RealGM

I found myself purposely trying to keep myself from being sucked in by the vacuum the Suns game 4 blowout created. I guess that game is symbolic for how maddening this franchise can be and has been for almost the last half decade.

I thought they fought valiantly in Game 5. I thought finally this team showed the hustle and committment it lacked on defense. When they erased that 9 point deficit, I saw all the guys working in unison and it was without Shaq in the game to cover Duncan. However, mental mistakes in crunch time did them in once again. Don't get me wrong, the tripping calls, the continuance of Kurt Thomas flopping, and the Bowen play at the end were maddening .........but our own mental mistakes don't allow us to overcome bullshat non-calls or calls like those.

So what now? Honestly, after taking a step back - I think nearly everyone is caught up in emotional hoopla specifically rooted in the inability to realistically weigh patience vs. change. This current incarnation of the Phoenix Suns had to go back to training camp with 29 games left in the season. To expect a championship to rise up out of the dynamic complications involved was simply naive and nonsensical. Unfortunately the Shaq move wreaked of panic to match the rest of the west, specifically the Lakers, so automatically this season became the focus. Moreoever the age of these players further that frantic "it's now or never."

I have been as harsh of a critic of Mike D'Antoni as any. He's stubborn and his philopophy on basketball falls tremendously short as it breeds laziness and lack of attention to detail on defense. But what coach isn't flawed? All you have to do is look around the league to understand just how in-demand D'Antoni is going to be if he's let go and that speaks volumes.

Can Mike D improve as a coach? Surely he can....and who does he need to help him with that? Kerr, or whoever Kerr can get to help D'Antoni in the areas he clearly lacks. If he's too stubborn to accept mentorship, then fine - jettison him. Yet if he's willing to do what's best for the team, he's only going to grow as a coach and the team hopefully follows suit.

I'm sorry, but nobody else we can bring in here is going to take this collection of players to the promise land. If you axe D'Antoni now, you have to do a major roster overhaul to match the next coach.....and at this stage, that is not possible......at all........ we don't have any moveable assets or assets we'd recieve fair value for in a trade. You also have to consider the condition of the players we have in regards to their age. Some guy on this board mentioned Pat Riley. Honestly, Pat Riley? You think this team can handle 3 hour hardcore practice sessions every single day? Did you not see what happened to Shaq in Miami? Give me a break.

.........but practice is definately a keyword here. While this team doesn't need to be put through a military style boot camp, it's clear the things they don't do in practice come back to bite them in the arse come game time and lead to poor in-game recognition on defense.

Judging by the make up of this roster, the key is coming up when Nash has a team option after this season and then the contracts of Shaq and Bell expire the year after. While it feels like we're stuck in vapor lock mode, it would be unwise to make panic moves before we can truly change the shape and direction of this team - if that's what it really needs.

When I look at the team now, it's pretty simple what it needs:

- For D'Antoni to back off his stubborness

- An assistant coach who can lead the focus on defensive principles in the same way Tim Thibideaux is doing for Doc Rivers.

- Once and for all a backup PG for Nash. We've been ignoring this glaring deficiency for years pretending guys like Diaw, Hill, and co. would be able to do it.

- A spot up jump shooter

.............. to think that the shortcomings of the players on this roster is all Mike's fault is shortsighted. It all comes down to mental preparation and committment. Mike's not the only guy who needs to change. It's clear a guy like Amare Stoudemire still has quite a ways to go as his mental lapses are simply unexcusable at this stage in his career. I mean the guy can't even box out properly on Fabricio Oberto or flash out on a shooter after the guy chasing him down has been picked off.

I personally like the versatility of the roster. It was clear to me that we could still push the ball at times, but we were still learning how to play in the half court set, which cannot be completely tought in 29 regular season games. You can never be too versatile as the San Antonion Spurs have shown.

I look at a guy like Jerry Sloan and I understand why the Jazz have kept him around all these years. In seeing the coaching carousel go round and round, you have to hold onto people who are clearly talented, provided that they want to improve. If Mike D wants to improve then I would like to see him stay. If he doesn't, then he has to go, but the timing here is what is important. Move him now and this roster has no place to go and the new guy is going to be stuck with nothing but garbage.

Great post. Great read

One the biggest mistakes you have recently made was trading that #1 pick you got from the Hawks and let him go to Boston.
Rondo was a perfect fit for the backup role to Nash; he would have had a couple of years to learn and be the next great playmaker in Phoenix.

Now you have to figure out what can be gotten for the limited athletes you currently have.

