"Soft" Euro vs Heat Culture "Tough" Guy
Potential injury, fines, technical fouls and suspension could have all been avoided if it weren't for the premium placed on preserving some increasingly obsolete basketball stereotypes.
Now that the dust has settled, I don’t know how hot of a take it is for me to say that both Markieff Morris and Nikola Jokic will come out of this having gotten what they deserve. Almost, anyway.
If you haven’t seen it already, the closing minutes of the Denver Nugget’s doomed-to-be-overlooked waxing of the Miami Heat got really ugly, for no apparent reason:
‘Keef saw the Joker crossing half-court with the ball and went to commit every NBA fan’s favourite ‘take’ foul (an intentional foul to save your team from having to sprint back on defense - drastically increased as a tactic so far this season). Instead of the usual ritual of a half-hearted slap or hug and then an instant nod at the referee to acknowledge that you fouled the guy, Morris jammed knees with Jokic while also digging a not-inconsiderable elbow into his ribs, before promptly turning around to walk away.
Jokic took the foul, gathered himself, and proceeded to level Morris with a loaded-up shoulder and forearm hit to the spine.
Jokic got ejected. Morris got ejected. Jimmy Butler picked up a technical foul for yelling at Jokic as he exited the arena. Markieff’s twin brother and Clippers Forward, Marcus (who happens to have his own history of getting into it with Denver bigs), tweeted Jokic looking for a fight. Jokic’s two brothers, Nemanja and Strahinja, actually created a Twitter account so they could give Marcus a piece of their mind. At the time of writing, they’ve picked up 53K followers in a little less than 48 hours. Silver linings, I guess. Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra called Jokic’s retaliation “a very dangerous and dirty play”. Jokic said that he knew that he had made a mistake. He was given a one-game suspension. Both Morris and Butler were slapped with financial penalties.
There’s a ton to unpack here, but first, just a bit of house-keeping:
First off, a handful of disclaimers:
More so than any point that I will make in this article, I will say that I don’t condone violence. It has no place in basketball, or life.
In my wheelchair basketball playing days, I have been involved in or near exactly zero physical altercations of this scale. Shout-out to wheelchair users for seemingly all being self-aware enough to know just how tragic it would look if a fight broke out while we’re all strapped into our aluminium exoskeletons.
Nikola Jokic is at worst my second-favourite basketball player, and I will try not to let that colour my opinion of what happened.
Both of the Morris twins have enough of a track record of unnecessary fouls, cheap shots and general shenanigans that I struggle to have any sympathy for Markieff in this instance, but I will try not to let that colour my opinion of what happened.
The ‘take’ foul sucks in all contexts and makes basketball worse, even when implemented smartly by the defensive player.
The “Soft Euro” label has been around for as long as I have watched the NBA. The idea behind it is that Americans believe that European basketball players can’t match their athleticism and are too scared to play physical basketball, instead having to resort to skill-based activities such as high-post passing and making jump shots.
There certainly have been some European players who have struggled to adapt to the NBA game, with high draft picks such as Andrea Bargnani and Dragan Bender being obvious examples. This tends to set the whole European big man archetype back by years at a time, despite some very obvious outliers in guys like Jusuf Nurkic, Jonas Valanciunas and Domantas Sabonis. It also continues to enable complete ignorance of how much more physical the style of FIBA basketball is compared to the NBA, as well as the fact that European basketball is perpetually about three to five years ahead of the States in terms of tactical evolution. If you want a shining example of that, look at how the ‘take’ foul itself used to be called the ‘Euro’ foul after being invented in Europe and now legislated out of their game, a step which the NBA is currently trying to figure out.
However you try and slice it, the anti-Euro bias still exists at this point. Even with the evidence to say that European prospects can hang in the USA, you still get Luka Doncic being drafted behind Marvin Bagley III because all he did was get named MVP of the Regular Season and Final Four of the second-best league in the world, whereas Bagley played half a season at Duke and beat up on some college kids.
Nikola Jokic was the MVP of the NBA last year, and I think it’s relatively public knowledge that there was some resistance to the idea of him claiming the award even though any case against him verged on insulting to basketball. Whether anyone will ever admit it or not, anyone who didn’t vote him the MVP probably couldn’t get past the fact that he doesn’t look like a media-coronated superstar.
