re: Zach Lowe Expects Pels to be Sellers at Trade Deadline

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He’s a great defender and his shooting 45% from 3. How is he not an asset.

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Marcus Morris Sr.
In terms of 3-and-D forwards, there might not be a better player on the market than Morris. He has turned himself into a very good shooter in recent seasons, with the sort of game-to-game and year-to-year consistency upon which a team can rely in the playoffs. Even this year on a dysfunctional Knicks team, he’s hitting the highest percentage of his 3s of his career on the highest volume of his career. And it’s not like New York has some sort of high-level distributor who’s getting him a whole bunch of wide-open looks from the corner. He can knock down tightly-contested jumpers and create his own shot at a pretty decent clip – he can get to his spots in pick-and-roll and generally has been New York’s best all-around offensive player. That’s not exactly a high bar to clear, but he’s been legitimately very good this season.

On the other end of the floor, he’s got the positional size and versatility to defend the strong-link superstars from a number of teams. He’s not going to shut down a LeBron James, a Kawhi Leonard, a Giannis Antetokounmpo, but if he’s defending those guys, it’s not a three-alarm fire. You don’t have to send panic help to Morris when he’s matched up with one of those guys, which has a ton of value for a team looking to upgrade their defensive prowess in those situations. The salary cap ramifications are particularly important in Morris’s case. He makes $15 million on a one-year contract and will be an unrestricted free agent in July. A team landing in the tax would have to send out at least $11.92 million in salary to trade for him, while a team outside of the tax gets a slight break – that team would only have to send out $10 million. For the top-end title contenders, cobbling together the sort of money it takes to get Morris without trading any significant rotation players is difficult, but not impossible. Doing so while attaching an asset that entices New York to move him makes things harder.

Any team holding his contract at the end of the year will have Non-Bird rights as he goes into free agency – they can sign him to a contract starting anywhere below $18 million, assuming they don’t already have cap space. $18 million should be more than enough to re-sign him, but whether it’s the Knicks or another team, they run the risk of him walking away for nothing. Any conversations they can have with him now, months before that decision gets made, are hard to trust – we saw how he rejected the normal decorum of the league and spurned San Antonio after they traded Davis Bertans in order to secure him on a deal they had already verbally agreed. If you’re another team and you get word that Morris would be interested in re-signing, how can you trust him to keep that word in the summer? So much can change between now and then, both with that team’s on-court success and his motivations and desires.

Perhaps under normal circumstances, a team would trade a late first-round pick or two second-rounders far enough in the future that they might be valuable. However, there are a number of other quality forwards on the market who are easier to salary-match, won’t cost a first-round pick, and don’t come with the immense uncertainty of Morris’s impending free agency.

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