In his rookie NBA season with the Denver Nuggets, point guard Monte Morris played a total of 25 minutes in three games.
But if newly-signed veteran Isaiah Thomas has not fully rehabilitated from injury by the Denver’s first regular season game on October 17th, Morris is likely bound to get a massive increase in playing time over last year.
On Wednesday, Altitude Sports’ Christopher Dempsey reported on Twitter that although Thomas’ recovery from a lingering hip injury which required arthroscopic surgery last March is progressing, his availability for training camp “remains in question.” In an interview with Dempsey, Nuggets president of basketball operations Tim Connelly made it clear that Thomas would not be rushed back from injury before he was fully healed.
Whether this will prevent Thomas, who is slated to be starting point guard Jamal Murray’s first backup off the bench, from being ready to start the regular season or not remains unclear. But if his rehabilitation does extend into late October or beyond, a window of opportunity will open for Monte Morris to temporarily jump up to second on the depth chart.
The 23-year-old Morris, one of Denver’s two players on two-way contracts in 2017-18, spent the majority of his time last season in the NBA’s developmental G League, where according to NBA.com he played 37 games for the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, averaging 18 points, 6.7 assists, 4.5 rebounds and 1.8 steals while shooting .470 from the field and .344 on 3-pointers in 34.7 minutes per game.
He only played significant NBA minutes in a single game, a 104-130 blowout loss to the Houston Rockets in which several end-of-bench players got more playing time than usual due to the game slipping too far beyond Denver’s reach, with a 12-point deficit at the end of the first quarter growing to 17 by halftime, and ballooning to 27 by the end of the third.
This small, one-game sample of Morris’ play at the NBA level provides the source of the film study footage below. To be clear, it would be wise not to extrapolate too much from such a limited data set. For example, the majority of his offensive scoring plays in the video below are drives. This does track with the fact that in the G League last season he took 316 of his 533 field goal attempts, or 59%, in the restricted area or non-restricted paint, with just 37 attempts (7%) from mid-range, per NBA.com. However, the remaining 178 attempts’ (33%) came from 3-point range, and in this particular game against the Rockets Morris did not attempt any threes, although it should be expected that he will take a fair amount if he logs regular minutes in the Nuggets rotation.
But with that caveat in mind, this film study at a minimum provides some glimpses into Morris’ skill set and capabilities, as well as a few things he will need to work on to have success at the NBA level.
Defense: Expect to see effort… and struggles
At 6’3” with shoes, Morris’ height was about average among 2017 draft combine point guards, per NBA.com, but his 175-pound weight and 6’4” wing span fell near the bottom of the pack. While his height is adequate, the slight frame does not lend itself to excelling defensively at the NBA level. And although Morris did say in an interview on Altitude TV that his weight is now up to 183 pounds and the Nuggets organization wants him to hit 190, he will still be at a physical disadvantage facing up against the league’s stronger, heavier, and bulkier guards.
One of the best things Morris can do to counter this is to put in maximum effort on defense, and fortunately it appears that he is keyed in on doing just that.
Morris consistently does a good job of sticking with the play. In the first clip he gets caught on Tarik Black’s screen, but after Darrell Arthur steps in with some solid help, he gets right back to stay in the grill of Chris Paul, who opts to pass the ball away at the 3-point arc.
Morris has solid defensive fundamentals, staying in front of his man and contesting shots. The fourth clip is a great example of this, where Eric Gordon isos him near the elbow and tries to step back to a pump fake, but Morris doesn’t bite on it, instead just staying planted, keeping a hand up, and forcing a more difficult, contested shot which misses. He may lack some wing span, but with effort he gets some good extension and positioning when contesting.
A knack for steals and disrupting plays is also in Morris’ wheelhouse, as can first be seen here in the third clip when he pokes the ball away from Paul as he’s bringing it up the court. He also seems to have a high basketball IQ and strong awareness of what’s happening on the court, opportunistically intercepting two outlet passes here, and turning defense into offense by quickly running or passing in transition.
Some of how Morris will struggle is seen in the next-to-last clip where there is not much he can do to stop Chris Paul, who posts him up at the mid post on an inbound play clearly designed to exploit what Houston correctly marked as the weak link in Denver’s defense. To be fair, this is a rookie drafted 51st overall in his first real NBA game going up against one of the greatest point guards of all time, but that is a reality Morris will have to face playing one of the league’s deepest positions.
