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Ja Morant and the Memphis Grizzlies have taken the NBA by storm this season.
After flirting with the playoffs his rookie season, and making them by knocking off the Golden State Warriors — in San Francisco — in the play-in tournament in his second season, Morant has taken the full leap to superstardom in 2021-22, becoming an All-Star starter and first-team All-NBA candidate while leading the Grizzlies to a top-three seed in the Western Conference playoff picture.
But is that enough to make Morant, whose Grizzlies face the New Orleans Pelicans on Tuesday night, the most desirable point guard on a rookie contract in the NBA?
To answer that question, ESPN reached out to 15 league scouts and executives and asked them to rank six star point guards who are still on their rookie deals — the Charlotte Hornets’ LaMelo Ball, Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, Cleveland Cavaliers’ Darius Garland, Oklahoma City Thunder’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Atlanta Hawks’ Trae Young and Morant — in terms of who they’d want moving forward.
It was a question that engendered plenty of debate, and a lot of hemming and hawing over how people would ultimately decide to rank them.
And while Morant received four of the 15 first-place votes, it was Doncic who got the other 11 and took home the top spot in the survey:
Doncic was the only player who didn’t receive a lower vote than second among the six players. Morant, meanwhile, had eight second-place votes, two thirds and a fourth to settle in at a comfortable second-place finish.
After the top two is where things got interesting. While Young was the only other player to receive a second-place vote — he got three of them — he also received eight third-place votes, placing him a clear third. Young also picked up fourth-, fifth- and sixth-place votes.
Ball and Gilgeous-Alexander, meanwhile, were ultimately separated by a single point, with Ball’s extra fourth-place…
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Source : espn
