Source: Jason Miller / Getty
Sports analyst Shannon Sharpe had strong words for Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant after some of Morant’s buddies were implied to have “aggressively confronted” some Indiana Pacers’ staff during a postgame interaction after the Grizzlies’ win Jan. 29.
On Monday, the retired Super Bowl champ gave cohost Skip Bayless his thoughts on their show Undisputed. “Ja is a really good basketball player,” Sharpe said of Morant. “Ja did everything he could to lift himself and his family out of this type of environment and to get away from this, and for some reason, he wants to surround himself with these type of people. Why? Bruh, you not hard. That’s not your life. People in that life would give anything to be in your life.”
Prior to the postgame confrontation, Morant and Pacers guard Andrew Nembhard had a heated exchange during the third quarter. Morant reportedly said that he “checked [Nembard’s] temperature,” and “he didn’t have a fever.”
But after the game, members of the Indiana travel crew said someone in an SUV pointed a red laser at them according to The Athletic. They also claimed the 2020 NBA Rookie of the Year was in the vehicle, too, and that someone may have aimed a firearm at them from the SUV. However, the Pacers’ staffers declined to file a report themselves for fear of retaliation, so their team did so on their behalf.
The NBA conducted its own investigation of the incident, and the league “could not corroborate that any individual threatened others with a weapon.” However, a member of Morant’s entourage was still banned from FedEx Arena. And this emboldened them to accuse the Pacers’ employees of lying. But Sharpe issued a few more words of advice to the NBA superstar.
“Stop pretending… You’re not gonna do nothing,” he advised Morant with regard to the guard’s tweet. “What you’re gonna do is get yourself in trouble — [and] put yourself and your family in harm’s way — when you don’t have to. Just play basketball.”
“You pretend like you’re hard but you’re not, Ja,” he added. “You’re opening yourself up, you’re putting yourself in a position you don’t even need to be in. And for what? Street cred? Come on, bruh.”
See what Twitter has to say about Ja Morant and Sharpe’s comments below.
