Marcus Morris withdraws from the Spurs agreement and reportedly signed a contract with Knicks

here are some lacrimation of military quality, from Jared Weiss of The Athletic's:

This is in reference to the developing mess of Marcus Morris. If you did not follow a recap: On July 6, Morris, an unrestricted free agent, would have entered into a $ 20 million, two-year contract (with a player option for that second year) with the San Antonio Spurs . Then yesterday, in the light of news that the New York Knicks were about to sign a $ 21 million two-year deal with Reggie Bullock, and would have more money to spend under the salary cap of the league, Morris would have reconsidered his options; it now seems that he intends to withdraw from his agreement with the Spurs in favor of a one year contract with the Knicks. The apparent logic is that either agreement would allow him to reinstate the free agency next summer, but the Knicks can offer him a much higher salary by then, which is an acceptable compromise to give up to the insurance policy represented by this optional second year.

It seems to have ruined everything for San Antonio. According to all reports available, the assumption that Morris was an agreement is what prompted the Spurs to transfer striker Dāvis Bertāns to the Washington Wizards in the negotiations that allowed the team to sign another new agreement. independent agent, DeMarre. Carroll. If the organization had not assumed that she was about to pay Morris, she might have simply signed Carroll, without it being necessary to clear a ceiling, exchanging with Bertans. Now he has no more Bertans, and he has no Morris, and the reserve of possible free agent replacements for either one became rather shallow during the four days that his brain had imagined to have with Morris.

It's a difficult break for the Spurs, one of the most stable and admired stores of all American professional sports, and especially because it still operates in the dark shadow of its unexpected break with the former pillar of the Kawhi Leonard franchise. You will surely remember that Leonard was absent almost the entire 2017-2018 season, seemingly dissatisfied with the way the organization handled his leg injuries, and then was forced to leave the city by the trade. Next summer, then won a ring and an MVP finals reward the next season. So you can imagine that another player unexpectedly pulled out a previous deal to play for the team, leaving him suddenly shorthanded and without a lot of obvious chances to replace him … well, that could to be a little smarter.

But it's very revealing that until now the media (and professional whist dogwritten by hand on the sacredness of the noble "chord" (and that The Athletic doofus is not the only one to do it or do it publicly, even Adrian Wojnarowski, of ESPN, does not used the word "committed" reference to Morris's agreement with the Spurs) emphasized the situation of Morris, and not, for example, that of Bullock. Let's revisit that.

Bullock, a 28-year-old wing who spent last season with the Pistons and then the Lakers, had an agreement in place with the Knicks at the end of the day, July 1, nine days ago, for two years and $ 21 million (with a team option for this second season). Now, because of an unspecified problem apparently related to his health – Woj calls it "an emergent situation" – the Knicks pulled out of that. The organization "reworked the conditions to reduce its financial commitment," according to Woj, because it suits him better and because the organization has the power.

I bet Reggie Bullock would have liked this initial agreement to work as a binding and binding commitment! He will lose many millions of dollars because it was not one. I wonder if he made any plans or purchases in the nine days following the time the Knicks organization agreed to pay him $ 21 million over the next two years and when she decided unilaterally to prefer to pay him a small fraction of that. As far as I know, no one at The Athletic or anywhere else has called for the Knicks NBA ban for a year.

Believe it or not, the NBA does have a mechanism in place to create a formal, binding and binding version of the negotiating agreement between an actor and an organization. It's a "contract". Both parties sign and must abide by the terms until it expires. If a player steps back, for example by unilaterally withdrawing from his agreement to play for the team, he may even be suspended. That would probably satisfy even Jared Weiss's desire to see the players dragged down. The Spurs and Marcus Morris, like the Knicks and Reggie Bullock, just had not signed it yet. And until they did, neither party had any contractual obligation to the other.

Who can guess why they did not do it? The contracts of NBA players, like any other in the big professional sports, can be extremely complex legal documents. presumably, it may take some time to draft one and bring the parties together to examine and sign all the lines that make it up. This is not a novelty for many things to be done in the interval between an agreement made public and the actual signing of documents, based in part on the presumption that the terms of this agreement are in place. But if, Sunday night, an unforeseen mishap in the ABC had allowed the Spurs to have Joel Embiid sign in the space provided for this purpose for the Morris contract, you can be sure that they do not do not tell him. "Sorry, Joel, we've already made an informal agreement to pay this money to Marcus Morris."

More specifically, if that happened, the Spurs would be looted for that. An artifact of the coverage of modern basketball, a calling now more than ever largely exercised by aspirant aspirants, almost naked auditioning for leading positions in the league, is that any clever analysis must take precedence of the priors general managers; the players, in this context, are abstract fungible assets and behave much better. When the Knicks pull themselves away from years and millions of people in their previously agreed deal with a mysteriously compromised player, such as a silly stepfather, effectively removing dollar notes every time his glass of water empties, it is a trivial matter of basketball; if any part of it is the subject of criticism, it is the team that did not show due diligence at the start. When Marcus Morris renounces an unfulfilled deal with a team in favor of a better deal with another, it is a violation of the sanctity of Uh trust in the transactional market of Uh or elsewhere.

In the same vein, the Spurs had to sacrifice Bertans to offer their agreed agreement with Morris, due to a salary cap on which the owners themselves constantly insist. Is the existence of the salary cap and the types of difficult choices it imposes on the windows a problem for the various market observers when the Spurs unilaterally decided to send Dāvis Bertāns from the best organization of the NBA to one of its worst, 1600 km apart, to make way for another guy that they preferred? In the end, Morris's criticism boils down to "This guy allowed a system that was designed and systematically deployed to strip players of money and autonomy, to trick a team, for once, and to make it particularly bad.

Morris's decision is as good as the Knicks'. More importantly, it's just as fair with the rules of the league, which so far rightly dealt only with contracts such as contracts and non-contractual agreements, such as non-binding It turns out that Morris does not make this decision the seat of institutional power in sport. In response to this, in the ridiculous appeal to punish the players to seek the best deal in the absence of one as in any case. various simpatico to qualify sure the so-called new horror of independent and mobile players who like the idea of ​​choosing their place of living and their work, you can see the contours of exactly on whose behalf many NBA journalists and analysts do their job – informally anyway, and at least for the moment without a contract.