The Washington Wizards are bad and Markieff Morris is angry

If time is but a stream in which the Spurs go fishing, then can we at least name the babbling brook Markieff Morris?

On November 26, the Washington Wizards and San Antonio Spurs played a rather sleepy regular season game at the Verizon Center. In this game, San Antonio’s bench outscored Washington’s 35 to 18, and the Spurs took apart the Wizards the way Encyclopedia Brown might dissect a mystery involving a stolen collection of baseball cards.

The only plays not lifted from a middle school coach’s rapture were the made and missed dunks of San Antonio’s high-flying Jonathan Simmons, whose flights to the rim always manage some level of jack-in-the-box wonder. One of these dunks by Simmons began with a revived David Lee turning up court after a defensive rebound. He guided the ball to almost half court before releasing it to Kawhi Leonarrd, and Leonard barely held onto it before tossing an alley oop to Simmons, who sprang, as always, out of nowhere. The play provided the Spurs with an 83 to 69 lead, and afterwards, the players in black and gray all celebrated like eldest sons fly-fishing in A River Runs through It.

Of course, casting the Spurs as proverbial choir boys requires some poorly chosen antithesis, which, given their level of consistency, is just about any franchise not named the Golden State Warriors.

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Enter Washington’s starting power forward Markieff Morris, a talented if largely underwhelming basketball player, who arrived in Washington via trade, or exile, depending on how one looks at it, from Phoenix last February.

Once considered a rising star in the desert, Morris’ off the court troubles, on the court settling, and low price tag rendered him ideal trade bait for only a struggling team like the Wizards. So low was the price tag that all Washington had to give up for his frontcourt versatility was an aging Kris Humphries and a no longer effective DeJuan Blair (and a protected first round pick). So, while Phoenix said, good riddance, the Wizards asked, why not?

After the trade, Washington finished the last 29 games of the 2015-16 campaign 16 and 13, but still missed the playoffs by three games, with a tenth place finish in the Eastern Conference. If not a step backwards, the season was at least a major stalling for a team that just a few seasons ago appeared on the verge of a tectonic shift.

After winning less than 30 games per season for half a decade, they not only finished six games above five hundred in 2014, but climbed into the second round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. Moreover, they increased their win total and returned to the second round the following season. While not necessarily the stuff of legend, consecutive trips to the second round had not occurred in the DC area since the days of Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes, in the 1970s. If not a golden age, then then this was at least something worth noting for its scarcity inside the District, where a player had more recently pooped inside a teammate’s shoe.

The young duo of John Wall and Bradley Beal, along with the hope that Kevin Durant might return home, prompted a strong belief that 50-win seasons and trips to the Eastern Conference Finals might soon be on the horizon. The rivalry with LeBron James and Cleveland, which in the days of Gilbert Arenas was a less ridiculous premise than the presence of guns inside the locker room, seemed, once again, only a matter of time. But then the Wizards missed the playoffs last season, whiffed on Durant over the summer, and have started this season as if the lottery were their only life preserver, if only it had not failed them so many times before.

All of which is to suggest that this current age of frustration isn’t so much plastic as it is Styrofoam.

While the Wizards have followed this trajectory before—remember the disintegration of teams built around Rod Strickland, Chris Webber, and Juwan Howard, along with the atomic splitting of Arenas, Antawn Jamison, and Larry Hughes—they haven’t always been here, treading in the motionless waters of a swamp too vast to even fathom.

Once upon a time, the Wizards were the definition of sustained success. But, ever since the decade in which they reached the NBA Finals four times and brought home the championship in 1978, their issues with chemistry and poor play have been anything but biodegradable. And, once again, these negative traits were on full display versus the steadfast Spurs.

In a third quarter where he had scored seven of his twelve points, Markieff Morris drew two personal fouls and two technical fouls to match in a matter of moments. The result was an ejection, and considering he was in the middle of perhaps his best basketball quarter this season, the anger seems especially misguided, as if he simply had decided he was done for the night and had no coherent method for expressing such a fatalist bent than to boil over and head for the locker room.

At the 7:33 mark, Morris was called for reaching in on LaMarcus Aldridge. He took the call as it came. He exhaled. His lower lip trembled in the faintest hint of a pout. Then, with 7:30 on the clock, the whistle blew on an inbounds play, and Morris was called for grabbing Aldridge a second time. The tremble of the lip became a steady stream. He grumbled. Then he grumbled some more. He kept grumbling, and at some point, the referee and the whistle and decorum had no bearing. Morris wasn’t exactly talking to anyone who could hear him. His complaints stretched beyond this particular game and the double-digit deficit his team faced against the San Antonio Spurs, and it’s fitting that no one really knows what syllables the man actually said, just that he said something angry and immutable.

And yet, Morris’ brooding frustration was as focused and understated as the other franchise’s joy. He wasn’t exactly yelling, and he didn’t exactly use the ball as a prop. There have definitely been more volatile occasions in the game of basketball, as well as in his own checkered past. And, on a single night, against a much better opponent it’s somewhat understandable and forgivable to have lost track of one’s temper. However, stretched over seasons and even decades such emotions do tilt the ledger.

When the Wizards were the Bullets, the Spurs were in midst of their own Ice Age, with George Gervin’s efforts consistently thwarted in the postseason by teams such as the Washington Bullets (1978 and 1979). Those days are a long time ago, and so much has changed between the two franchises and the league that the wins and losses appear equally diminished. The Spurs became the Spurs of Tim Duncan and Gregg Popovich, and the Bullets, well, the Bullets became the Wiz. Time can render such apocalyptic tides graceful in their irrevocable state, as if the only path out of Gheorghe Muresan’s shadow was to pair Kwame Brown with Michael Jordan. But that notion of beauty mistakes permanence for inevitability. Washington could have literally drafted any other player in 2002. They could have literally built a dozen other rosters in any given year, and yet here they are with a losing record amidst speculation that either Wall or Beal could one day be dangled as trade bait, too.

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I doubt Morris thought about any of these events as he mumbled his way off the court, but the sentiment of his feelings still paid some level of tribute to the starts and fits in Washington basketball’s journey from history to farce. Because of that decades-long shift, he is as much the current face of the Washington Wizards as anyone else, not due to any inner column of strength, but because of the fissures that render his demeanor so tragically infantile.

John Wall and Bradley Beal, even the man dubbed the Polish Hammer, Marcin Gortat, are all more likely choices for the role, perhaps even better choices. But, at the end of the day, Markieff Morris personifies the franchise’s unwillingness to amend its behaviors and alter its trajectory. And, like the franchise that pays him a tidy sum, he is currently suspended in an inchoate state of being.

This could all end up okay. The season is still quite young, and Saturday night’s ejection was Morris’ first in a Washington uniform. People and athletes do change. But, knowing Morris’ history in Phoenix, it’s easy to imagine all the possible floods lurking on the horizon’s other side.

The scariest part about the world’s many endings is how they tend to arrive by invitation. By the time you can blame the events on a single man, or moment, it’s probably too late to build the ark. In any event, head coach Scott Brooks may want to start packing an umbrella to work everyday.