show this one? Probably not, but word will get out, people who can’t name more than 5 teams might be saying to their coworkers “you hear about that rookie on the Grizzlies who hit a buzzer beater” and their coworkers are like “nah, the NBA is rigged”. But at least that first guy will have heard of him. That’s one step closer to a bigtime shoe deal.