There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened with Ja Morant and the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday night, and what will come in the days ahead. But we now know this: Morant won’t be playing in the team’s next game, on Sunday in Toronto.

On Saturday afternoon, the Grizzlies announced Morant has been suspended one game for “conduct detrimental to the team,” which means his next game would come at home Monday against the Detroit Pistons.

The conduct in question seems to be Morant’s response to being challenged by head coach Tuomas Iisalo after Friday night’s loss to the Los Angeles Lakers.

Memphis Grizzlies suspend Ja Morant

Morant’s public frustration aimed at the Grizzlies coaching staff drew attention late Friday night, but perhaps the reason Morant was being challenged by Iisalo is the greater issue.

Morant’s play against the Lakers looked something like “quiet quitting.”

This recent term of art is not ‘take this job and shove it,’ but rather punching the clock and then checking out — going through the motions while doing the bare minimum.

On Friday night at FedExForum, Grizzlies fans — along with a national audience on Prime Video — saw what quiet quitting looks like on a basketball court. 

Morant had a decent enough first half against the visiting Lakers. 

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Early in the game, he got a steal and pushed the ball up the floor to set up teammate Jaylen Wells for an alley-oop dunk. 

Morant’s first basket came less than a minute later, when he used a Jaren Jackson Jr. screen to dance into the paint and sink a short pullup jumper. A couple of minutes later he started an offensive set without the ball, standing in the corner, but scored a layup on a sharp baseline cut.

Morant missed his next shot, but it was a good one, a baseline jumper from the edge of the paint, created by a quick dribble move. Then Morant came right back into the paint again, finishing a hook over Lakers 7-footer Jaxon Hayes.

At the half, Morant had eight points and four assists; the Grizzlies led the Lakers 69-55 and had beaten them by nine points in Morant’s 15 minutes. 

If Morant wasn’t taking control of the game he seemed to at least be feeling his way into it, perhaps setting up a bigger second half. This is pretty typical for the two-time All-Star guard.

Then the second half came, and all of that dribble penetration and off-ball movement was gone. Vanished. Any energy Morant had in the first half was nowhere to be found.

What basketball ‘quiet quitting’ looks like

Morant played five minutes to start the third quarter, nine Grizzlies’ offensive possessions. In those, Morant fully crossed the 3-point line only twice and never fully entered the paint. His only shot attempts were three missed 3-pointers. Often, he stood so far from the action — including during a scramble for a loose ball — that he wasn’t even visible on the screen for those watching the broadcast. 

The nine possessions Ja Morant played to open the third quarter against the Lakers on Friday, while the Lakers were on an 18-5 run. Rarely crossed the 3-point line. Never fully in the paint.

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— Chris Herrington (@chrisherrington.bsky.social) November 1, 2025 at 2:36 PM

While Morant mostly watched, the Lakers went on an 18-5 run to cut the Grizzlies’ halftime lead to only one.

Morant’s next second-half stint, another roughly five minutes stretched across the end of the third and start of the fourth quarter, was a little better. In another nine possessions, he crossed the 3-point line five times, but with no aggressive paint touches, much less in-the-paint shots. The Lakers pushed a one-point lead to five in this stretch.

Morant’s final stint began with roughly five minutes to play in the game and the Grizzlies now down nine points. As Morant stood at the scorer’s table, waiting to take the court, a fan could be heard yelling, “Time to Call 12!” 

Morant looked the fan’s way, frowned and said something inaudible. When he took the floor, quiet quitting hit overdrive. 

In another nine possessions, Morant became even more of a bystander, often jogging up the floor and watching from the sidelines as other Grizzlies — Cam Spencer, Santi Aldama, Wells — tried to make things happen. No shot attempts. No assists. Minimal effort. 

Watching from courtside, I wondered if Morant might have been battling illness. He’d just had arguably his best game of the season, a couple of nights earlier in Phoenix, and wasn’t visibly angry.

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In a 55-second media availability after the game, Morant cleared that up, at least: He was not sick or impacted by injury. 

“I’m fine,” he said.

His body was fine, but he was still bent out of shape.

For every other question, Morant offered only variations on the same refrain: “Ask the coaching staff.”

Morant seemed to be specifically referencing an interaction between coaches and players after the game, one in which his play was apparently criticized. 

Why did Morant play poorly?

“Go ask (the coaching staff),” said Morant. “They had a whole spiel in here.”

