The only time that NBA commissioner Adam Silver appeared to veer off from the talking points of his state-of-the-league press conference on June 1 was in discussing Ja Morant—the wildly popular Memphis Grizzlies point guard who had waved around a gun while streaming live to Instagram, after waving around a gun on another livestream not a few months prior. After the first incident, Morant was suspended eight games by the league and made a literal show of his apology, insisting in an ESPN interview that the gun wasn’t his. “It’s not who I am,” Morant said. Roughly half a month after the second incident, Silver was asked for an update on the timeline for potential league action and revealed that the investigation into the incident had effectively concluded.
“In terms of the timing, we’ve uncovered a fair amount of additional information, I think, since I was first asked about the situation,” Silver said before Game 1 of the NBA Finals. “I will say we probably could have brought it to a head now, but we made the decision—and I believe the [National Basketball] Players Association agrees with us—that it would be unfair to these players and these teams in the middle of the series to announce the results of that investigation.”
The Finals are now over. The parade in Denver has run its course. And true to Silver’s tease, the league announced on Friday that Morant would be suspended for 25 games for conduct detrimental to the league—a pertinent reminder of what, exactly, the league objects to and seeks to punish in this case. There is a statement from Silver in the official press release noting the troubling potential for “other young people” to imitate Morant’s behavior, but only after first noting the real problem at hand: that this was a repeat incident for which the league had already suspended him once. In 2021, then-Timberwolf Malik Beasley was suspended for 12 games after pointing an assault rifle at a family parked in a car outside his home, and then pleading guilty to felony charges for threats of violence. Morant was suspended more than twice as many games largely because he did something—brandishing a gun while dancing in a car with his friends—that league officials had told him not to.
The league office has communicated with its statements and its actions that the problem in this case isn’t the presence of a dangerous weapon, but the fact that Morant’s disregard for the first wave of discipline is embarrassing for the NBA. “Conduct detrimental to the league” is uncommon and specific language in the realm of NBA punishments, generally reserved for incidents that hew a bit closer to basketball operations. The league office fined the Mavericks $750,000 on those grounds in April after Dallas openly tanked the last few games of the regular season. Players have been fined for public trade requests under that same explanation. Notably, the NBA did not classify Miles Bridges’s domestic assault arrest as conduct detrimental to the league back in April. Nor was there any concern in the league press release for how that abuse might be emulated.
Those violent acts landed Bridges a suspension of just 10 games. (The NBA shamefully claimed it had actually suspended Bridges for 30 games, but that 20 of them had somehow been served last season when he wasn’t even signed with a team.) Other NBA players who have committed acts of domestic violence—including those who have pleaded guilty—have been handed a range of suspensions, though none as severe as the one Morant just received for holding a gun on camera. This is a landmark punishment in the history of the NBA. Twenty-five games is the longest suspension ever doled out by the league for a player’s behavior outside an NBA setting. Gilbert Arenas brought guns into the Wizards’ locker room. Metta Sandiford-Artest charged into the stands and fought with fans at an NBA arena. Latrell Sprewell choked his coach at a team practice. Morant did something reckless—but less explicitly violent—on his own time and in his own space during the offseason.
Or is it his own space, if it’s also broadcast to the world over social media? The NBA is grappling not just with Morant’s behavior, but the accessibility of it in a digital age. At the point where Ja is knowingly participating in a livestream, he becomes a representative of the league.
And because of the way he represented himself and the NBA, Morant will not only face an unprecedented suspension, but he’ll be barred from all public team and league activities in the interim. He’ll be required to meet league-mandated conditions before he can eventually return to action. Unsurprisingly, the players association has already objected to the severity of the punishment, stating that it’s not “fair or consistent” with past disciplinary measures. On the most literal grounds, that’s true; even when NBA players have pleaded guilty to firearms charges in the past, they’ve generally been suspended for only a handful of games—maybe 10 at most. But considering what Morant is actually being punished for, those might not be the relevant reference points.
Eight games is a gun-related suspension. Twenty-five games—and the more than $7 million in salary that Morant will forfeit with them—is something else entirely. It’s the cost for making the NBA look foolish, and for establishing a pattern of behavior that could continue to cause damage. It’s for meeting with Silver once and assuring him this would never happen again, only for another video to pop up showing the same behavior just a few weeks later. “If it had been a 12-game suspension instead of an eight-game suspension, would that have mattered?” Silver asked rhetorically during his press conference earlier this month. “I know it seemed based on precedent, and he’s represented, and we want to be fair in terms of the league. It seemed appropriate at the time. That’s all I can say. Maybe by definition, to the extent we’ve all seen the video that it appears he’s done it again, I guess you could say maybe not.”
There are many reasons why Morant’s behavior has become a massive story, not least of which is that Morant himself is a massive story. This is a 23-year-old megastar with a signature shoe and one of the top-selling jerseys in the league. Nearly 10 million people follow him on Instagram. If a rank-and-file role player had taken out a gun in a club or in a car and streamed it live, the conversation would be different. The punishment might even be different. If the offense in question is conduct detrimental to the league, a highly visible young superstar is in a unique position to do real damage to the NBA brand.
That is, and has always been, the chief concern here for the league office. The NBA punished Morant in a way that will prevent him from making an All-NBA team or winning any individual awards next season, which could have a real financial impact. In his own statement in response to his second suspension, Morant made sure to apologize not just to the Grizzlies and the kids who look up to him, but to his sponsors. Money talks, and even when every word of every official statement has been sanitized to PR-approved perfection, the message comes through loud and clear.
