NBA PLAY-IN TOURNAMENT: PELICANS vs CLIPPERS

April 15, 2022

Marcus Morris

Postgame Press Conference

Pelicans 105, Clippers 101

Q. Marcus, obviously not the way you wanted the season to end. What can you say about the locker room, the season?

MARCUS MORRIS: I mean, it was a good season. Obviously we wanted to make the playoffs. From the season we had, all the ups and downs, we deserved to. Give them credit, they played well, stayed resilient when they was down, got the win.

Q. You have off-season decisions to make. How do you see next year going? Is this a team that has enough to win a title when healthy?

MARCUS MORRIS: Sure, yeah.

Q. Ty has been praising you all season with being a very instrumental veteran voice during moments of adversity. What has been your message during this time, including when you found out that P.G. wouldn't be with you tonight?

MARCUS MORRIS: Man, first of all, that was very tough going without our best player. I just told him, Everybody in here (indiscernible) team. We all NBA players, played a lot of the season without P. Just tell guys it's an opportunity to step up, make a name for they-self. Thought we played really well. Thought guys came in, give us a lot of energy. We just fell short.

Q. Young guys on this team got a lot more run than they would have if you had all your pieces. How much can that help going forward? Anything specific you saw that impressed you?

MARCUS MORRIS: First, I was happy for them all down the line. Isaiah, Amir, B. Boston, Zubac is fairly young even though he's been in the league for a while, T. Mann. Down the line, I've seen the growth in all of them. I was very happy for them.

One thing that's probably like same with me, we go from thinking we going to make the playoffs to starting our summer. I think for them it's going to be eye-opening because they never been part of the playoffs yet, as far as rookies. Just the fight we put up this year, as I said earlier, I thought we deserved to make it even though we didn't. Hey, man, it is what it is.

Q. You finished six games ahead of New Orleans. Is there part of you that wishes there was a mechanism...

MARCUS MORRIS: I mean, I'm not a fan of the play-in. I'm not going to sit here and say... We should have won one of those games and we would have been in the playoffs, that's all I really can say.

Q. Is there still a sense of feeling proud of the fight you showed all season, leaving everything on the court?

MARCUS MORRIS: That's a tough question. A tough question.

Honestly it's just tough. It's tough to answer that right now because we fought so hard the entire year. It was a lot of ups and downs, a lot of comebacks. Getting our guys back towards the end, felt like it was turning in the right direction for us. To go down like this, it's tough. It's just tough.

Q. What could this team add to make itself a bulletproof title contender?

MARCUS MORRIS: Again, that's another tough question. I would say one of our biggest needs is a backup point guard. We played a lot of the season without one. T. Mann did a great job stepping in, being a backup P.G. The whole season we didn't have a backup point guard. That's probably the biggest thing.

Q. All season Ty talked about the veterans. He said it was a quiet group. Did you feel like you had to get out of your comfort zone to fill that role?

MARCUS MORRIS: No. Not really. I'm naturally a leader. Even with P.G., Kawhi. It's natural for me. The early part of the season I missed a lot of games, too. Maybe that was the quiet time. Once I started playing, started leading, kind of bringing the guys together. I thought we had a really good group. Locker room presence was really well. Guys enjoyed playing with each other, so...