SAN FRANCISCO — Ja Morant limped off, the Golden State Warriors went off, then Taylor Jenkins and the Memphis Grizzlies sounded off.
Every game, it’s something new in this young versus old, establishment versus new kids playoff series. You can’t tell if this is the start of a contentious rivalry or independent odd occurrences happening in close proximity.
Morant, the excitable and flexible Grizzlies star, appeared to injure his knee. Then the Grizzlies pointed in the direction of Warriors guard Jordan Poole, claiming he yanked Morant’s right knee during a play with 6:55 left in the fourth quarter in the Warriors’ resounding Game 3 win at Chase Center.
It’s impossible to determine intent, especially in slow motion where belief would have to be suspended in such a moment for Poole to intentionally grab at Morant’s knee while he and Andrew Wiggins were trapping him.
Poole’s arm did make contact with Morant’s knee as he was reaching for the ball, but how much torque and strength was in that contact is anybody’s guess, and a matter of interpretation.
Morant tweeted and later deleted a video of the play, with the caption “broke the code” — a strong insinuation that Poole was committing a dirty infraction.
Tacitly or not, the Grizzlies are making it known what they believe and want some attention brought to it. It’s part gamesmanship, part grief, part naivete, the inertia of the playoffs.
“It looked to me that they bumped knees before he even reached,” Draymond Green said. “That’s kind of what I thought I saw.”
Green was at the center of the first altercation of sorts in this weird series with his flagrant 2 foul on Brandon Clarke in Game 1. Clarke seemed to intimate Green is a dirty player in his postgame news conference.
Saturday, it was Jenkins’ turn at the podium, and although he didn’t go as far as Clarke, it’s another game where the Grizzlies, after a loss, are pointing the finger in the direction of the Warriors.
It’s a 2-1 series now, but one wonders if the Warriors have figured out their opponents. Being more physical is one thing, but it appears certain the Warriors have taken up real estate in the Grizzlies’ psyche.
“He was going after a dribble and Jordan Poole actually grabbed his knee and yanked it, which kind of triggered whatever happened,” Jenkins said. “So I’m actually going to be very curious to see what happens after that.”
That’s probably as strong a call to action for the NBA to review the play as it can be for someone in Jenkins’ position — a good coach but one who doesn’t have a footprint in the league landscape to vociferously go after a franchise with championship equity.
More importantly, it obscures the fact the Warriors put a 2015-like beatdown on the Grizzlies, illustrating the gap between the two teams. The Grizzlies are still smarting from the suspension of Dillon Brooks after his flagrant 2 foul on Warriors guard Gary Payton II — who’ll miss the rest of the series, if not all of the postseason, with a broken left elbow.
They missed his defense and irritation on a night where the Warriors got everything they wanted, but Morant’s potential absence would effectively end the series, if it isn’t over already. The Grizzlies performed admirably without Morant this season, going 20-5 when he was out, but this is a little different, being in the throes of a playoff series against an opponent that feels like it’s getting stronger by the day.
That possibility sparked the fears of the upstarts, and Jenkins likely knows his personal future is tied to his connection with Morant. Morant’s style is reckless — recklessly exciting, recklessly effective and dangerous, for himself and his opponents.
He single-handedly kept the…
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