Joe Tsai may have had his fingerprints all over one particular signing.
Veteran basketball reporter Marc Stein wrote this week in a post to Substack that the Brooklyn Nets owner Tsai made a personal recruiting pitch to Nets free agent acquisition Markieff Morris this summer. Morris, 33, signed a one-year, $2.9 million deal with Brooklyn earlier in September.
The veteran forward Morris is not too impactful of a basketball player any more. But he is a respected veteran who has made playoff runs with five different teams and won a title with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020. Stein adds in his report that the Nets were “desperate” to bring in a veteran who could command the respect of volatile stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.
As for Tsai, he became the full owner of the Nets in 2019 after initially purchasing a minority stake in the team two years earlier. We know that Tsai has a hands-on style (sometimes very openly so), and his reported personal recruitment of Morris here is just another example of that.
