spanishninja wrote:the 06-07 team was 15th in the league on defensive rating, and offensive rating is basically the same at 112 with this year's team. both this year's and last year's teams were more balanced than the 06-07 team. not to mention nash's teams were not elite in the clutch like cp3'sHitachi77 wrote:I think the 06-07 team was a little better than this one. People forget that team was pretty good defensively with KT. Not top 5, but maybe 8th or so, while having the top offense easily. That team is was a favorite over, and likely beats the Spurs without those BS suspensions. And that was basically the NBA finals in 06-07 after Dallas got ousted.
I can't say if this team would be a favorite over the 06-07 Spurs like the 06-07 Suns were.
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+1
We didn't care much for defense, we certainly didn't take pride in putting in the effort to play great defense. We had great defenders like Trix, KT, Raja and Diaw but just having good defenders isn't enough because it's not an individual sport. You can't individually play good defense to shut down NBA offenses that are built to beat a 5-man NBA defense. D'Antoni never cared for defense and it's almost like the good defenders on the team were playing defense on their own island.
I think the big difference between our team now and then is that while our offense may not 100% match the 07 Suns SSOL offense, we have the defensive focus, defensive pride, defensive system and the defensive personnel to potentially shut down the 07 Spurs. We can also now play half court basketball with the best of them because of CP3 and even Booker is pretty good at operating in the half court too. We don't really have any players on the team that couldn't function in the half court. We can run, we can slow things down, we execute in the clutch and we have defensive players to throw at their big 3.
We all remember how devastating the 07 Suns were in the regular season but when it got to the grit and grind of the playoffs, there were always concerns that our fast paced, open floor offense would be severely limited by being forced to slow down and playoff the half court offense which wasn't our game. We struggled with the Spurs back then because they forced us to play their brand of basketball, they could score on us in the half court because that's their bread and butter and they limited us offensively just by slowing down the game and on defense, they were elite too. So they forced us to play a slowed down half court game which we weren't good at and they were elite at defending against and we had no answers for that aside from trying to push the pace.