What could have gone better?

“According to them, probably don’t play me, honestly,” said Morant. “That’s what basically the message was after. That’s cool.” 

What was this about?

The chaotic overlap between Morant’s earlier-than-usual locker-room exit and Iisalo’s later-than-usual appearance in what ended up being an empty media room kept those interviewing Morant from taking his advice. There was no coach to go ask, and the Grizzlies boarded a plane Saturday for Toronto, where they have a single-game road trip for their game with the Raptors on Sunday. 

After that, the team will be back in Memphis for a four-game homestand.

Right now, we can only guess what was said in the locker room that set Morant off. But it was presumably a response to listless play that was very much public. And what explains that?

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Morant has been a highly temperamental player during his career. While the memory of the two suspensions that took away chunks of two different seasons in 2023 recedes a little more each day, that episode also took a toll on the franchise. 

More recently Morant is coming off a season in which he sometimes appeared checked out, on and off the floor, and in which his palpable unhappiness played at least some role in the late-season dismissal of head coach Taylor Jenkins. 

But the context of this latest episode is curious.

It came in the sixth game of a season in which the Grizzlies were 3-2 and playing a high-profile, competitive home game. Morant had come back from a preseason ankle sprain to have a good start. He dominated the paint with 35 points in an opening night win against New Orleans and had just put up his best total line of the season — 28 points, eight rebounds, seven assists, with a final-seconds game-winner — against Phoenix.

Morant had notably endorsed Iisalo’s coaching candidacy at the end of last season, when Iisalo was still just in an interim role. And he’d praised Iisalo’s direct communication as recently as the young season’s opening week. 

“I pretty much like that aspect of the game and our relationship, being able to talk during the game,” said Morant after the team’s win over Indiana a week ago. “Having that dialogue with him throughout the game, I feel like is great for us and puts us in way better positions.”

Until Friday night, Morant had been in good spirits after each game, including even the team’s blowout loss to Miami.

So what’s happening here? 

Until more emerges, I can venture a couple of educated guesses, and only that. 

Iisalo has talked about playing his starters three stints per half. Instead of the more standard two eight-to-nine minute stretches per half, Iisalo has played Morant in more like three five-to-six minute stretches, as he did against the Lakers. And he’s used quicker substitutions across the roster and throughout the game. 

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I’ve noticed several players, most notably but not only Morant, seem frustrated at these quick substitution patterns.

What Iisalo wants to get from this approach is clear: fresher lineups capable of playing with more pace and intensity throughout a game. 

That’s logical. But so is the potential trade-off: Do you sacrifice individual rhythm and unit chemistry in pursuit of more intensity?

There have been times when players are subbing out just as they seem to be heating up. 

Maybe that win in Phoenix obscured some of these issues. Morant actually played four different stints in the second half of that game, while only logging 32 total minutes. The Grizzlies were up seven points with seven minutes to play and seemed on the verge of pulling away when both Morant and Jackson went back to the bench. 

When they returned, it was a four-point game with four minutes to play. This allowed a ‘Call 12’ moment, but perhaps it also necessitated one? 

This tension around the value and cost of quick substitutions, and how willing Morant and Jackson, in particular, were to embrace it, is a subject I was monitoring. But it seemed too early to be a major issue. It felt like a kink to be ironed out, not a flash point. 

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If that’s what set this off Morant’s quiet quitting would seem a disproportionate response, even if to legitimate frustrations.

So maybe it’s something more than that. 

Perhaps the same blunt coaching approach Morant had previously championed instead rubbed him the wrong way? Maybe he’d been too coddled by the organization in the past for a different approach to not create some blowback?

To this point, only Morant has spoken on the issue he made public. And only vaguely. 

What now?

Perhaps this is something Morant and Iisalo can get past. Perhaps a fissure can actually be a breakthrough?

But there’s history here for Morant. Too much of it. It’s his seventh year and for all the concerns about both his on-court availability and basketball development, perhaps the unreliability of mood, the way his temperamental personality can weigh on the enterprise, is as big an issue. 

Morant’s quiet quitting on the court and heedless public display in the locker room didn’t come from nowhere. But they came so achingly early in a season seemingly off to a perfectly acceptable start, in the context of a coaching staff and system forged in part to cater to Morant’s game, that it’s hard to imagine serious damage hasn’t been done. 

And in an NBA season in which the games are public and just keep coming, the fallout won’t be held at bay for long.