Ja Morant’s Dunks Are Amazing. His Misses Are Even Better.

Ja Morant of the Memphis Grizzlies had already spent several months showcasing his hops when he and his teammates faced the Los Angeles Lakers in February. By then, Morant’s willingness to challenge some of the N.B.A.’s most towering figures was no secret.

But Morant, 20, was about to take his fearlessness to a new level. As he slipped toward the lane, he caught a backdoor bounce pass and gathered himself before bounding toward the rim. A defender was impeding his path. Morant behaved as if no one was there at all, even though that no one happened to be Anthony Davis, one of the league’s most ferocious rim protectors.

“Just a guy standing in my way,” Morant said in an interview. “I don’t care about a name or who it is. I’m just trying to finish a play.”

Nearing the apex of his flight, Morant shoved his left forearm into Davis’s neck as he tried to jam the ball over the top of him. He missed in spectacular fashion: The ball banged off the backboard as Davis and Morant tumbled to the court. But the building in Memphis was abuzz.

“The A.D. one was kind of the one where you were like, ‘Oh, wow, he really doesn’t care who’s down there,’” the Grizzlies’ De’Anthony Melton said. “If you’re in his way, you’re in his way.”

A rookie point guard, Morant is leading the Grizzlies in their pursuit of one of the final playoff spots in the N.B.A.’s restart at Walt Disney World in Florida. But for all the weirdness of the so-called bubble, the atmosphere feels oddly familiar now that Morant is once again soaring for dunks — and not just for the ones he makes.

In only his first season in the league, Morant has pulled off a remarkable feat: Few players have ever made missed dunks look cooler.

“They’re all just so disrespectful,” Melton said.

The aesthetics of Morant’s dunks (both the makes and the misses) are captivating because of his size. In a league populated by redwoods, Morant — listed at 6-foot-3 and 174 pounds — is more of a spruce tree. It is one thing for point guards to dunk on breakaways, in the open court. It is another thing for someone like Morant to have the confidence to scale the likes of Davis, a 6-foot-10 colossus, and Kevin Love, a 6-foot-8 power forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers whom Morant nearly posterized earlier this season.

“I knew he was athletic, but damn,” Love told reporters after the game. “He legit jumped over me.”

When the Cavaliers hosted the Grizzlies in December, Love had a couple of thoughts that surfaced when Morant collected a loose ball near the 3-point line and began to accelerate toward the basket with a hard dribble.

The first was that Love wanted to draw a charge. (In the past, Love said, the Cavaliers had awarded players $100 for such feats.) The second was fear in the form of a haunting image: the 7-foot-2 Frederic Weis getting demolished by Vince Carter at the 2000 Summer Olympics, the so-called dunk of death.

Sure enough, Morant tried to vault himself over Love and spike the ball through the hoop. But the ball ricocheted off the back of the rim and straight into orbit.

“Probably the best missed dunk ever,” the Grizzlies’ Tyus Jones said.

After the play, Love reached down to help bring Morant to his feet, a sign of respect — and relief.

“I was so glad he missed,” Love said.

Pete Pranica, the Grizzlies’ television play-by-play announcer, recalled in an interview how Tony Brothers, one of the referees, made his way to the scorer’s table during a subsequent timeout and shook his head in disbelief. As the season wore on, Pranica advised referees who were new to the Morant experience to stay on high alert.

“You might see something tonight,” Pranica recalled telling them, “that you’ve never seen before.”

When Morant had his near-dunk over the Lakers’ Davis in February, he was on his way to collecting 27 points and 14 assists in a lopsided win. Afterward, he exchanged jerseys with the Lakers’ LeBron James, who called him “super special.”

Four days later, Morant seemed to levitate against the Nets in Brooklyn, corralling an alley-oop lob from Jones before violently misfiring off the back iron. The Nets’ Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot was whistled for nudging him, and the Grizzlies went on to win by 39. And while the clip of his missed dunk went viral online, Morant avoided watching the replay. He never watches any of them, he said, even though his teammates do.

“I only like makes,” he said. “I don’t get cool points for misses.”

N.B.A. players dunk all the time, but there is still a mystique to the craft — even for the practitioners themselves. In fact, most players can remember their first time. Jones and Melton said they both first dunked as high school freshmen, and their memories are vivid. Melton, for example, dunked on an alley-oop from a teammate after practice.

“Man, it was exciting,” Melton said. “Because when you get up there, it changes the whole game. You’ve suddenly got that confidence to finish at the rim, no matter what.”

In that sense, Morant was a late bloomer. He said he did not start dunking until the summer before his senior year of high school.

“It was just a basic rim grazer,” he said. “I’d say it was hard layup.”

These days, Morant’s misses are tantalizing because he has shown that he can finish, too. He proved as much against the Phoenix Suns in December, when he found himself being defended by Aron Baynes, a 6-foot-10 center, on the perimeter after a switch. Morant seized on the mismatch by taking a couple of aggressive dribbles into the paint, then soaring over Baynes. The dunk came in the final minute of a nip-and-tuck game, sealing the win for the Grizzlies.

“That one was nasty,” Jones said. “He’s a dog. He just goes after it full throttle with no remorse, every single night.”

Before the N.B.A. suspended its season on March 11 because of the coronavirus pandemic, Morant had successfully completed 44 of his 58 dunk attempts. He spent the ensuing four-month layoff working on his craft — and his body.

Given his aerial feats, it might be easy to overlook the arthroscopic surgery Morant had on his right knee before the Grizzlies made him the second overall pick in the 2019 N.B.A. draft. By the time the Grizzlies reported to Disney World in July, he said that he had gained 12 pounds. The result?

“I actually feel like I’m leaving the floor easier and jumping higher,” he said in a recent Zoom conference call. “I’ll do the things I’ve been doing before, but better.”

Ahead of his team’s showdown with the New Orleans Pelicans on Monday, Morant had averaged 23.5 points and 10 assists in the Grizzlies’ first two games of the restart, a pair of narrow losses. His most dynamic moment came when he soared for an alley-oop dunk against the Portland Trail Blazers on Friday. It went in.