Pharzeone wrote:What are you talking about? Amare was never considered the key to that Phoenix team. Games in which he would go nuts, Suns would lose if Nash had a bad game. It was common for Amare critics to say he put in the most quietest 30 points sometimes.
Who said that Amare was the key to the PHX team? The point is that he was a TOP player on that team and he wasn't there. Take any team and remove the 2nd best player on that team and it's tough to adjust to that loss.
Was Amare an All Star or not? They didn't replace his production from any single player, but still they found a way to win. That's what a coach is there for. To come up with a game plan and a way to use the guys he had left. Changes had to be made cuz the guys brought in had different strengths and weaknesses, but overall none were on the level of Amare. Don't try to minimize the loss of a guy that was very productive on that team. Especially when you have Diaw and KT as the replacement.
Pharzeone wrote:Check out D'Antoni's record with Nash on the team but when he was out of the lineup. He is 4 and 12. 33%. Now compare that percentage to his NBA coaching career without Nash on his team and it's very similar. To me that's a very telling sign. Without Steve Nash, D'Antoni has only been able to win 33% of his games. That's below mediocrity. We had threads about D'Antoni being overrated going back to the very season you are talking about and how much impact Nash has on that team. D'Antoni was always considered an afterthought. It was always about letting Nash do what he wanted to do. This ain't news.
Great players make great teams, but in the case of the Suns you can't forget that Nash gives credit to MDA and lobbied for the team to return to the system that MDA taught him. It's not about what MDA's record is without Nash. You should be saying that his record without a good team period isn't that good. besides which it's well known that he will be far more successful with a PG that can effectively run his system. Heck whenever Duhon actually stepped up and played well you could see what a difference it made even on this weak team.
Look the players are always more important than the coach, but the coach sets the direction, philosophy and helps to get them back on track when they falter. You can't just wipe away a coaches involvement in a winning team.
I found this article of note:
The Suns’ offense hums again — if at a slightly less frantic pace than it once did. The coach and the players are all using the same playbook again. Their superstar point guard is happy again.“It was what I hoped,” said Steve Nash, who signed a contract extension this summer in a leap of faith that the Suns could reclaim their lost glory after a humdrum 46-win season.
They have, more quickly and more convincingly than anyone could have forecast. But the Suns have long had a thing for speed.
Coach Alvin Gentry, who took over in February after the team fired Terry Porter, reinstated D’Antoni’s run-and-gun offense, albeit a slightly modified version of it. The results are evident. The Suns lead the league in scoring at 112 points a game and are once again putting up (and making) 3-pointers at a dizzying rate, going 178 for 400 from the arc. (Their .445 success rate on 3-pointers was better than the total field-goal percentage for 10 teams through Sunday).
“To be honest with you, we’re doing what Mike taught me,” Gentry said Monday. “We tweaked a little here and there. But this is how we’ve played the last four and a half, five years.”
It is, in essence, the formula that made the Suns the N.B.A.’s most entertaining team in the mid-2000s, when they averaged 58 victories for four seasons under D’Antoni. But by their own standards, these Suns are slow.
They still run when possible, but they are not as reliant on the fast break. Phoenix ranked fifth in pace — an estimation of possessions per 48 minutes — according to basketball-reference.com, behind Golden State, Indiana, Denver and the Knicks.
“We’re not a fast-break team,” Nash told The Arizona Republic last week in a statement that bordered on heresy. “We’re not a great running team.”
Indeed, the Suns are taking 82.6 shots a game, nearly five fewer than they averaged in 2005-6, the last time they made the Western Conference finals. But they are shooting a league-leading 50.7 percent from the field, which offsets any decline in scoring chances.
“We don’t get as many fast-break points, but we do keep the tempo high,” said Amar’e Stoudemire, an All-Star power forward who is averaging 19.8 points. That would be his lowest figure for a full season since his rookie campaign in 2002-3.
The Suns also say they are more attentive to defense, although they ranked 22nd, according to basketball-reference.com’s defensive rating formula. (They were 16th in 2005-6.)(Note that they are not as good on D as they were under MDA, despite having more size and supposedly more emphasis on D)
There is no scientific measure for the Suns’ greatly improved mood. Nash and others were angry at D’Antoni’s forced departure last year and nearly depressed when Boris Diaw and Raja Bell, two stalwarts of the D’Antoni era, were traded to Charlotte last December. And they struggled to adapt to Porter’s coaching.
“I don’t think we really had a clear understanding of what type of team we were,” Nash said Monday. “We came into the season saying we were going to be a running team, but we never really practiced being a running team. In actuality, we became a post-up team. But we never really declared, ‘O.K., we’re a post-up team now.’ We never really got on the same page or felt comfortable. I think when people are confused, it really can detract from effectiveness, but also chemistry.”
The ambiguities have been lifted. Gentry is a D’Antoni disciple and a true believer in the running game. The Suns also traded Shaquille O’Neal, whose mammoth personality and presence hung on the lineup like an anvil.
The driving lanes are now wide open for Nash and Grant Hill. Stoudemire is free to roam the low blocks. He is also free, for now, of the trade rumors that haunted him for the past year.
The Suns will probably not sustain this pace, but they have already surpassed most outside expectations.
3/13/2010 6:05 PM