This has been an incredibly busy week in the NBA, with the draft, and all of the trade action leading up to it. I was at the Planet Fitness on Pico yesterday at the perfect moment to accidentally witness the pterodactyl known as Viktor Wembanyama get drafted to the San Antonio Spurs, in what will either be a watershed moment for the NBA’s future, or the biggest hype machine bust in the history of the league. David Stern, god rest his soul, must be splooging in his grave with the top NBA prospect and the most recent MVP & NBA Finals MVP, all being from countries not called the United States. I have a dream! Before I get too far down this rabbit hole, why don’t we proceed to the topic at hand, Ja Morant and his suspension from the NBA for being a bad boy — with guns.
Whether you think a 25 game suspension is fair or unfair, it’s historic that here we have a player who is essentially being suspended (from the NBA) for playing with a gun on camera in a state where it’s totally legal for him to be doing so. Let me be the first to say that I have zero patience for guns. In fact, just last night, none other than my own father admonished me for not already owning one. Why do I need a gun, I said, when I have an antisocial pitbull with a neurosis for defending my family in any and all circumstances. And I really mean any.
Ja Morant may be an idiot. He may have made the NBA commissioner Adam Silver, (the Basketball&Feelings logo!), look like one, or he may just be some dumb kid acting like dumb twenty-something year old kids tend to do, but in this case he’s doing it with a firearm - on camera - and one small mistake with a firearm, well, that’s a lot worse than one small mistake with a water gun or even a knife.
I see all that. I see it and yet “the punishment” he got from the NBA, a 25 game suspension for doing it, is technically smaller than the one Miles Bridges got for literally beating the shit out of his wife.
Like Ja Morant, Bridges did not commit a crime on NBA soil either. He was being abusive on his own time, but the reason he got his punishment is clear: He committed a crime. A real crime. In the case of Ja Morant, that’s not what happened. Depending on who you are, Ja Morant may have done an inappropriate thing by waving a gun, but waving a gun, even if it’s loaded, in a southern state, is not just not illegal, but promoted, accepted, and baked into the culture in certain states. So if you’re a pool cleaner in Mississippi, you might Think Different about this “punishment” than the Director of Photography on your indie feature does.
So my thing is, you got a problem with Ja Morant playing toy guns with his real gun on Instagram (when he should be on TikTok), god speed, you can help me fight that fight with my dad. But if you agree with Ja’s suspension on NBA grounds, the grounds that say “it’s important to protect the brand,” aka financially, I ask you then to examine your beliefs, because when it comes to fairness, even though the NBA is capable of hitting Ja with a painful 25 games, does that mean that they should?
Call me crazy, but I don’t want to live in a country where my employer can look at my social feeds and fire me. As long as I’m doing legal shit, I don’t want my employer anywhere near my personal-internet life. They have no business there, just like they have no business in my sex life. Should the NBA be able to suspend players whose kinks they disagree with? I’m not kidding.
In the NBA, guns are seen as bad today, but what if tomorrow playing kinky games in Joshua Tree or having multiple sexual partners is perceived as a no-no? Is there some player of the NBA future who is going to be kicked out of the league for engaging in a thrupple?
What I’m saying is that even though I hate the fact that Ja Morant was doing something so dumb, I’m not sure what I hate more: the fact that he did it or the fact that the NBA has the ability to get him in trouble for doing something legal. At the end of the day we’re all just products of our environment, on some level, and for a twenty-something year old kid from the south, who broke no laws, there should a deeper discussion of the circumstances that led him to make this “mistake,” than the old American slap-on-the-wrist, we can solve this problem by pretending it doesn’t exist method. It’s startling how many in NBA media bypassed this issue, lumping it all into the vanilla-ass, canned NBA talking point of protecting “the brand.” And then again, why am I even surprised. The entire NBA media exits under the umbrellas of a “healthy NBA,” and the NBA can’t be healthy when one of its best players is kissing a guy on camera.
Sorry, wait, what year is it again.