Where do Ja Morant and the Grizzlies go from here after playoff ...

LOS ANGELES — By the time the Memphis Grizzlies made it here on March 4, their season and maybe their long-term trajectory had changed forever.

The Grizzlies flew from Denver to Los Angeles after a truly disastrous 24 hours in which Brandon Clarke blew out his Achilles and Ja Morant shared a post on social media wielding a gun while intoxicated at a nightclub. Clarke’s season was over, and Morant was headed home, and then to counseling, on suspension by the NBA.

With those things in mind, it’s fitting the Grizzlies’ season came to a crashing end in Los Angeles nearly two months later, when they were embarrassed by the Lakers 125-85 in Game 6.

Injuries and distractions proved to ultimately be too much, forcing the Grizzlies down a path of becoming just the sixth No. 2 seed to ever lose to a No. 7 seed in the NBA playoffs. One of those problems you can chalk up to terrible luck. The other is correctable, if the parties are willing to make changes.

“I just got to be better as a decision-maker, that’s pretty much it,” Morant said late Friday night after a miserable Game 6 in which he shot 3 of 16. He wasn’t talking about his shot selection.

“(My) off-the-court issues, you know, affected us as an organization, pretty much,” Morant said.

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To be clear, the Grizzlies suffered major or otherwise untimely injuries to three key players that dramatically impacted their playoff run. Starting center Steven Adams was averaging 11.5 rebounds overall and 5.1 offensive boards per game when his knee injury knocked him out in early January. He didn’t play again. Clarke is an athletic, versatile big who along with Adams would’ve provided some much-needed girth and depth against Anthony Davis and LeBron James in the paint.

And then in Game 5 of this series, the Grizzlies discovered they could get along with playing Luke Kennard — acquired at the trade deadline — as a floor-spacing shooter over Dillon Brooks, a defensive specialist, and the Lakers, at least for one game, couldn’t keep up. But Kennard injured his shoulder in the fourth quarter and couldn’t play at all in Game 6.

Those injuries alone could be enough to sink a lesser team in a series against LeBron, but it was the Grizzlies’ deeper problem that prevented them from overcoming those absences.

Morant’s off-court trouble was not limited to the suspension. He and his friends have been accused multiple times of assault and menacing behavior, and while he’s denied those accusations, and even filed a counter lawsuit in one of the case, the mere mention of such things is part of the distraction. Morant also said his mental health had suffered a setback too after he re-injured his right hand after Game 1.

The Grizzlies’ other emotional leader, Brooks, called LeBron “old” and said he liked to “poke bears” after Game 2 of this series. He ratcheted up the outside noise and attention with those comments and provoked the Lakers’ best player, and then in Game 3 got himself ejected for punching LeBron in the privates. Brooks also shot 31 percent in the series and 24 percent from 3, making it difficult for the Grizzlies’ offense to get any room to breathe.

And then beyond that, there were the myriad mistakes the Grizzlies made on the court, a lack of attention to the small details that can beat you in a playoff series if you aren’t paying attention. This Memphis core of Brooks, Desmond Bane, Morant and Jaren Jackson Jr. have been to the playoffs three consecutive years and still have not learned to nail down those fine points.

All of this is what coach Taylor Jenkins was talking about earlier in this series when he said his team lacked maturity. But now that the season has ended in a mass of disappointment, the question becomes what the Grizzlies will do about this most glaring deficiency, which rears its ugly head in many ways?

What must change?

“It’s truly embracing what these moments in time in your evolution are gonna provide for you,” Jenkins said after Game 6. “You’re either gonna seize them, or you’re not. You’re going to take them lightly and take them for granted, or you’re going to truly embrace them and understand where you’re going to look when you look at yourself in the mirror.”

In the last few days, both Jenkins and the Grizzlies players have described the same basic problem in a number of ways. On Friday night, the words they used suggested an air of entitlement that surrounded this team after the two previous seasons of surprisingly strong regular-season play.

It’s how an All-Star’s focus can wane off the court and how details can get missed in a playoff series.

“I think so, a little bit,” said Bane, the Grizzlies’ leading scorer in Game 6 with 15 points. “You know, last year we were kind of the surprise team in the league and was able to also work our way to the two seed, and it just seemed like, you know, we were celebrating every moment. … It’s everybody — training staff, coaching staff, players, you know, everybody was really into it because we didn’t know how good we were and we were just trying to win games and play to the Grizzlies standard. This year we came in with some different expectations and you know, I don’t want to say that we overlooked the process or the daily things … but you know, we got to be better, and that’s where our player development comes in and will shine bright on stage like this.”

Brooks tried during this series to say being a “villain” was a role he didn’t create for himself, as though he hadn’t earned enough technical fouls this season to earn two one-game suspensions, hadn’t whacked Gary Payton II in the head in the playoffs last year or started a fight with Donovan Mitchell this season. He left Crypto.com Arena as something worse — a goat in this series for taking a big swing at the King (James) and missing.

Brooks also may have left the arena for the last time as a Grizzlies player. He will be a free agent this summer, and perhaps the best thing he has going for him as far as his future in Memphis is concerned is the big payouts headed to teammates. Lucrative contract extensions are already on the books for Morant and Jackson, and one worth up to $204 million could go to Bane this summer.

Under NBA salary-cap rules, if the Grizzlies let Brooks go as a free agent, it would be difficult to sign someone as good or better than him as a replacement. Brooks, for the third time in the last four games, did not speak to reporters after the game.

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“It’s not just going to be one summer, one move,” Jenkins said. “It’s going to be a collection of everything that we do. It’s how we draft, it’s how we develop, it’s other decisions that we make to add to this roster and I think we’ve done a phenomenal job in getting the right people in here.”

The Grizzlies won more games at home than any NBA team this season and secured the No. 2 seed in the West for a second consecutive year despite problems in early March. They have one superstar in Morant, who is 23, and two stars in Jackson (23) and Bane (24) who are all either under contract for a long time or are about to be. But they didn’t get as far in the postseason as they did a year ago by failing to get out of the first round. And they sure made a mess of things along the way.

Jenkins called the end result of the Grizzlies’ 2022-23 campaign “the ultimate wake-up call” for this franchise.

“We don’t know what it is that’s gonna happen, but it’s gonna click and it’s gonna happen and it’s gonna look good,” Jackson said.

(Photo of Dillon Brooks and Ja Morant: Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)

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