Marcus Morris didn’t score a single point for the Los Angeles Clippers on Thursday. The attacker missed all four shots in 19 minutes against the Los Angeles Lakers in the second “seeding game” on the reopening evening, barely showing that he was the creator of differences he had to make when the Clippers exchanged a first … round pick for him on commercial expiration.
Blaming Morris alone for the loss of the Clippers’ 103-101 would be silly. They slept collectively for most of the evening and were without Montrezl Harrell and Lou Williams. Patrick Beverley played just 16 minutes off the bench. Landry Shamet shot 1 by 8 and lost all five of his 3s. Amir Coffey got five minutes of running. But in a game that made it to the last possession, in which both teams scored less effectively than the NBA’s worst offensive team, the Clippers could have used something by Morris, whom the Lakers also attempted to leverage the miserable New York Knicks in February.
And what about the fact that, in the Clippers’ third third game – OK, this was 145 days ago – Morris scored only one point in the 0-for-9 shoot, including 7 missed, against these same Lakers? Hey, Russ, what do you think?
Twice in the second half of Thursday’s game, Morris made me scream on TV. Immediately after the break, he decided to go one on one with Anthony Davis instead of throwing the ball to Paul George, and he traveled while he put the ball on the floor. Within minutes of the fourth quarter, he tried (and tried and tried) to create separation against LeBron James with the time trial running down, and he couldn’t even get out of his wild, contested, foot-on-line 2nd half.
In all honesty, he was in a difficult situation in that second game, and James was protecting him so aggressively that he could have thought he could be making a foul. I would have preferred a ride to Kawhi Leonard, and these are the types of things that bothered me during Morris’ short spell in Los Angeles.
If it wasn’t clear when he became Clipper, it was after a defeat in Philadelphia in his second game: Morris had to make an adjustment. At the moment, I wrote that he made some questionable decisions along the way. He was no longer part of a lottery team, he had a starring role, so it was alarming to see him isolate against Al Horford and attempt to score on Joel Embiid.
There were moments like that in that 0 to 9 game against the Lakers. He was missing two clumsy mid-range skinny, for some reason he decided to dribble with Davis in the corner and, perhaps the most worrying, he hesitated with a couple of open glances. In new or uncomfortable roles, players tend to think too much.
That stuff, however, represented only a few possessions. If you sign up for the best parts of the Morris experience, you accept strokes that are not recommended here and there. Morris’s bad line of stats made headlines, but it wouldn’t have been a story if he had just done two or three of these looks, which went from good to fully open:
In Orlando, none of Morris’ shots can be credibly called ugly, even if he has fun with him by turning a corner 3 into a 15-foot pull-up in the fourth quarter. Morris played the role of a roleplayer, which he is now, and sometimes roleplayers become incapacitated when their clean looks happen to get in and out. Aside from the two turnovers above, most of the criticisms I can make is that he got into trouble quickly and only made 19 minutes.
Here it is easy to worry about trolling the Clippers. Most analysts expect them to see the Lakers in the conference finals and Morris has lost all 13 shots he has made in this matchup. Canceling him by chance would be easier if he wasn’t wrong with everyone else too: in 13 games with the Clippers, Morris has an effective shot percentage of Antoine Walker of 46.4 percent. According to NBA.com, he fired 23.5 percent on 3 “open” (with the defender 4-6 feet away) and 26.7 percent on 3 “wide open” (6-plus feet). He fired badly from the deep, both detecting and shooting from the dribble. (But he did his long 2 seconds!)
After playing the best basketball of his life in New York’s cramped system, Morris joined a team with superstars and modern space and became one of the least efficient players in the league.
How much does it matter, however, when the Clippers scored as if they were the best team in NBA history with Morris on the field? According to Cleaning The Glass, they beat opponents by 15.1 points per 100 possessions in its non-garbage minutes, with an outrageous offensive rating of 117.1. Morris wasn’t the best version of himself with Los Angeles, but opponents still treat him like a shooter. This seems far more significant than some putrid percentages in a small sample.
This all adds up to … honestly, I don’t know. If you’re inclined to believe that when the Clippers find themselves in a game of high stakes playoffs, Morris is likely to miss open shots and hijackings of property that would otherwise have gone to Leonard and George, there is evidence to point in that direction. If you are optimistic that his shooting crisis will end and the threat he presents is all that matters, there is evidence for that too. (Last season, he turned off the lights until mid-January, then cooled for months and caught fire again in the post-season.)
My main goal on Thursday was that the Clippers didn’t even play well, but they probably should have won anyway. Another takeaway: Morris didn’t shoot any of the meager mid-range guys and mostly stayed out of the way. Progress!