Catching up to the speed of the game is another aspect of Morris’ defense he will likely have to work on. In the final defensive clip, he is guarding Gordon as James Harden brings it up the court, but the Rockets have already started running their play before Morris catches on, allowing Harden to easily set the screen on him on the dribble hand off (DHO), freeing Gordon up for an open 3-pointer.
Offense (Scoring): Expect a lot of drives and a good amount of 3-point shots
Morris’ G League shot distribution was noted above, and in this game he certainly backed up the high frequency of at-rim and paint shots he took for Rio last season, with four of his five shot attempts inside the restricted area, and the fifth just inside the key.
Morris’ strong court awareness comes back into play here, as he has a good nose for sniffing out driving lanes and use dribble penetration to create opportunities for both shots at the rim and, as will be seen below, drive-and-kick plays.
Finishing in traffic will be something Morris will need to work on – another area where his smaller frame and relative lack of strength may put him at a disadvantage. This can be seen in the third clip, where he succeeds in driving to the rim, but gets caught in the weeds and shoots directly upward into the bottom of the backboard (where it takes a fortunate bounce into the hands of Juancho Hernangomez for the putback).
Also on display here are Morris’ ability to run the pick-and-roll (PnR), as in the fourth clip where Trey Lyles attacks the close-out, and to create his own shot off the dribble, in this case a short mid-range jumper in the paint.
As mentioned above, Morris shot .344 on 3-pointers in the G League, where he took one third of his shots, with another 59% of his shots coming at the rim or in the paint. That is a high concentration of high-value shots in his distribution, which is reflected in an efficient effective field goal percentage (eFG%), which accounts for the value of 3-point shots, of .531. For context, per CleaningTheGlass.com Damian Lillard had an eFG% of .524 last season, putting him in the 74th percentile.
If Morris’ G League efficiency translates to the NBA level, which seems within reach given the proficiency at drives on display here, it will bode well for him being a reasonably capable scorer off the bench who will not be a liability. And while it is highly unlikely he will provide the same punch as Will Barton or a healthy Isaiah Thomas, being a net neutral-to-positive player on offense should be considered more than sufficient from Denver’s third point guard.
Offense (Passing): Expect controlled, competent passing and solid ball-handling
Of all guards in the G League last season with at least 20 games and 20 minutes per game, Monte Morris had the best assist-to-turnover ratio at 3.51, and was ninth in turnover ratio at 7.8 while averaging 6.6 assists per game, according to NBA.com. At the same time, the Denver Nuggets had a net rating of +3.4 when their starters were on the court, but that dropped to -4.3 for their bench, resulting in the third-worst starter-bench drop-off in the league.
In other words, one of the most important areas Denver will need to improve to make a playoff run this season will be bolstering the bench to avoid falling off that cliff. They will be counting on Isaiah Thomas to lead that effort when he is healthy, but Morris’ competency in avoiding mistakes in ball handling and passing, along with his control in running an offense, should also be helpful to that end.
Morris’ passing is not exceedingly flashy, but he does a very solid job of getting the ball to his teammates in their spots. He has good court vision to complement his aforementioned awareness, which helps in finding seams for entry passes for cuts, dunks and layups. He also uses his ability to drive to draw defenses into the paint and free up good looks on perimeter shots when he kicks it out.
Morris seems to play in a fairly traditional point guard mold, so it will be good if he can, as seen in the second clip, work on being a little more dynamic in running DHOs, PnRs, and generally incorporating more motion into his game. It almost seems in these plays as if the coaching staff has instructed him to just hang out above the 3-point line unless he’s driving the lane, which makes the offense more stagnant than Denver’s usual free-flowing style of play, but might make sense in terms of not piling too much onto a rookie’s plate. But as a permanent member of the team on a fully-guaranteed contract, with an entire summer and training camp with the team, it seems reasonable to expect Morris to come out with a more fluid, and better-integrated style of play in the upcoming season.
As a final note on Morris’ passing, he seems to already have a solid chemistry with both Lyles and Hernangomez, and if he is called upon to play a rotation role off the bench to start the season, this may help him get a leg up on a smooth transition into regular playing time.
