Let's take some time to appreciate Alvin Gentry, mmkay?

[SUN]

I've been the biggest Alvin Gentry hater here. I found his rotations mind blowing and his approach to defense atrocious. I had issues with his inconsistency and lack of toughness. He never seemed to hold players accountable, especially after Nash left. I always felt Nash was the backseat driver, and Gentry's passiveness was on full display during his tenure here. When the team clicked, he was okay, but when we failed, we failed hard.

[RunDogGun]

I've been the biggest Alvin Gentry hater here. I found his rotations mind blowing and his approach to defense atrocious. I had issues with his inconsistency and lack of toughness. He never seemed to hold players accountable, especially after Nash left. I always felt Nash was the backseat driver, and Gentry's passiveness was on full display during his tenure here. When the team clicked, he was okay, but when we failed, we failed hard.

[GMATCallahan]

If there was a conceptual flaw to those Phoenix teams, it's that the Suns' offense proved virtually unstoppable when it featured a dynamic pick-and-roll big man surrounded by four perimeter players, but when it featured two true big men, it struggled more often because the spacing wasn't as wide and defenses could help and recover more readily. Remember how the Suns stormed back late in Game Four of that 2007 series with their small (routine) lineup, or how Phoenix would fall into big holes versus the Lakers in the 2010 Western Conference Finals before mounting impressive (although not always ultimately successful) comebacks in the second half after removing the true center. And a year ago, I was reviewing the third quarter of Game One of the 2005 Western Conference Finals and when the Suns attempted to play Stoudemire and Steven Hunter simultaneously, their offense sputtered. Kurt Thomas could obviously shoot much better than Hunter, but he couldn't stretch the defense like a three-point shooter, nor could he place athletic and slashing pressure on the defense. Thus the Suns' attack didn't prove quite as dynamic and the defense's job became easier.

Well, here we have it again: D'Antoni, correctly examining his efficiency numbers, decided that Howard and Gasol, two true big men, really should not be playing together in his system. So there's the perpetual dilemma: either you change the system, in which case Nash is not necessarily an elite player (he never shot as high as .490 from the field or averaged as many as 9.0 assists per game prior to entering D'Antoni's system), or you remove the second big man.

[GMATCallahan]

I've been the biggest Alvin Gentry hater here. I found his rotations mind blowing and his approach to defense atrocious. I had issues with his inconsistency and lack of toughness. He never seemed to hold players accountable, especially after Nash left. I always felt Nash was the backseat driver, and Gentry's passiveness was on full display during his tenure here. When the team clicked, he was okay, but when we failed, we failed hard.

What was Gentry's "approach to defense"?

When Beasley failed to justify the opportunity that Gentry gave him, the head coach severely reduced Beasley's role. Gentry also tried Dudley, Brown, and Tucker in both the starting lineup and reserve unit, mixing and matching in an effort to unlock something, but there was probably not much to unlock. The change to Hunter may prove beneficial, but the problems extend way beyond the coach. In the NBA, you need advantageous players who complement each other and no amount of coaching excellence can completely compensate for deficiencies in the central area. As I wrote earlier, Doc Rivers' Celtics did not make the playoffs in 2006 and 2007 and didn't even win as many as 34 games either season, while Jerry Sloan's Jazz missed the postseason three straight years from 2004-2006, including a 26-win campaign in 2005.

[GMATCallahan]

Lets be real here. Gentry is a terrible coach. I watch every game and I get so annoyed watching Telfair play. Telfair, Brown, and o'neal all play at the same time and they are all the worst.

As a head coach, how can you justify playing Telfair and O'Neal 8 4th quarter minutes over Dragic and Gortat practically every game? By the time they come back in with 4 minutes to go either they're out of rhythm or the game is already lost.

Maybe the justification is that Gortat and Dragic have been mediocre players and in any given game, O'Neal and Telfair could be more effective. Besides, Dragic has received two-thirds of the minutes at point guard, so Gentry has given him ample time.

You can't be called a bust and avg 20 ppg in any season. It's just not true. Beasley is not a bust

Beasley has never averaged 20 ppg in a season and when he averaged 19.2. points per game two years ago, he averaged more points than his team won games, which indicates that his points were of little value. Minnesota improved dramatically last season by significantly reducing the roles of both Beasley and Wesley Johnson. What does that fact tell you?

Gentry killed Beasleys confidence early. Then moving him to the bench sealed the deal.

Beasley averaged 27.6 minutes in his first 21 games as a Sun and 30.3 minutes in his first 11 games as a Sun. To the extent that he wasn't receiving even more playing time, the reason was that he proved pathetic, a front-court scorer with little all-around value who was remarkably inefficient and bogging down the team's offense. In fact, over his first 20 games, Beasley's True Shooting Percentage (scoring efficiency) was .434.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/pla ... l_advanced

Do you know how awful a .434 True Shooting Percentage happens to be over the course of an extended period, especially for a front-court player? And Beasley was averaging 12.2 field goal attempts per contest over those first 20 games, meaning that the combination of a decent-sized volume with horrendous inefficiency represented a severe liability.

The bottom line is that after the rotten experiment of the first quarter of a season, Gentry began using Beasley exactly as anyone should use Beasley and precisely as I'd prescribed when the rumors about signing him first surfaced last summer. That is to say that Beasley should be used as a scorer off the bench whose minutes expand if he's hot and contract if he's not.

And that's it.

