(Barry Gossage/NBAE/Getty Images)
The struggling is ongoing, but the losing has at least been interrupted.
The Suns had to work a little harder than one might expect (or at least would LIKE to expect) at home against a team that is undermanned and 18 games under .500, and the victory did not come nearly as easily as the 115-105 score suggests.
But still, the way things have been going of late, they are quite happy to beat ANYBODY any way. So while they didn’t really resolve any of the issues that have been swirling about them, and probably did little to stifle nonsensical talk about trading Amare Stoudemire (that talk must be coming from another planet besides Orange or even Earth), this is no time for carping about not destroying an eminently destroyable foe.
Stoudemire, who says he doesn’t want to go anywhere, scored 19 points, but more pointedly addressed the criticism of his rebounding with 15 boards. But the big story was Grant Hill.
Hill, who has been the most complete and consistent player on the team all year, not only scored 27 points, but helped open up the offense with his movement both with and without the basketball. As noted here before, he does everything so well and so quietly it’s easy to overlook how great a pickup he was.
While this may be shrugged off as a small win by some, the flip side is it would have been a huge loss, one that not only would have sent them off on an Eastern trip with two consecutive losses to a bad team in their baggage (of which they have more than enough already, thank you very much), but also have dropped them another notch behind Utah in the race for the bottom rung on the playoff ladder – to say nothing about what it would have done to their already fragile psyche.
But in the end they did what they had to do, partly because Jason Richardson did what he was brought here to do, namely light up scoreboards. He finished with 25 points on 9 of 14 shooting (including 3 for 5 from arc city). He and Steve Nash hit some particular huge hoops when things got sticky – which they were most of the second half after the Suns frittered away a 13-point lead.
This team continues to be a bit of a mystery, at least to me – the mystery being whether it is overrated or underachieving. If the former, then we should cut the management (or at least the coach) some slack. If the latter, there is still plenty of time to climb back into the middle of the playoff pack and make some post-season noise.
The two most popular theories are that the parts are good but not a good fit and/or that key players have too much mileage on them. My own theory (my theories rarely make most popular lists) is that there has been altogether too much conversation about changing systems and how hard it is to adjust.
We’ve been hearing that since July, and the players, as is the wont of all players, seized on it (subconsciously or otherwise) as a ready made excuse for all the problems.
I mean, it’s not as though Coach Terry tried to re-invent the wheel or anything. He found himself thrust in the role of bad cop in the good cop/bad cop scenario, and frankly there are very few coaches out there, make that very, very few, who would have handled the transition any better than he has.
It’s still too early to say he won’t eventually get the job done, but I have to believe the job is a lot harder than he and General Manager Steve Kerr thought it would be.
The bottom line: Darned if I know.
