If you're playing against Jaren Jackson Jr. and the Memphis Grizzlies, you better be prepared to run up and down the court and compete at the highest level.
Behind Jackson and rookie point guard Ja Morant, the Grizzlies sit in the eighth spot in the West, a position no one saw Memphis getting to before the season started. In fact, most pundits thought the Grizzlies would be rebuilding and in the cellar of the Western Conference.
Jackson says all of the experts and their predictions motivated him and his Grizzlies teammates to play hard every single night:
“It was definitely motivating because nobody really thought that we’d be in this position at this point,” Jackson told Alex Kennedy of HoopsHype. “People just said to us, ‘Oh, you have time. Don’t worry about it! You’re young!' We kind of were just like, ‘We don’t care.'
“That’s how we play and how we are – we just don’t care. When we go out there, you have to put five on the court just like we have to put five on the court. It don’t matter if you’re young or old. There’s only one basketball. You have to literally beat us down if you want to win this game against us because we like to compete. We’ll have off nights, for sure. But at the end of the day, we’re going to play hard.”
The Grizzlies are 28-26 on the season. They will have to play steady basketball for the rest of the campaign if they want to shock the world and make the playoffs.
If the postseason started today, the Grizzlies would face the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round. A series with Morant and Jackson going up against LeBron James and Anthony Davis would be pretty fun to watch, even if the Lakers would be the heavy favorite.
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