LA Clippers Rumors: Why they should avoid a Marcus Morris trade

The LA Clippers want Marcus Morris even though New York claims why won’t deal. That’s fine and the team should avoid trading for the volatile power forward.

Despite recent claims that they’re eager to hold onto Marcus Morris, the New York Knicks can’t seem to keep his name out of trade rumors. Even if they were open for business, the Clippers should avoid trading for the volatile power forward.

Marcus Morris is a player that’s been on the Clippers’ radar since the 2019 offseason. They, of course, were rumored (by Morris himself) to have had a three-year, $41 million deal in place with Morris, which he then reneged on in favor of more money with San Antonio, and yet again for more money with the Knicks. There’s enough smoke to suggest that they may still have interest in adding Morris, depending on whether the Knicks are willing to let him go and the price isn’t too steep. ESPN’s Zach Lowe stresses that although the Knicks seem hellbent on keeping him, they could still be swayed by the right package.

However, there are real concerns with adding a player, and person, like Marcus Morris. With Morris, the easy place to start would be his controversial comments and history of poor temperament. We’ll shelve that for now, a do a quick review of his numbers this season.

Morris is averaging career-highs in points, free throws attempted, and three-point percentage (43.8%, over 5% better than his previous career-high). His current splits for the season are 19.4PTS/5.5REB/1.4AST in 32.2 minutes per game. That’s not too shabby, even for a guy on a bad team. Given the Clippers’ intermittent struggles to generate offense outside of Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, it would make sense that they’d still show interest in adding an offensive threat like Morris to their roster. He even went off for a career-high 38 points in the Knicks’ lone visit to Staples Center earlier in the season.

Even for good players, some situations are destined for failure. The Knicks are a very, very bad team. Morris hasn’t exactly helped the situation in New York either, though. Despite shooting well, he’s having far from a good defensive season — turning the ball over and committing fouls at a record pace. Relative to previous seasons, Morris has almost an entire season’s worth of shooting (60) and offensive fouls (16) with only 42 games played.

Opponents actually shoot 4.1% better from three and finish at the rim 3.1% more often when being guarded by Morris. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that a team fielding four power forwards at the same time is never going to be good defensively, but it is a bit concerning.

If the Clippers are looking to make a move for someone of that archetype, they’ll want three things; a respectable jump shot (which Morris has, even if he were to regress), an odd ISO possession if the offense breaks down, and someone they can trust on defense. Morris’ shot-making ability may be enough for the Clippers to look past his lackluster defense, but that’s still only part of the equation.

We now get into the fun that is unhinged behavior and blatant misogyny! Morris’ recent outburst after a chippy game against the Memphis Grizzlies has likely killed off a fair amount of interest that many teams may have had. The degree to which NBA teams actually care about that type of thing is up in the air, but they certainly aren’t fond of the mess it can create. This is far from his first offense, though.

He was ejected from a preseason game for hitting another player on the head with a ball (funny in a vacuum, but you can’t have that). His history of getting physical with opponents could be looked at as a sort of competitive fire, but it could also be seen as a guy who doesn’t have great control over his emotions.

The LA Clippers may or may not be interested in Marcus Morris, but given other potential trade targets, it feels prudent to avoid taking on that type of player–even at the expense of a few percentage points from behind the arc. The best thing may be for the Knicks to keep him and save a number of teams, including the Clippers, from themselves.