On Wednesday night, with a little more than two minutes left to play between the Memphis Grizzlies and San Antonio Spurs, Ja Morant turned down a Desmond Bane screen, drove left, saw Victor Wembanyama rotating over from the far corner, and authored the highlight of the NBA season. Wemby, both gangly hands extended skyward, could only watch as Morant cocked back and dunked it right in his face.
Morant strutted past the basket toward the crowd with his chest puffed out, knowing nobody on the planet, let alone in the arena, could say shit to him, for he'd just conquered the supposedly unconquerable. Wembanyama himself held his arms to the sky, as if to say Even if I got smoked, I made the correct play. Both players are in the right.
The frame placed around this highlight is that it "did not count," which is only true in the technical sense: San Antonio's Stephon Castle was whistled for jostling Morant a fraction of a second before the dunk, the referee pointed to the sideline, and there is no official record of a field goal attempt in the books. However, I would argue that the cinematic value of the dunk not only survives its technical nonexistence, but is meaningfully enhanced by it. Both Morant and Wembanyama agreed to the terms of engagement. Neither party half-assed their role. Morant tried to drop a dunk on Wemby like a meteor from the heavens and the Frenchman tried to erase Morant from the skies.
What I like about this highlight is its purity of spirit. The immortal Blake Griffin dunk on Timofey Mozgov is a gravity-killing exercise in humiliation, but it was also a shot that cut a 14-point deficit to 12 (or 11 if you want to count the ensuing free throw, which Griffin made) in a game whose outcome was still in doubt. When Morant hit the runway, both he and Wemby knew the stakes of their encounter would be purely psychic, without a tether to the basketball game that the Grizzlies had all but won at that point. It is in this agreement that we can see the beauty and value of Morant destroying Wembanyama: In the span of microseconds, on pure competitive instinct, they had both decided this would be a clash worth fighting.
My first memory of Victor Wembanyama in a Spurs jersey is from the first game of the 2023 NBA Summer League, when he tried to defend both sides of a Nick Smith Jr.–Kai Jones pick-and-roll, only for Jones to catch the lob and slam it on his head as he tottered like a baby deer. What I took from that was that Wemby is not afraid of being dunked on. One non-physical thing that makes Wemby special is his dedication to making the right play possession after possession, on and on to Brownian lengths. This can be annoying sometimes, like when he passively follows this logic to 16 three-point attempts in a game, but it also means that he won't shy away from the potential embarrassment of getting dunked on. The right play is to rotate and protect the rim, so he did.
And Morant, for his part, understands the hard basketball value, both in the immediate and long terms, of authoring spectacular highlights. The Grizzlies are built around his explosive abilities. Everything flows from Morant getting into the lane and making a play. The Grizz don't play like other teams; they snarl and fight and build off Morant's irresistible momentum, and beating a fully activated team requires direct confrontation with that force. That's an intimidating prospect. Your competitive spirit has to survive the effects of potentially getting dunked on as hell.
"I dunked on plenty of people, bro," Morant said after the game. "He don't get no pass. If you at the rim, I'm gonna try you if it's that situation." The punchline here is that Morant claimed to be a changed man one month ago after eschewing a would-be highlight-reel dunk for a priggish layup in a December loss to the Dallas Mavericks. "I'm not trying to dunk at all," Morant said at the time. "Y'all think I'm lying. I'm dead serious."
So what changed? I'd argue Morant saw in Wembanyama a mountain worth climbing. Why scale him? Because he was there.
