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I have a hard time believing anyone who used social media as a teenager would look back at their posts from that time and think, “Man, these have aged incredibly well and I’m glad I shared every single one of them with the world.”
Most people are eventually able to learn from the error of their ways and reach a point in life where they put a bit more thought into the things they’re willing to share with people online (in addition to going back and scrubbing some of the ill-advised content they willingly shared when they were younger and dumber from the internet).
However, Ja Morant hasn’t gotten there yet.
As you probably know by now, the Grizzlies superstar hasn’t played since March 3rd after Memphis suspended him for flashing a gun on Instagram Live in the wake of his team’s loss to the Nuggets (he’ll be eligible to return on March 20th after serving the eight-game suspension the NBA hit him with earlier this week).
That decision was a fairly costly one, as Morant will likely miss out on a $39 million contract incentive and forfeit the money he was slated to receive for the Powerade campaign that was quietly shelved after the news broke.
That incident raised plenty of questions about Morant’s maturity, and while I’m not trying to make any sweeping judgments about a man I’ve never met, it’s hard to ignore how little he’s seemingly changed over the course of the past decade based on the content of the Instagram account he briefly ran when he was in middle school.
Internet sleuths recently uncovered the profile dubbed “soexclusive12_,” which Morant posted to 50 times over the course of a couple of weeks in 2013 (Morant was in eighth grade at the time).
The account is home to a plethora of cringeworthy content that’s likely familiar to anyone who tried to pretend they were cooler than they were in middle school, including posts where a young Morant brags about being high, claims he can “make cocaine,” and channels his inner Chief Keef.
It would obviously be asinine to judge Morant too harshly for anything he posted as a 13-year-old, and even if you take recent events out of the equation, it’s safe to assume he wishes this had been kept under wraps.