With the result already decided in their Friday night duel, tempers have suddenly flared between the Brooklyn Nets and the Memphis Grizzlies.
As the Grizzlies were already on the verge of taking the victory with a massive 133-113 deficit, Ja Morant decided to foul for his team to insert their end-of-bench guys. In the midst of the substitution process, the Memphis star went near the scorer’s table, repeatedly yelling in front of the crowd in what could be an act of taunting.
Morant’s actions didn’t sit well with Jordi Fernandez as the Nets head coach talked to an official, prompting Taylor Jenkins to immediately approach them and join the conversation. As such, Dennis Schroder entered the scene and had to be separated as he seemingly blasted Jenkins to defend Fernandez.
Fired up, the Grizzlies mentor lost his cool at the turn of events and walked away as the players of both teams rushed over to check what had happened.
Upon the referees’ assessment, the trio of Morant, Schroder, and Jenkins were slapped with technical fouls from the incident.
Right in the postgame of his team’s loss, Fernandez admitted that he found Morant’s late-game antics unnecessary and unpleasant to watch.
“I will never speak to other players, and I don’t want other players to speak to me,” Fernandez said. “If they want to be nice, obviously, that’s part of the game. If not, I don’t want any interaction. I think it’s disrespectful, and it’s not part of the game. And that’s what we are projecting to everybody else, especially the little ones, is play with respect. [Have] respect for the game, whether you are a superstar or whoever you are.”
It has to be noted that the two had an intense moment earlier in the matchup. After Morant hit a buzzer-beater trey at halftime, Morant walked in front of Fernandez and stared him in the process.
As such, the Grizzlies superstar meant no disrespect towards Fernandez as he was only “trolling.”
“I didn’t say nothing crazy,” Morant said. “If you look at the video, I was just saying ‘yeah.’ If ‘yeah’ is disrespectful or makes you feel some type of way, then hey, so be it.”
Apparently, both teams won’t meet again this 2024-25 season. Their regular season series is knotted at one game apiece as the Nets notably beat the Grizzlies in their first encounter back in November, 106-104.
Unless they’ll eventually find themselves facing each other in the next six months for the 2025 NBA Finals, that would only be the another time that they’ll go at it again. As the Nets are continuously dropping with a 10-15 record, the contending Grizzlies only have a considerable chance to make it to the championship stage with an 18-8 card that puts them as the No. 2 seed of the West.
Despite how things unfolded during the game and in the postgame presser, it’s safe to assume that both teams are all good with each other. Right at the buzzer, it was seen that the four of Fernandez, Jenkins, Schroder, and Morant huddled up to settle their differences.
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