Marcin Gortat’s hairstyle was infuriating his teammates.

Markieff Morris started bringing clippers to Washington Wizards practices. Gortat, wily vet that he is, would sneak out before the power forward could touch his mohawk.

“I was pulling the Houdini trick where I was disappearing right at the end of the practice,” Gortat said last week.

Then, before Game 3 of the Wizards’ first-round series against the Toronto Raptors, the 34-year-old center took care of the situation himself.

“I finally said, ‘You know what, I’m done fixing it. You know, it takes a lot of time to maintain that,’ ” Gortat said. “So I shaved it. And I’m glad.”

While his hair was a target of disdain for teammates, it’s Gortat’s playing style which frustrates opponents.

Amid loud debate following Game 2 about whether Gortat should be replaced in the starting lineup, the Polish big man has made an impact against the top-seeded Raptors with his physical brand of screening. Through four games, Gortat leads all players in the postseason by averaging 6.8 screen assists per game, the statistic that measures how often his blocking moves on the offensive end have created points for teammates.

“That’s how I made my living in his league,” said Gortat, who has played 11 years in the NBA, “and that’s how I continue to play.”

The Raptors, however, are trying to curb his go-to move.

Before the series, Raptors Coach Dwane Casey highlighted Gortat’s screens — likely as a way to subtly put officials on alert for offensive fouls. As the team returned to Toronto locked in a 2-2 tie with the Wizards, Casey once again called for closer scrutiny of those plays.

“We gotta look at some of the hits and fouls, we’re getting hit at the rim, and understand that we’ve gotta play through those hits. We’re getting cracked, we’re getting hit at the rim, but we’ve gotta go ahead and finish those no matter what happens,” Casey told reporters Monday, then singling out Gortat.

“Gortat’s one of the best screeners in the league of clamping. We’ve gotta get off his body and not let our arms get tied up with his arms. It’s a new screening style.”

For Gortat to be the center of a campaign against the Wizards’ physicality may come as a surprise. His style may not be as patently physical as Morris. When the Wizards need a bully, Morris, the mastermind of Deathrow D.C., dutifully steps into the role. Gortat, however, doesn’t get into shoving matches nor does he draw the attention of referees for hard fouls under the rim. A point that substantiates his preference of play: Although Gortat has spent more than a decade patrolling the paint as a big man, he has not ever collected a flagrant-2 foul.

“I can’t afford to go crazy bizarre and then sit [on] the bench and see centers abuse my team on the boards … I can’t help the team if I’m sitting on the bench,” Gortat said. “I’m just not that type of a person who’s going to foul you hard or aim at your head when I’m trying to go for the ball. I ain’t going to do that. I’ve never been that person. I know I had issues with many coaches telling me, ‘I need you to foul him hard. I need you to literally ‘eff’ him up.’ But I just can’t. I just can’t because that’s not me. I’ve never been that type of player.”

Such a flagrant act, interpreted as unnecessary and aggressive, undermines Gortat’s understated physicality.

Instead of bumping with center Jonas Valanciunas, his younger and bigger counterpart who has made 18 of 25 shots in the one-on-one matchup, Gortat keeps him on the move. When Gortat succeeds in the matchup, it’s by forcing Valanciunas to shuffle his feet when the 7-foot, 255-pound big man would rather stand near the rim and protect against a John Wall drive. In Game 4, Gortat made 6 of 8 shots for 12 points. Many were scored off assists as Wall drew the defense and Gortat glided away from Valanciunas.

“I think I have a little mobility advantage over him,” Gortat said, “so I just got to continue to be athletic and move around the rim, try to finish easy possessions.”

The man with “Houdini tricks” for escaping teammates’ clippers also knows how to avoid a referee’s whistle. In one play in Game 4, Gortat backed off providing an on-ball screen for Bradley Beal but still helped him out by clearing a path. Gortat made a swift move to push center Jakob Poetl away from the rim but dropped his hands and backed off before officials could see what he was doing.

“He’s very slick with it. He does a good job of doing it when the ref doesn’t see it and also, he’s a physical guy,” Beal said. “He takes bumps and bruises. Sometimes I don’t understand how he does it, like practices every day, lifts every day, plays in all the games. The wear and tear on his body is crazy, I’m sure, but he’s a physical guy. Playing his position, he has to every single night. He does it.”

The Wizards might have hated his hair, but they respect Gortat’s game.

“He sets great screens, fouls guys when necessary, boxes out,” Beal said. “He does everything we need him to do.”

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