Ja Morant returns after being suspended by NBA

and welcome back to the factor on since it Grizzlies baller John Morant is off of the bench. He joined his team in a match against the Houston Rockets tonight. The controversial athlete was previously suspended for eight games after flashing a gun while streaming it on Instagram Live. There's been a lot of speculation about the reasons for this behavior. Rapper Ja Rule told TMZ Morant may have been influenced by hip hop culture. Let's talk about it. Joining me now, former NBA player and now judge Joe Stevens and Houston rap legend Willie D from the ghetto boys.

Glad to have you here both. When you hear what Ja Rule said about Ja Morant, your thoughts on that, accurate or not? As someone who has benefited tremendously from hip hop, I would say that I'm still the first one to say that artists should be held accountable for what they say, right? Having said that, I think it's preposterous to blame hip hop for the actions of a pro athlete. If you're going to blame hip hop for pro athlete's actions, we'll also give hip hop credit for him being an athlete in the first place, a pro athlete in the first place. Why is it that when people got complaints about the youth, they want to point the finger at hip hop? But when the youth do outstanding things, they have nothing to say. Hip hop doesn't get the credit. We want all the credit. We want it.

There's a lot of young people who are doing tremendous things. A whole lot of young people are doing great things out there. And I would dare say that they are hip hop fans. So why aren't we getting the credit when those young people do outstanding things? But when you say scapegoat. Yeah, we're easy scapegoats just like rock and roll with easy scapegoat. Hip hop is the music of the youth. And the music of the youth is always going to be blamed for society's downfalls.

So hip hop is just a scapegoat. The way I see it, I think again, it's preposterous to blame hip hop for the actions of a pro athlete. We're not getting any of his money. He don't give us credit when he scores 30 points. We don't get no credit when he, you know, get 20 rebounds. Why do we get the blame when he gets on social media and waves a gun? No, that's on him. Alright, let's bring in Judge Joe Stevens, former player for the Houston Rockets.

Fair assessment or not, what Willie D is saying, why is hip hop getting the blame for negativity and no positivity? I agree with Will. Let me say this in 1996. I was a rookie with the Houston Rockets and I didn't have a quarter of a billion dollars like Jack Moran does. When you take his age and that kind of money, you get at us three right now. We may go crazy, right? And fortunately in that day, we didn't have cell phone cameras like they do today. So every moment that these kids are out here gets caught on film. And unfortunately, Jai had a bad moment.

You got a guy that went from being a college athlete 48 months ago to now the breadwinner for his family, for generations, for his uncles, aunts, his friends, and you're thrust into this limelight, you know, then the trappings of everything that goes along with the NBA. In 96, we go to a rookie camp. Anytime you make it to the NBA, all the rookies go to one place out in Virginia about two hours outside of D.C. Remote location. It's a five-day intensive camp that they put you through. I was there with Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, all of these guys, and they teach you about all of the trappings that you're going to deal with, but nothing Isaiah prepares you for the lifestyle.

Well, you remember the Eshalon days, Jamaica, Jamaica days, with just imagine being a 23-year-old guy with a couple of hundred thousand dollars or a few million dollars in the bank and then all of the trappings that come with it. So, Jai Moran's going to learn from this experience. He's going to be better for it. He didn't hurt anyone, you know. Some would say he was exercising his Second Amendment right. He was in a strip club by himself, so I don't think we should condemn him, and we certainly shouldn't blame hip-hop. You can scroll down social media any day and see images that 20 years ago you would never see.

You know, I remember landing in Istanbul, Turkey, when I first got my first job in Europe after my NBA days, and the stuff I would see on TV over there, the blood, the guts. I'm like, wow, they would never show that in America. And now here, we're desensitized to it, because you can scroll down social media, and you're seeing a dead rapper's body with blood pouring out of it. You know, we've kind of become desensitized to this stuff as a society, and we can't blame hip-hop for that.

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