Ja Morant brilliantly burned 20 seconds off of the game clock by trolling the Hornets and standing over the ball
The NBA is a weird league sometimes with lots of weird rules.
There are all these weird little hacks that players come up with to - not cheat the game - but give themselves advantages by pushing rules as far as they can go. We see it all the time, honestly.
One of the tricks that always makes folks laugh is when the inbounding team rolls the ball up the court. The shot clock doesn't start until after a player makes contact with the ball, so it gives the inbounding team a pretty lengthy possession.
We've seen plenty of players push this rule to the limit - Chris Paul, Marcus Smart, LeBron James, Russell Westbrook.
None of them have quite done it like Ja Morant just did, though.
On Wednesday night en route to a 131-107 win, the Memphis Grizzlies point guard burned 20 seconds off of the game clock by just standing over the ball against the Charlotte Hornets. Literally, that's all he did. He just stood there. It was wild to watch.
This is hilariously brilliant stuff from Ja. The game clock was running but the shot clock was not. Neither the 8-second backcourt count nor the shot clock starts until the ball is touched. Morant would've been content to just let the third quarter run out with his team up 96-67 if Terry Rozier hadn't gone and pressured the ball at all.
Is this actually part of basketball? No, not really. But it is brilliant.
LaMelo Ball made a shot for the Hornets around the 3:40 mark but Charlotte didn't get the ball back until nearly a minute later because of this gamesmanship. As a team with a lead, the goal is to always get to the end of the game with that lead. Finding any way to get to that result faster is always the way you want to go. Morant found an extremely clever way here and he took things over the top.
One could argue that this is in poor taste - the Grizzlies are up 30 and this feels like one big embarrassing troll for them. But, hey, man. Rules are rules. Pressure the ball and this doesn't happen.