told reporters<\/a> when discussing his former Grizzlies teammates attending the game. “Those are guys that I spent five years with, started my career with, made a lot of memories with. <\/p>\n“So I’m super thankful that they came out to support. It’s a friendship that’ll last forever. Those are guys that mean a lot to me. I’m thankful that they pulled up to support.”<\/p>\n
Bane played with Memphis for the first five seasons of his career before the team traded him to Orlando ahead of the 2025-26 campaign. Morant and Jackson were teammates with him during that entire tenure.<\/p>\n
The Grizzlies made the playoffs in four of those five seasons and seemed to have a bright future, although Bane and Jackson are no longer on the roster while Morant has been limited by injuries and suspensions of late.<\/p>\n
Yet they clearly all still have each other’s backs.<\/p>\n
Morant and Jackson saw quite the performance from Bane, who finished with 22 points and five rebounds on 7-of-18 shooting from the field and 5-of-10 shooting from deep. One of those three-pointers banked in with just more than a minute remaining to give Orlando a six-point lead it never relinquished.<\/p>\n
It was arguably the most important shot of the game that put the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 seed on the brink of elimination.<\/p>\n
The series now returns to Detroit for Wednesday’s Game 5, where the Magic will look to advance to the second round with another win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ja Morant’s Memphis Grizzlies and Jaren Jackson Jr.’s Utah Jazz missed the playoffs, so they took the time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[139,141,140],"class_list":["post-249290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}