There are times where you have to be careful of what you ask for, this was a sobering lesson for the Memphis Grizzlies, most notably for Dillion Brooks and Ja Morant. Prior to the start of the playoffs, Dillion Brooks, in the latest instance of a Grizzlies player recklessly shooting his mouth off, said that he wouldn’t mind facing the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round. If that were not enough bulletin board material, he added more fuel to the proverbial fire when he said that LeBron was old and that he did not respect anyone who hadn’t dropped 40 on him.
Even at his advanced basketball age , 38, LeBron James is still one of the still preminent players and personalities and he also happens to play on one of the cornerstone franchises , the Los Angeles Lakers. Combine this with the fact the Lakers are back in the post season, with a , one again, revamped roster who has been playing winning basketball, there were plenty of eyes already built on watching the Lake Show. Brooks’ comments turned up the spotlight on the series even more than it already would have been.
With talk that brash and the attention of the people firmly graped, as they would tune in to see if Brooks could back up his words. To put it succintly , he did not; it was akin to a heel in professional westling talking a crowd into a building for a big match only to get squashed in 30 seconds.
Brooks averaged 10.3 points, 3.0 rebounds and 1.8 assists on 38% shooting. He was a -44 in the 167:13 he was on the floor in the series. You can’t talk the way he did and then come out and perform like a jobber and your team gets bounced from the postseason by the very team you welcomed playing. As he enters restricted free agency this offseason, his pie hole and his poor play have likely cost him millions of dollars.
However, Dillion Brooks wasn’t the only Grizzlies player to suffer from foot-in-mouth disease. After their 116-99 victory in Game 5, Desmond Bane issued a guarantee that the series would return to Memphis for a Game 7.
We saw how that turned out didn’t we, that prediction came up about 41 points short.
As noted in one of our previous articles on the Grizzlies, when a team or individual comports themselves as many on this club did, it makes it quite easy for the public to cultivate a healthy amount of aversion toward said individual or team. It makes people root for that humbling comeuppance to come sooner rather than later.
This is why people have gleefully reminded Ja Morant of his earlier comments in the season, when asked about teams in the western conference he said the Grizzlies were “good in the West.”
Time will tell if the young Grizzlies will learn from this humbling defeat and tone down on the bravado, which before, they were an enjoyable and likable team on the rise.
