During the Grizzlies’ win over the Pacers on Jan. 29, Ja Morant’s father, Tee, and his friend Davonte Pack were yelling at Pacers players.
When the Pacers’ Andrew Nembhard told the elder Morant to “shut up,” the younger Morant confronted him. Pack was eventually escorted out after he walked on the court to curse at Indiana players, but the incident didn’t end there.
After the game, Pack and “four or five other men” parked near the Pacers team bus and began shouting at players and team officials.
“According to the sources, the remarks directed at them by Pack and others included: “Come get some of this” and “you don’t know how we roll” and “I’ll show you what I got.”
The confrontation lasted 15-20 minutes before Pack and Morant got into an SUV and drove toward the Pacers’ bus. That’s when the Pacers noticed red lasers being trained on people on the bus.
The NBA investigation didn’t confirm that it was a laser sight, but a Pacers security guard said, “That’s 100% a gun.”
NBA security declined to make a finding about the incident. League spokesman Mike Bass said, “We could not corroborate that any individual threatened others with a weapon,” and added that some people involved “might have been banned” from attending games.
It’s a conundrum from the league. Morant is one of the league’s most exciting young players. But the league really can’t have a player’s dad and friends continually starting fights with other players and fans.
They especially can’t have a player — or even a player’s friends — pointing guns at his opponents. Whether it was a real gun or they were acting like a gun, it was effectively a death threat.
The NBA’s response can only be described as weak. They wouldn’t even definitively ban Pack, who already trespassed onto the court, tried to fight an opposing team after a game and possibly aimed a gun at them. Especially after the Gilbert Arenas gun incident, the league should have zero tolerance for any hint of gun violence.
It doesn’t look like the investigation will go further, and the Grizzlies likely aren’t going to stop starting fights any time soon. So we will offer a suggestion. Ja’s father can keep attending games, but he has to sit next to Shannon Sharpe.
