MEMPHIS — Losing Game One of their playoff series against the Lakers might not be the biggest loss facing the Grizzlies.
Ja Morant raced straight to the locker room after injuring his hand in the fourth quarter.
Morant would not return, and now, his status for game two remains in doubt even though X-rays came back negative.
“Very tough, stressful. Obviously, I feel like you guys can tell with my body language and stuff. I’m pretty much taking what happened in. I don’t know, man. I’m just pretty much numb to everything now,” Morant said. “It’s like, I’m not even surprised. It’s just one thing after another.”
“It hits me in the heart. I knew when that fall happened, something wasn’t good happening,” said Grizzlies forward Dillon Brooks. “Now we’ll see what happens in a couple of days.”
With or without Morant, the Grizzlies are all too familiar with the position they are in.
Last season, they lost game one to both the Timberwolves and the Warriors, but were able to rally back to beat Minnesota to open last year’s postseason.
“It’s one game. It’s first of four for a reason. I mean, you want to win every game, but most of the time it doesn’t happen,” said Grizzlies guard Desmond Bane. “We obviously wanted to start off with a win, but they won tonight and we get another opportunity on Wednesday.”
“Game one’s over. Move on to game two. Whether we won or lost this game, we were going to have the same mentality,” said Grizzlies forward Jaren Jackson Jr. “We know exactly what we got to do.”
