Robert Sarver and Phoenix Sun continue to show the folly of treating players like corporate assets.
Markieff Morris claims his days of playing for the Phoenix Suns are over. “One thing for sure, I am not going to be there,” he said in an interview with Keith Pompey of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “If you want to put that out there, you can put that out. I don’t give a f–k. I am not going to be there at all. That’s just what it is.”
There you have it. Another over-privileged athlete refusing to live up to the contract he agreed to. Another sign that modern players just don’t appreciate what they have, and how lucky they are to be in the NBA.
But it’s not that simple. It never is, certainly not here.
As Kevin Draper of Deadspin succinctly noted, Morris feels betrayed that the team traded away his twin brother to try to upgrade the position that Markieff was supposed to hold down this season.
"Morris claims he’s mad about how the Suns traded his brother Marcus to Detroit. Markieff is the longest-tenured Sun, and feels he deserved a heads-up that Marcus was being traded, and reassurances that the Suns viewed him as their power forward of the future. Instead, Markieff learned about the trade while on vacation with Marcus and their girlfriends, and believes Marcus (along with Reggie Bullock and Danny Granger) was traded to free up cap space to lure free agent LaMarcus Aldridge to take his job."
There is plenty of reason to think Markieff is handling the situation poorly, though the Suns are not simply an innocent, aggrieved party in all of this.
For a chance to acquire a top-tier asset in Aldridge, they flipped a quality employee (Marcus Morris). It was a salary dump in a league where lots of teams now operate as if players are commodities to be bought and sold whenever the market signals that they are under or over-valued. The Suns had a low-probability chance to sign Aldridge, but despite those long odds they opted to kick a valued (particularly to Markieff) member of their organization to the curb. The math on that made sense to them: Certain loss of asset in exchange for a not-0% probabilistic benefit gained if they could then convince Aldridge to come.
The certain returns of the Marcus Morris futures market weren’t as promising as the vast sums to be gained in the LaMarcus futures sector. They made the move and didn’t fully realize that these are actual human beings, thus the cost of trading away one twin and not getting LaMarcus also hurt the value of their other asset, Markieff.
Marcus expressed his disappointment after being sent packing to Detroit to the Associated Press.
"“Everybody knew how bad I wanted to play with my brother,” Marcus Morris said. “Phoenix knew. For them to trade me without consent or telling or anything like that was kind of like a, I would say slap in the face, because of the contract I took from those guys and the money I took from them. That was kind of a slap in the face.”"
Treating players like items to be bought and moved without emotion is nothing new in the NBA, and it is old hat for the Suns. This is sports and sports is a business. So of course many transactions are made with cold, calculated motivations that, for good reason, don’t rank human emotions high in the hierarchy of choices. These days, however, so many teams don’t just gloss over the personal aspects of team building, they operate with outright disregard to the concept. And teams like Phoenix continue to expose the flaws in that line of thinking.
Back in the heyday of the Seven Seconds or Less team that revitalized a stagnant, isolation-heavy league, the team’s executives were the antithesis to the product on the floor. No team was more fun-loving, free-flowing, and long-ball happy than the Steve Nash-led Suns. Not only was it a delight to watch, but the players on the court seemed to be having the time of their lives on a nightly basis. Captain Canada was nearly rubbing his palms raw with the number of high fives he was dishing out nightly — a total way higher than his league-leading assist figures.
The mentality behind the scenes was entirely different.
This Phoenix squad could have won a title. There was a lot of debate regarding if such an offense and 3-point focused team could go that far. Alas, we now have the hindsight of the 2014-15 Golden State Warriors title to show us that, yes, it was equally possible back then. They simply suffered some bad luck (suspensions against the Spurs, Joe Johnson breaking his face) and ran into some equally world-class competitors (Timothy Duncan, namely).
But in addition to the hurdles that always exist, the Suns had to overcome themselves. Their owner, Robert Sarver, was as cheap as anyone in the league, and did his franchise no favors. Even he admits that the team made a colossal mistake by penny pinching as opposed to re-signing Joe Johnson and keeping the team’s core together, as Paul Coro of the Arizona Republic recently recounted.
"Sarver said his biggest regret of his 11 years as managing partner was not extending Johnson before that 2004-05 season started. Johnson wanted a six-year, $50 million contract. Sarver would not budge from $45 million, a difference of $833,333 per year. “It would’ve made all the difference in the world,” [then-Suns GM Bryan] Colangelo said of extending Johnson."
$833,333 per year is a vast sum of money for most humans walking the earth, but it is irrelevant to an NBA franchise. For an NBA owner, it should never have been a, literal, deal-breaker. But he chose the hardline of fiscal prudence, and Joe Johnson went to Atlanta and became a six-time All-Star.
The moves to come were even more revealing of just how little regard Sarver and the Suns had for trying to help their core realize its dream of winning a title. They sold draft pick after draft pick and pocketed the money, forgoing talent like Rajon Rondo (whom they picked then traded to the Celtics in 2006 for cash) and generally alienating a locker room full of guys who just wanted a little help.
So instead of Joe Johnson and a bunch of first-round picks who would have added depth, the franchise opted to make cold, calculated financial moves to meet a budget line Sarver needed to hit.
A decade later, not much has changed.
The Suns are still treating their team like a corporation and their players like assets. Before Markieff Morris, it was Goran Dragic who had had enough.
He was a late bloomer in the leauge. The Suns gave up on him early in his career, trading him away to the Rockets before bringing him back into the fold a few seasons later. Dragic flourished upon his return. He was solid in his first year back, then took his game to another level, at 27 years old, averaging 20.3 points per game on 50.5% shooting after previously having only eclipsed 46% once in his career. He had become a lethal penetrator, arguably the best-finishing guard in the NBA at the rim.
What did the Suns do the following summer? They ignored the rise of Dragic and his desire to run a team — his own team — and brought in point guard Isaiah Thomas. They had already added Eric Bledsoe and now Phoenix was clearly telling its emerging star that he would be sharing the rock with two other ball-dominant guards. But, hey, Thomas was a great signing. You can’t pass up a chance to add a cheap asset.
As with Morris, some are quick to call Dragic selfish for demanding to be traded, but there is no point guard on this planet who wants to share the ball. They will pass the ball — that’s their job description — but owning the offense is something that virtually all point guards are hardwired to want. To need.
Dragic didn’t like the change, and as the Suns collected yet another great perimeter asset on a good deal in Thomas, they ignored the human cost. They lost their actual star, and the team granted Dragic’s trade request by shipping him to the Miami Heat.
Now Morris wants the same.
The team dealt his brother away — they sold off his twin — and thought all would be fine. But as they didn’t realize when they let Johnson leave, or when they were cashing in on first-round picks rather than giving Nash, Amar’e Stoudemire and Shawn Marion the help they needed, this isn’t a hedge fund.
You can’t just view everything as an asset.
These are people.
It would be easier if they weren’t and you could play fantasy basketball in the front office, but that isn’t real life. Some learn the hard way. Others, as the Suns keep proving, just never learn.
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