Worth a shot.
If the superficial differences are enough to make the awards voters choose a less-deserving MVP candidate, imagine how world-class basketball players feel when they’re getting made to look daft by a chubby dude from rural Serbia, who just happens to look like the one Monstar who didn’t get his fair share of the basketball powers.
Ironically, the thing that I believe drove Markieff Morris to take a cheap shot at Jokic is also probably the most important fact from this game that nobody will care to remember. That is that Miami, who, primarily through trademark work ethic and snarl, have looked as legitimate as any team in the early season, were getting stomped by a Nugs team that was missing its second and third best player.
So, why did Morris see being down 17 with 159 seconds remaining as his time to strike? Because he is a tough guy brought into a team of tough guys, and they look and act the part too much to get walloped by somebody who doesn’t. As James put it when he read my first draft of this article, Heat Culture dictates that Miami players remind any opponent who is clowning them that “while you might be better than us at basketball, you will NEVER be better than us at this thing that matters less”.
If any of that seems like too much of an assumption on my part, I’ll happily point you to the 2020 playoff series where Marcus Morris took not one, but two swipes at Luka Doncic, who is also European and was also making his predominantly American opponents look like chumps.
Before I dive into the Jokic portion of this, I should probably state that I think the Morris twins might have basketball’s least-deserved reputation as tough guys. Sure, they’re from famously tough and unforgiving Philadelphia (ask Ben Simmons), they both measure roughly 6’8” and roughly 220lbs, and are made to seem more intimidating because there are two of them whereas there is usually only one of most people. But they do have a history of cheap shots, trouble picking on someone their own size, and having a reputation for being hard-ass dudes because they look like it, and that’s about where it ends.
Nikola Jokic got branded as both “dirty” and “soft” the instant he landed that forearm shiver on Morris’ back, whereas it was days later before I heard any mention of the fact ‘Keef landing his calculated cheap shot on Jokic and immediately turning to walk away wasn’t exactly Spartan behaviour.
Here’s a quick run-down of options I believe Jokic could have taken in response to the foul from Morris, and how they might have been perceived:
Flop: Jokic takes the contact and falls to the floor like he’s been hit by a sniper, exaggerating the contact in an attempt to earn Morris a more severe penalty. The media and basketball-viewing public are outraged and declare him soft for flopping. They choose to ignore the fact that it is yet another European product that has been much too widely adopted by American players.
Don’t React: Jokic stands stoic and cool, taking the high road and not giving Morris the satisfaction, while also sinking his freethrows. The media and basketball-viewing public are outraged and declare him soft for getting punked and not standing up for himself on the way to a double-digit win.
Retaliate: Jokic takes the foul, gathers himself, and proceeds to level Morris with a loaded-up shoulder and forearm hit to the spine. The media and basketball-viewing public are outraged and declare him soft and dirty for a from-behind attack on an opponent who attacked him and then turned around. They choose to ignore the fact that Patrick Beverley did this to Chris Paul while with the Clippers, and was then hailed as the guy who would bring some grit, toughness and pride to Minnesota upon his arrival there. They also choose to ignore that they are the ones who spent the Lob City years pleading for media-coronated superstar Blake Griffin to retaliate when he was being repeatedly laid out by overmatched opponents. Griffin never did, and was ultimately declared soft by the media and basketball-viewing public.
Ultimately, one of the top five basketball players on Earth was put in a no-win situation thanks to an average role-player, and he chose the action that he did, even if he later said it was the wrong one.
Morris deserved, at the very least, his flagrant foul assessment and his fine. Whether he deserved to get bulldozed like he did is up to the interpretation of the individual.
Jokic deserved his ejection and subsequent suspension (shout-out to the Nuggets for going on to beat Indiana without their first, second or third best player). It was a dirty move, but one I don’t think that Morris would have seen as beneath him if the roles had been reversed.
Denver deserves credit for a statement win, which they won’t get. Miami deserves some level of criticism for a very real loss, which they won’t have to face.
Above all else, Jokic deserves the “Soft Euro” label about as much as Morris deserves the “Tough Guy” moniker.