re: Weekly Non-Pels League Discussion Thread 2/12 - 3/4

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Offense more important than defense. Someone tell willie that

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2 way players do both.

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LaMelo after suffering non-contact ankle injury: “It popped. I heard it pop.”

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Last summer, in an encounter that has not been previously reported, the head of security at a Memphis mall told police that Morant “threatened” him during an altercation in the parking lot, leaving him alarmed enough that he filed a police report. A member of Morant’s group shoved the director in the head, he told police. No arrests were made, records show.

Four days later, Morant repeatedly punched a teenage boy in the head during a pickup basketball game at Morant’s house, the boy told police. Morant and his friend struck the 17-year-old so hard they knocked him to the ground and left him with a “large knot” on the side of his head, according to a police report narrative written by deputies who said they observed the boy’s injuries.

The teenager told detectives from the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office that, after the fight, Morant went into his house and re-emerged with a gun visible in the waistband of his pants and his hand on the weapon, according to police interviews obtained by The Post, which have not previously been reported.

In an interview with police, Morant said he acted in self-defense. “I swung first,” he told detectives, but he believed the boy had been the aggressor because he threw a ball at Morant’s head and then stepped toward him, pulling up his pants. “The ball was to me the first hit,” Morant told police.

During the interview, detectives mentioned the boy’s allegation that Morant flashed a gun but did not ask Morant whether it was true.

Morant told police that as the boy left, he shouted, “I’m gonna come back and light this place up like fireworks.” Weeks after the incident, according to records obtained by The Post, Morant filed a police report about the boy’s comment, saying the teenager had threatened his family.

Prosecutors reviewed the case but declined to file charges, the Shelby County District Attorney said in a statement. The office “decided that there was not enough evidence to proceed with a case,” a spokesperson said.

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Ja Morant was one of the stars of last year’s playoffs before the Grizzlies lost a heated series with the eventual-champion Golden State Warriors. Two months after the loss to Golden State, Morant’s mother was at a Finish Line shoe store at a Memphis mall when she got in a dispute with a store employee, according to a Memphis Police report obtained by The Post. She called Morant, who arrived shortly after with a group of as many as nine other people.

Confronted by the director of mall security, Morant and his friends refused the security guard’s demands to leave the mall parking lot. Police arrived and a “verbal confrontation” escalated, the report says, until someone in the group allegedly pushed the security director in the head.

“As the group was leaving the premises … Ja Morant said, ‘Let me find out what time he gets off,’ ” police wrote in the report.

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Less than a week later, Morant, as he often did, hosted an evening pickup basketball game at his family home, a sprawling brick mansion on the edge of Memphis. His parents and sister were there, as was Mike Miller, the former NBA player.

Among the players on the gated court was a talented local high-schooler who, he would later tell police, considered Morant a mentor. Though the police records identify the boy, The Post is not naming him to protect the privacy of a juvenile.

He had been invited to the games before, the 17-year-old said in the police interview, but he still found himself entranced by Morant: “He was doing some amazing things, and I was just impressed,” the teenager said to police. “I’m playing against an all-star, you know?”

The teenager drew the task of guarding one of the world’s most electric scorers. When Morant threw the ball hard at the boy’s chest as he attempted to check it in, the boy threw it back just as hard. The ball “slipped through [Morant’s] hands,” the teenager said, and it hit Morant’s chin.

The teenager told police Morant then put his chin on the boy’s shoulder and asked his friend, “Do I do it to him?” The friend responded, “Yeah, do it.”

Morant then punched the boy in his jaw, the boy told police, and without warning, the friend struck him on the other side. “I fell to the ground, trying to cover my face, so I wouldn’t get hit in the face,” the boy told police. “I got, started getting hit, punched in my head, everything else.”

“Ja hit me like 12 to 13 times,” the boy said, adding that the friend struck him four or five times. When police asked the boy how hard the punches landed, he compared them to an MMA bout.

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After the men were pulled off him, the boy told police, Morant went inside and the boy got up to leave. As the boy was going to his car, he said, Morant “came outside with his gun.” It was tucked into his pants, the boy said, and though he didn’t pull it out, the boy said he saw Morant put his hand on it.

“His dad was yelling at him, like: ‘No, no, no. Go back. Go back in the house,’ ” the boy told police.

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