On October 19, Ja stood with his hands on his knees behind mid court, his sneakers kicking at the outline of the Grizzlies logo. He looked calm for someone in his position, or at least the kind of anxious that’s more anticipatory than apprehensive. He knew what he had to do, and he knew he was going to do it. The only variable was who would try to stop him from initiating the inevitable.

There were 3 seconds left in the Grizzlies home opener vs the Knicks, with the score knotted at 108 after a broken play and botched Aldama coverage led to a clutch Cam Reddish corner 3 (the first and last time my keys will ever type that phrase in that order, unless I start covering the Big 3 League). But if that shot was unexpected, what happened next wasn’t. 

There were 20,000 people in the arena. 1,000,0000 watching from home. And 10 standing on the court. Not one of them didn’t know exactly what was coming next. And yet it still couldn’t be stopped. 

Ja took a handoff from Brandon Clarke after an inbounds from Konchar, completed one dribble, jumped from a foot inside the free throw line over a fully-developed adult man who was paid $104,000,000 to keep him from scoring, checked his surroundings in mid-air with the patience and nonchalance of a seasoned pilot checking the runway, switched hands while in a near horizontal-position with tenths of a second remaining in a time game, and laid it in off the glass. 

He did everything we all knew he would, but in a way we’d never seen it done before.

That’s Ja Morant.

And as he laid at the base of the goal after crashing back down to earth, the ref trotted over and casually motioned in the opposite direction - a charge. Basket waved off. A miracle rendered meaningless. Ja was incredulous, sporting the same expression everyone watching him had. Disbelief. At both the act itself, and the result. How something we all recognized as remarkable could be so disappointing. His look was pure adrenaline enveloped by anticlimax, the feelings so close you couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended. 

In that moment, Grizz fans had our first iconic image of the season. And with that one visual, I started a season-long campaign to draw every Ja Morant performance for the year. To commemorate the man who puts people on a poster every night, with a poster every night. 

But what I didn’t realize about that moment - is that it was both representative of where things started, and where they would eventually end. The whole season in a snapshot. Balancing disbelief with disappointment. Wondering how something so spectacular could have such a subpar conclusion.

Below is every picture I drew from this uniquely broken season, 110 different drawings in total, spanning the entire 2022-23 campaign. A piece for every single game of the season, and then some. The highs and lows, disbelief and disappointment. The full Ja Morant experience.