Now every time Beasley comes in the game he either tries to prove himself by taking bad shots and trying to do to much or he gets complacent because he knows he's coming out in 5 seconds.

That's how Beasley played early in the year when Gentry was giving him tons of offensive opportunities. The guy lacks any above-average skill, his athleticism is mediocre, and his Basketball IQ is very, very low.

He started the season in a funk, every offensive player goes through it especially on a new team. Only difference with Beasley was he played for Gentry who doesn't understand that and didn't let him shoot himself out of it and now it's turned into a confidence thing.

The issue is not just Beasley missing shots, it's how he plays. He forces his game constantly, rendering him inherently inefficient. He lacks the explosiveness and technique to create separation in one-on-one situations, but he loves to play one-on-one. He lacks the strength to establish position and he struggles to create clean looks for himself. He routinely makes awful decisions, such as receiving a switch against Derek Fisher and still settling for a twenty-two-foot jumper, and he badly struggles to play within the flow of the offense. Beasley lacks the intelligence needed for the NBA game, especially given his lack of physical advantages. If you can't overwhelm opponents physically or athletically, then you especially need to be shrewd and crafty and Beasley is the opposite. He's Carmelo Anthony without the body and the game, which makes him a "zero sum" player at best and a huge negative at worst. In short, Beasley's downside isn't worth his upside.

Dudley is not a sg in any universe. And even less a starter. He's a great 6th man because he brings energy and consistency. Again gentry doesn't understand this.

Evidently, you don't understand that while Dudley is not an ideal shooting guard due to his lack of speed and athleticism, he is arguably the Suns' best player right now (not their most talented, but their most efficient and effective) and unquestionably their best perimeter shooter. Really, Dudley is Phoenix's only good perimeter shooter at the present time, so he needs to be out there. And if he's starting with P.J. Tucker, then at least Phoenix boasts two tough, physical, aggressive defenders at the swingman spots.

Wesley Johnson is a shooter. A 6'8 sg that can cause matchup problems. He should've been starting from day 1. Brown should never get more than 15 min a game.

Wesley Johnson is an afterthought, a front-court player dumped by Rick Adelman with a career field goal percentage below .400 and a career True Shooting Percentage of .482 (which is very bad over a big sample, especially for a front-court player).

You can't bench Scola for Morris for like 8 games then for no apparent reason bench Morris again. There's goes Morris confidence and you get the same output from scola either way.

While I too would like to see more minutes for Morris, blaming Gentry isn't entirely fair when the front office jumbled the roster by inking Beasley and Scola in the first place, thus almost automatically eroding Morris' playing time, regardless of whether he is starting or not. Nor can one overlook Morris' frustrating passivity and frequent lapses.

So now you have a disgruntled starting C because he's not getting the ball because coach is an idiot.

Gortat "not getting the ball" speaks more to Dragic's failures than Gentry's.

Your starting pg is losing his confidence because his backup, who on any other team would be a 3rd string pg is playing in crunch time.

So every player is struggling because he has lost his confidence, and every player has lost his confidence because of Gentry. Couldn't the problem just be that you severely overrated most of these guys? Dragic is in his fifth season and he has rarely constituted a consistent floor leader, one reason why I wanted to sign Jeremy Lin instead of him last summer.

Your new big fa signing Beasley has no confidence in his game because coach is an idiot.

Or maybe the problems are that Beasley has almost no game and the Suns' front office proved idiotic to sign him in the first place.

Morris has no confidence because he was doing everything right and loses his starting job.

Brown chucking up everything because he's trying to regain his starting job

Tucker taking jump shots because no one is guarding him because he can't shoot.

O'neal trying to prove he can still play so some team can sign him next year

All this is gentrys fault. If your team is in every game and has a chance to win in the 4th quarter and never does that's coaches fault. It means he can't call plays and doesn't know how to get it done.

"All this" is a sign that these players are all marginal-to-mediocre, with no stars or anyone who naturally leads to offensive efficiency, and "all this" is a sign that the front office gave Gentry a poor roster that for some strange reason, many fans here (such as yourself) wildly overrate.

I think the team fired gentry so that they could actually see what Beasley and Wes Johnson can do before the deadline because gentry has made the front office make bad decisions because of his ineptitude

The Suns' front office should have never signed those guys in the first place. Why do you think that other teams let them go for nothing?

A better coach might have squeezed a couple more wins out of this bunch and perhaps Hunter will be that better coach, but fans such as yourself are coloring on the margins based on delusions and romantic daydreams, while ignoring the big picture.

The only way for this team to have been competitive, to have won 35-40 games, would have for Dragic to play on a borderline All-Star level and the fact that he has not done so says everything about him and very little about Gentry. I hope that Lindsey Hunter, as a former point guard himself, can get into Dragic's ear, but for as long as I have watched him in Phoenix, Dragic has struggled to effectively run a half-court offense on a possession-to-possession basis. Certainly, Gentry should not be blamed for Dragic's passivity, the point guard's failure to place pressure on the defense, and his failure to take the initiative and turn the corner more regularly. The fundamental problem lies in how Dragic plays, not in who's playing him or whether he's playing 32 minutes per contest instead of 38 minutes. What about Tony Parker, who has never averaged more than 34.4 minutes and hasn't averaged more than 32.6 minutes since 2009? What about Steve Nash, who has never averaged more than 35.4 minutes and has not averaged more than 33.6 minutes since 2008? Again, I hope that Hunter helps Dragic, but the player is the one who fans should hold accountable.