While I admit meeting the Spurs in the playoffs is just maddening, you still have to be able to just out play them. Shaq didn't make a difference this year and you didn't have enough time to figure out what the problem was.

A busy offseason is in store for the Suns.

td00 wrote:One the biggest mistakes you have recently made was trading that #1 pick you got from the Hawks and let him go to Boston.
Rondo was a perfect fit for the backup role to Nash; he would have had a couple of years to learn and be the next great playmaker in Phoenix.

Now you have to figure out what can be gotten for the limited athletes you currently have.

While I admit meeting the Spurs in the playoffs is just maddening, you still have to be able to just out play them. Shaq didn't make a difference this year and you didn't have enough time to figure out what the problem was.

A busy offseason is in store for the Suns.

None of this was Shaq's fault. The guys did what he was asked to do. You can look back at this series and see that Nash didn't show up. Boris didn't show up until the end. Amare routinely made mistakes that cost this team dearly (especially in game 1). Bell showed up for one game.

Obviously Shaq's pick-and-roll defense leaves a lot to be desired, but he clearly knows how to defend Duncan. He faired better than any other Suns defender I've seen in the last 5 years.

td00 wrote:One the biggest mistakes you have recently made was trading that #1 pick you got from the Hawks and let him go to Boston.

Shaq didn't make a difference this year and you didn't have enough time to figure out what the problem was.

I won't disagree with the first statement, but I will disagree that you're saying Shaq didn't make a difference. If you watched the last 3 seasons of us against the Spurs, you would have seen that we had absolutely no way to contain Duncan. Neither Marion, Diaw, nor Amare could guard him. Kurt Thomas was the only guy we had to guard Duncan, and we traded him away. Without Shaq, Duncan would dropped 30 ppg, 5 offensive board, and probably would have drawn 6 fouls a game on Amare and Boris.

Shaq did everything that was asked of him. It's not his fault we played stupid in game 1 and handed away a double digit lead in the second half. Nor is it his fault that neither Amare, Boris, nor Barbosa came to play in game 3.

The biggest thing that pissed me off about D'Antoni was the phrase "We're not here to develop players."

That phrase is the singular moment when I thought D'Antoni has lost his marbles.

If he can prove he was wrong about that, and is willing to cultivate talent while at the same time utilize the go-to guys, then all can be forgiven.

That, imho, is the biggest fault I saw.

like someone mentioned earlier a very nice post...

i

The Phoenix Suns have become one of the best first-round exit playoff teams in NBA history, and notched yet another 'great' series (along with many others), and afterwards my wife and I sat down and had a talk about the Suns. In particular, she pointed out that during the playoffs she would constantly ask her co-workers how the Suns were doing on a game day - not because she especially cared about the Suns (she likes 'em fine but not the way we do), but because she knew that when the Suns lost big games, she had to go home after work and do some psychological damage control on her pissed/frustrated husband.

Put it this way: I have drunk alcohol to comfort myself exactly twice: once because I was wrongly fired from a good teaching job out of malice, and once just after Game 1 of this playoff series, which was a thriller, but ultimately was a loss.

This is no way to treat your wife, or yourself, and it needed to change.

I've determined that in order to be a Suns fan, you have to have a bit of emotional distance from this. This is true of anything that one can be emotionally invested in, but can't do much if anything to actually control: politics, pro sports (i.e., not ones that you're actually playing in), the accomplishments of others, etc.

Games can be exciting, but I have to learn to let it just wash away, after every disappointment. I'm 27 and I've been following this franchise since I was seven or so (1987) - and at this pace I'll have ulcers by the time I'm 30.

The truly maddening thing about the Phoenix Suns are always an A-minus team. They're consistently an exciting, playoff-bound team with realistic hopes for a title. In fact, the Suns have the 4th-best all-time winning percentage of all active teams:

Los Angeles Lakers (.618)
San Antonio Spurs (.595)
Boston Celtics (.587)
Phoenix Suns (.556)

Of course, there are 34 championships between those four teams in 62 years - a little over half - and none of them belong to the Suns. I suspect that the Spurs very recently overtook the Celtics because the Celtics just plain sucked for about the last 10 years until Kevin Garnett's arrival this year. The Suns hold the record for most playoff appearances without a championship (26 of 40 seasons). In fact, they're in the sixth place (of 30+ teams) for how often they're in the playoffs, and the newest team on the list:

Lakers 54/60 (90%)
Sixers 44/59 (75%)
Celtics 45/62 (72%)
Spurs 28/41 (68%)
Pistons 40/60 (66%)
Suns 26/40 (65%)

The lack of an NBA salary cap for a long time is a big reason that the teams from L.A., Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit have such high percentages. San Antonio and Phoenix were born within a year of each other and went through similar growing pains to post very similar winning records, except of course that San Antonio is a bunch of ****. (I'm bitter, but I'm not alone.)

