If you walked into Ja Morant’s media availability in Berlin expecting the usual NBA-in-Europe script, smiles, gratitude, a few lines about “growing the game,” maybe a wink about German crowds, you didn’t get it. What reporters instead captured was something far more brittle: a franchise star offering clipped, minimal answers while the questions circled the most combustible topic in the NBA calendar, the trade deadline.
On Wednesday, with the Memphis Grizzlies in Germany ahead of Thursday’s regular-season game against the Orlando Magic, Morant faced a press conference dominated by rumors that Memphis is listening to calls on him. His response to the first wave was as short as it gets. Asked about the chatter, Morant’s line was essentially a shrug in three words: he’d “live with it.”
@opencourtJa Morant was a man of very few words during his press conference before the NBA Berlin Game 💀🥶
That phrase traveled because it sounded like resignation and defiance at the same time: brief, guarded responses, little interest in expanding. If you perceived it as rude or weirdly cold, you weren’t alone, but it’s more accurate to call it strategic: Morant did not appear interested in giving anyone a quote big enough to become tomorrow’s headline.
Well, the problem, of course, is that this becomes the headline anyway.
Berlin isn’t just a stop on a road trip. Thursday’s game is the NBA’s first regular-season contest in Germany, staged in the city and arena that has been marketed as a statement of intent for the league’s European future. It’s also, inconveniently for Memphis, arriving at the same moment Morant’s season has been interrupted by injury, reported as a right calf contusion, and overshadowed by speculation about his relationship with the organization. The Grizzlies’ own reporting confirmed Morant would not play in Berlin due to that calf injury.
So the scene was set for discomfort: a star who isn’t playing, asked to answer for the franchise in front of an international audience, while trade noise follows him across an ocean.
A “rude” press conference is usually a player choosing friction. This felt more like a player choosing absence while still physically present: a controlled disengagement. That may give off a weird vibe. It also tells you exactly how heavy the moment is. When the rumors are loud, and the deadline is approaching, even a global stage can feel like the wrong place to be asked to explain your own uncertainty.
And that’s the real Berlin headline. Not that Ja Morant was short with reporters, but that the NBA’s most export-ready product still can’t outshine its own volatility. The league can put a regular-season game in Germany. It can sell out the arena. It can make the world watch.
It can’t make a star want to talk when the story he’s being asked to narrate might be bigger than he is willing to admit.
