Winning in the modern NBA can be boiled down to two simple questions.
How many stars do you have? And, are they happy?
Two seasons and 109 losses into what looked to be a lengthy rebuild in the league’s smallest market, where the weather isn’t quite good enough and the nightlife’s not glitzy enough to attract the game’s biggest free agents, the Memphis Grizzlies struck it rich by landing the No. 2 pick in the 2019 draft and using it to select Ja Morant, of Dalzell, S.C.
It isn’t just that Morant was the runaway 2020 NBA Rookie of the Year. Or that, despite his slender, 6-foot-3, 175-pound frame, he eviscerates rims by dunking on much larger men, sending social media ablaze. Or even that, more importantly, the Grizzlies immediately went from terrible to respectable, reaching the NBA’s first-ever Play-In Tournament game two seasons ago, then winning the West’s Play-In last season to make the playoffs — which preceded a surprisingly competitive first-round series against the Jazz.
It’s that all of this was done by a kid from low country, South Carolina, where until two years ago, there were 2,260 people living in the town. Four of them — Morant, his mother Jamie, father Tee and sister Teniya — moved to an unincorporated area just outside of Memphis, all because one was drafted by the Grizzlies. This what the Morants do — they stick together. The house they all live in now costs about $1.