Although my wife doesn't agree, I argue that the "A-minus" syndrome is actually much worse than being a Chicago Cubs or Arizona Cardinals fan. With those teams, any foray into the playoffs (if they make it into the playoffs at all) is a huge and great thing. Hope rises for a championship, certainly, but to an extent you can be happy just knowing they got as far as they did. Suns fans can't take much satisfaction in being a playoff team because they're always a playoff team. They've missed the playoffs twice in the last twenty years. Even the years they they were out, they weren't terrible (36-46 and 29-53, the former record being good enough for this year's Eastern playoffs). For fans of perennially mediocre teams, there's also the added bonus of having a community of loser-lovers that has grown up around the team. With the Suns, every year has high expectations. It's emotionally untenable.

That's not to say the Suns haven't done me some good, in the NBA, in the Phoenix community, for basketball in general, and even for me personally.

- I have learned to evaluate my own likes and dislikes through this team. In the mid-nineties, I had a huge falling-out with someone who was a Bulls fan. He liked Chicago because he was from Chicago. I decided that was a stupid reason to like a team: what if everyone on that team was a jerk? I thought about this for years; pondered the nature of how where you were born can influence your behavior and how stupid that is. I decided I like the Suns because they're a class act. Not only the current team, but historically the Suns have valued good people, who care about their communities, and even the rebels - Barkley, Shaq - were only bad boys because of their passion and the game. Barkley was acutely aware of it: "I am not a role model." You'll never find a Dumas or a Bowen on the Suns for long, if at all.

- The Suns inspired me to play basketball once during high school, and now again in my adult life. Steve Nash in particular has inspired my current run, knowing that he has roughly the same body type as I do, but has worked on his body and his skills with maniacal intensity. His work ethic inspires me, in practicing my free throws, and also in my music and work.

- I suspect Suns' Charities is one of the reasons the NBA Cares came about in 2005. I don't know if the Suns organization was the first NBA franchise to make charity an integral part of its existence, but I do know it was a good model for the rest of the league to follow when it wanted to clean up its image. Kevin Johnson and A.C. Green, in particular, come to mind as extraordinarily community-minded people. Both are still doing community work and I heard Johnson is even running for mayor in his hometown.

- The Suns have been a point-guard franchise for about twenty years, now. We've had roughly half of the truly great point guards in the last twenty years on our team at some point or another: Kevin Johnson, Jason Kidd, Stephon Marbury (in his prime), Steve Nash, Joe Johnson, Dennis Johnson, and Sam Cassell have all been Suns. I'm a big believer that the game of basketball is best when it is about movement and flow. I believe in my core that things like hack-a-Shaq, intentional fouls, dominant center-based play, and 70-point games are antithetical to what Naismith wanted: an athletic, skill-based game.

- As a web guru, I appreciate the absolutely ludicrous amount of work that the Suns put into their media. They post thousands of hours of video on their site, have players and staff blog occasionally, and even created a MySpace-like fan community site called Planet Orange. That willingness to explore technology - and spend money on it - in the name of the fan community is impressive.

Ultimately, I'm glad to be a Suns fan. It's a relationship complicated by heartbreak and disappointment but made healthy by the sense that the organization keeps its head up. It continues to have faith in a pure vision of what basketball is and should be; it has faith in its community and despite the escalating cost of games and inaccessibility of the players, makes real efforts to connect to its community.

They have strength of conviction in their work and in what is right; in small ways, through that, so do I.




It took every last bit of effort I could muster not to draw parallels between what I like about the Suns and what I like about Barack Obama. You're welcome. Also: I don't have a crap if nobody reads this.

Great post impulse...one of the few MONSTER posts in the aftermath that I've been able to read easily!

That was an excellent post, Impulse.

Impulsenine=Win

Well, it's like Big Chris said (@5:20):

It's been emotional.

I don't even need to click that to know that Vinnie from Lock stock

Top movie...AWESOME movie

TASTIC wrote:Great post impulse...one of the few MONSTER posts in the aftermath that I've been able to read easily!

As did I. Probably beacause I can totally relate to everything said.

