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reverse-jamming a self-alley-oop off the backboard.
Morant’s ascent isn’t an accident.
“I don’t know if everyone in the NBA works hard,”
Grizzlies wing Dillon Brooks says. “I’m gonna keep
it real. What I’ve seen is his growth and how he works.
At first he was going through the motions, like most
NBA guys do....Now you see him, he’s unguardable.”
The spark for his sudden rise came a few months
before the season began, when Morant grew convinced
that to unlock parts of his talent that nobody, includ-
ing himself, had ever seen, he’d need to embrace a
place most people tend to avoid:
the Dark.M
ORANT’S INITIAL taste of
the NBA playoffs last spring
was bittersweet. The only player
to score more points than his 73 in
their first two postseason games
was George Mikan (in 1949). But
the Grizzlies lost in five games
to the Jazz in Round 1. Two days
after they were eliminated,
Morant sat down with Grizzlies
coach Taylor Jenkins and made
clear he wasn’t satisfied. “He had
another level in this game that he
could take himself,” Jenkins says.
“Another level of his leadership,
his work ethic, everything.”
After that meeting, Grizzlies
assistant coach Blake Ahearn,
an avid reader, gave Morant a
book called Win in the Dark by
Joshua Medcalf and Lucas Jadin.
One of several passages caught Morant’s eye: “The dark
is where you transform into a version of yourself you
never dreamed possible.... We quietly and relentlessly
train in the dark with complete trust that our moment
under the bright lights will come. Welcome to the dark.”
Morant ingested the message and made it an offsea-
son ethos, informing his private trainers Trey Draper,
Jonathan Thomas and Mo Wells that his regimen wasn’t
meant for public consumption. Morant didn’t want anyone
to witness his progress, be it on social media or in person.
“Welcome to the Dark?” Wells says. “That’s album mode.”
Morant spent parts of the summer in Memphis,
Las Vegas and L.A. But most of his sweat was poured
at House of Athlete, a facility located just north of Miami
in Weston, Fla. It resembles an airplane hangar, with
30-foot ceilings and black walls. In South Florida, the
Dark went from f igurative mantra to literal experience.Behind the main gym, Morant escaped sunshine in a dim
studio that was softly illuminated by neon-blue lamps.
“Sometimes they had the lights on, and if Ja came in
we would just tell them, ‘Make it dark, man,’ ” Draper
says. ‘We’re working in the dark.’ ”
(While in L.A., Morant broke his own rule by hop-
ping in a pickup game with a few other NBA players;
he turned down the next invitation. “He was like, ‘Nah,
I ain’t going back to that. I don’t want them to see what
I’m working on,’ ” his uncle, Phil Morant, remembers Ja
saying. “Basically, ‘I don’t want to give none of them no
cheat codes.’ ”)
For nearly five hours a day, Morant prioritized his game
and his physique. He’d lift weights, endure balance and
coordination training and sharpen his vision with head-
sets designed to enhance cognition and response times.To prolong the hang time that
allows him to make shots on the
way down over defenders who’ve
already landed, Morant developed
his power by sprinting. He’d hop
on a curved treadmill or zip
around a small chamber that
simulates altitude. According to
Wells, Morant has the straight-
line speed of a track star and
could probably still add another
inch or two to his vertical leap, but
the goal instead is to sustain what he already does. “I
don’t need him to touch his head on the top of the back-
board,” he says. “I need him to be consistent at the rim.”
On the court, twice a day, Morant polished strengths
(such as ballhandling) and homed in on areas of weak-
ness. There was a near overload of shooting drills that
imitated what he sees in a game: pick-and-roll pull-ups,
driving layups and the parachute f loater that defenses
have no answer for.
Everything was counted. Sessions usually didn’t end
until at least 400 shots went in and between 750 and 800
were cast. That includes threes. Last year, Morant was
the NBA’s seventh-worst three-point shooter among all
players who took at least 200. Over the summer, that
shortcoming was attacked with repetition. Morant wasn’t
allowed to stop any workout until he made eight jumpers
in a row from seven separate spots along the perimeter.JA MORANTFR
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“His ability to read the game is
second to none,” Grizzlies coach
Jenkins says of Morant.
“H
E
’S A S
A
V
A
NT.”