Suns Season Recap

The Suns season ended on a high note on Wednesday night as they beat rival San Antonio Spurs 106-103. The win staved off what would have been a season sweep for the Spurs less than a year removed from the Suns’ own four game sweep of the Spurs in last year’s playoffs. Although it was good to see a victory against the top seed in the Western Conference, the win cannot take the stink off the season that was a far cry from last year which had the Suns only two games away from a trip to the NBA Finals.

Most of the team’s struggles have been well documented as the year has progressed. Those issues range from poor rebounding, porous defense and inconsistency. However, there is one difference between this year’s team and last year’s team that has impacted the team the most. That one thing is Amare Stoudemire.

Amare Stoudemire was a dynamic scorer for the Suns, which were only accentuated by Steve Nash’s amazing point guardiness (eventually I plan to make this into a new advanced metric a la John Hollinger’s PER stat; just watch it will catch on). The overall makeup of the team is very similar to last year. They played an up-tempo style, high efficiency team that relied on a lot of jump shots to outscore their opponents. The major difference is that when the jump shots weren’t falling, they could rely on Stoudemire to create shots be taking a slower defender off the dribble and getting to the free throw line.

Once Robert Sarver decided not to invest in Amare’s knees the Suns dropped from 9th in free throws attempted to 20th. The loss of Stoudemire started a series of acquisitions that gave the Suns six wing players, and that’s being generous by considering Hakim Warrick is a power forward. The front office hoped that a combination of Hedo Turkoglu, Grant Hill, Channing Frye and Robin Lopez could all pitch in and fill the void that Amare left upon his departure to the Knicks. They were wrong.

As I have already written, the Turkoglu experiment was a massive disaster that Lon Babby humbly quit on after only two and a half months. Robin Lopez turned out to be the biggest letdown since the Obama campaign turned into the Obama administration (I kid, I kid). And although Grant Hill, Jared Dudley and Channing Frye have had good seasons they just couldn’t bring the consistency and scoring dependability that Stoudemire brought.

Moving on from the Turkoglu disaster, on paper, the Suns found a great remedy for the problem in the trade for Marcin Gortat, Vince Carter and Mickael Pietrus. Gortat was the rebounding defender they lacked inside. Pietrus was an athletic wing defender who could shoot from outside, and Carter was going to be the dynamic scorer the team could depend on for twenty points a night. It turns out that Carter may have been a more egregious miscalculation than the Turkoglu acquisition.

The Phoenix fans found out, what everybody in the NBA seemed to already know: Vince Carter is a lousy sandbagger. Don’t get me wrong, he seems like he is probably a nice, easy going guy who would be fun to hang out with, but if you are depending on him to be a consistent force in the NBA then you will want to light yourself on fire. The most frustrating part is that he still has loads of talent. There were times where he would get up and throw down an alley-oop just like the Vincanity of old. There were games where he would continually drive the lane and get to the free throw line, but those were few and far between. For the vast majority of his time in Phoenix Carter was content on loitering around the three point line and jacking up a shot that anyone on the team could get at any point on the shot clock. This was evidenced by his 1.9 free throw attempts per game; well off his career average of 5.6. He just seemed indifferent. He cemented his legacy as a guy with tons of potential but who never was willing to do what it took to be the best. He just doesn’t love the game. Somehow, we need to find a way to steal talent, Space Jam style, and give it to someone else. Just think of what a player like Jared Dudley could have done if we mixed Vince Carter’s talent with Dudley’s basketball IQ and will to improve. I wonder if Phil Jackson already knows how to do this…

Now that the season is over, the Suns need to turn to the not-too-distant future in order to still find a way to capitalize on Nash’s talent. The team will certainly buy out Carter’s contract for $4 million. The Suns aren’t going to have much flexibility in the offseason to improve the roster, besides the 13th pick in the draft or whatever they can get in a trade by dangling one of their eleventeen wing players. Unfortunately neither of those options is likely to bring the Suns the dynamic scorer that they can depend on. After perusing the upcoming free agent class I can see a few options that might be intriguing for the Suns to look into that could come at a discount price. Both Greg Oden and Yao Ming will be free agents. The Suns training staff may be able to help resurrect their careers. Adding either of these two players could also free up Robin Lopez to be put on the trading block with Pietrus or Childress for a starting shooting guard. To fill the shooting guard slot, the Suns should look into Michael Redd, who is coming off a major injury or explore the possibility of bringing back Jason Richardson who certainly will not go for the $14 million that he was paid this season.

Whatever the case, the Suns should be back in the playoffs next year, even without significant upgrades. They just aren’t going to be championship contenders…but in the mean time I’m going to studying a little zen philosophy.