Tremendous post, impulse. To speak to the "A minus" syndrome, and whether it's better than being a fan of a doormat. I'm in somewhat of a unique position as a Buffalo Bills fan in that when I first started liking football, the Bills were the ultimate A minus team -- my first year as a fan was the first of 4 straight Super Bowl losses. Wide Right, 2 straight blowout losses to superior teams, then Thurman's fumble. But even after the 4 straight losses, we were still an A minus team. One down year, then a heartbreaking playoff loss to the Steelers when Bruce Smith came down with a 104 degree fever the night before the game, then a heartbreaking playoff loss to the 2nd-year Jaguars, then a rebuilding year, then 2 straight heartbreaking, last-second playoff losses -- first to archrival Miami, then to Tennessee on the infamous Music City Miracle. Since then, however, we've failed to make the playoffs, and pretty much been irrelevant and a doormat.

So I've lived through both fan experiences. And as much pain and misery as I got from 1990-1999, with no championships to show for it, I'd still take it in a heartbeat over what I've had to put up with from 2000-2008. So cherish what we DO have, Suns fans. Trust me, we're still better off than fans of the Bucks or the Clippers or the Knicks (especially the Knicks). That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't be upset every time we get bounced in the playoffs. But just keep in mind that the Suns provided you with a bit of joy 55 times this year, and a measure of misery only 27 times. Yes, they cut our hearts out in the playoffs (again), but at least our team matters.

I think it's weird, though, that it took me the better part of two decades to figure out how to take the good and shed the bad. My wife and I talk about what we'll do as parents (not expecting a kid... yet...), and I'm more convinced every day that stuff like the mental gymnastics required as a fan of the Suns is as important as anything I learned in school.

scootfu602 wrote:Great post. Great read

hear, hear - you nailed it.
backup for Steve and a centre to apprentice under Shaq. Take advantage of these two guys while we have them. If we can find a great pass-first guard in the draft Steve can teach him to shoot, among many other things.

We have a whack of expiring bench contracts - that should give us some flex in picking up people. Add role players around the core, use the picks and put some effort into D.

Damn, that Kurt pick we gave away hurts ....

Cash wrote:Tremendous post, impulse. To speak to the "A minus" syndrome, and whether it's better than being a fan of a doormat. I'm in somewhat of a unique position as a Buffalo Bills fan in that when I first started liking football, the Bills were the ultimate A minus team -- my first year as a fan was the first of 4 straight Super Bowl losses. Wide Right, 2 straight blowout losses to superior teams, then Thurman's fumble. But even after the 4 straight losses, we were still an A minus team. One down year, then a heartbreaking playoff loss to the Steelers when Bruce Smith came down with a 104 degree fever the night before the game, then a heartbreaking playoff loss to the 2nd-year Jaguars, then a rebuilding year, then 2 straight heartbreaking, last-second playoff losses -- first to archrival Miami, then to Tennessee on the infamous Music City Miracle. Since then, however, we've failed to make the playoffs, and pretty much been irrelevant and a doormat.

So I've lived through both fan experiences. And as much pain and misery as I got from 1990-1999, with no championships to show for it, I'd still take it in a heartbeat over what I've had to put up with from 2000-2008. So cherish what we DO have, Suns fans. Trust me, we're still better off than fans of the Bucks or the Clippers or the Knicks (especially the Knicks). That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't be upset every time we get bounced in the playoffs. But just keep in mind that the Suns provided you with a bit of joy 55 times this year, and a measure of misery only 27 times. Yes, they cut our hearts out in the playoffs (again), but at least our team matters.

I'd like to add that I've had a pretty miserable fan experience myself. My teams (hold laughter please):

1. Phoenix Suns
2. Miami Dolphins
3. New York Mets

Each one of my squads has had an arch nemesis who's consistently ended their seasons and has endured absolute meltdowns in the playoffs.

For the Dolphins it was your Bills all throughout the 90's - talk about being in a team's head. Then it became the Patriots in the 2k, not to mention all the december swoons I've had to deal with. The Dolphins had always been one of those teams you could count on to be in the playoffs, but also to get bounced. It wasn't until the Wacky Ricky Williams retirement fiasco that I actually learned what it was like to be a fan of a doormat.

The Mets have been owned by the Atlanta Braves for as long as I can remember and again, yet another one of my teams who's endured late season meltdowns. The one season they took care of business with the Braves was the same season they through away an opportunity to go to the World Series to a flatout mediocre Cardinals team.

I don't even need to speak on the Suns as we all know their history.

Basically, I know sports fan misery.