As Season Slips Away, Phoenix Suns Look Within and Struggle to Find Their Heart
MIAMI — There are seasons to remember and seasons to forget, and sometimes, there isn't much that separates the two. It might be an absence or an injury or an ailment, all of which the Miami Heat have had to endure—from LeBron James leaving, to Josh McRoberts and Dwyane Wade and others hobbling, to Chris Bosh hurting and now healing. Or, as the Phoenix Suns have proven this season, it can go south for other reasons, such as unnecessary additions and an altered overall attitude.
Those teams met in South Florida on Monday, and while the Suns entered and exited with a superior record, even after a 115-98 defeat, they appeared like the team in much greater trouble. Part of that is geography, playing in the West, where playoff entry currently requires a record seven games better than it does in the East.
But part of that is purely their own responsibility: They've gone from one of the NBA's feel-good stories to a definitive disappointment, not only losing nine of their last 12 but, organizationally and spiritually, appearing to have lost their way.
Monday seemed the right time to check in on whatever mess they've made, considering they were facing the recent smiling face of the franchise, Goran Dragic, who forced his way out after feeling deceived; according to multiple league sources familiar with the situation, the Suns had promised Dragic they wouldn't acquire another point guard with the backcourt already crowded enough, prior to signing Isaiah Thomas last summer.
Now Dragic is in Miami, Thomas is in Boston, and almost-All-Star Brandon Knight is in their place and out of sorts, all as Phoenix tries to push past two teams (Oklahoma City and New Orleans) that have stayed ahead even while dealing with injuries to superstars.
Prior to playing 30 miles from where he starred in high school, Knight still sounded shell-shocked as he spoke of Milwaukee making what he believed was a "business decision" to deal him. And while he predicted that his collaboration with Eric Bledsoe will be "fine" because they have some complementary talents, he noted that he will have to take a step back from what he was doing for the Bucks, in terms of leadership, at least for now.
"In Milwaukee, I had no problem saying anything at any time, at any point," Knight said. "I had a great relationship with the guys. But when you're in a new situation, you want to do it when it's needed, and over time, you'll get the same respect that you had with your prior teammates. You're not going to come in and have that right away. It's going to take time."
The problem for the Suns is they have little of that left. If they intend to make a serious push for the 2015 postseason, they need to get it together quickly.
"It's tough, there's no room for error," head coach Jeff Hornacek said prior to Monday's tipoff. "When we're going up against the West Coast teams that we have to try to climb over, they're big wins...When you get down to those last 25 games, I always say it's the first 20 that everybody is jacked up, the middle 30 or 35 are kind of the dog days where the really mentally tough teams make their push and win a ton of games, and then you get to the last 20, 25, and teams are jacked up again. So it makes it very difficult to play in those games. We're trying to do the best we can of the situation."
They're trying to do so without the schedule allowing for a full practice since the transformative trades, which Hornacek also called "tough" and said has forced him to "keep it simple" for players who "are learning on the fly."
Still, that doesn't mean he will make excuses for them. That was plainly evident when, after a long time behind the closed locker room door, he tore into his team—through the media—during his postgame press conference. Some of his comments may have struck some as strange, if you only saw the highlights of the Suns showing passion—albeit outside the officials' outline of the rules—with four Phoenix players receiving technical fouls and two (Markieff Morris and Alex Len) getting tossed within a four-minute span of the third quarter.
But that would ignore the Suns' apathy, and detachment from each other, in many other situations—especially in a second quarter in which the short-handed Heat (with Dragic in foul trouble and Chris Bosh out for the season) somehow scored 39 points.
Knight pulled aside a couple of players to offer instruction, but at times, the Suns looked as if they hardly knew each other at all—strikingly so in light of the team not only having twin brothers in its rotation, but also with plenty of players remaining from the surprising 2013-14 season in which they proved to be greater than the sum of their parts.
Even after they showed some fight, rallying back to a seven-point deficit after Len and Morris were ejected—for a skirmish with perfect-football-form-tackler Hassan Whiteside and a hard foul on Dragic, respectively—they still yielded a career-high 26 points to Heat D-League call-up Tyler Johnson and 21 to Dragic in just 14 minutes.
In light of all that, Hornacek's tirade, specifically related to the first half, made a bit more sense.
"We have to find out who on this team is going to be tough, that's going to be going after balls," Hornacek said. "We're soft going after everything. They just take the ball out of our hands. Maybe they grab the arm, but you got to be tougher than that. I don't know what it is. When teams get physical, we look like a high school team, in terms of our competitiveness and the way we battle against some of those teams. We have to get tougher, we have to find tougher guys."
Hornacek saw a little more fight late in the second half.
"We waited three quarters of getting pushed in the back before we decided to do anything about it," Hornacek said.
In searching for more options on his bench—he played 12 guys at least two minutes—Hornacek repeated that he "gets tired" of watching the Suns not pursue loose balls, since "there's nothing worse to me than being soft." He wasn't condoning violence, though he didn't have an issue with Morris' foul on Dragic, since "I think he was just challenging the shot. We all know how Goran plays, and he throws that right arm out. Markieff just went to block it and he missed it, and they said he hit [Dragic] up in the neck area. That's why it becomes automatic."
Hornacek is looking for a consistent pulse, something closer to last Thursday's overtime win against Oklahoma City, not the 24-point first half against San Antonio on Saturday, or the 13-turnover first half against Miami on Monday.
"It's on them," Hornacek said. "They've got to come to the game with the desire and the determination to win a game. You can't just go out there and play. Basketball, at this level, is not that way. You want to just go play, go play in a rec league. Do something like that."
Hornacek said he didn't know who in his locker room would take that to heart. Then he started naming some names.
"We've got P.J. [Tucker], P.J. plays tough like that," Hornacek said of the undersized small forward who he used some at center. "So we just need more of that type of effort. When we put him on the big guys, he boxes out, and he goes after rebounds. That's desire. That's determination. That's something we need to spread throughout the rest of our game."
While the trade-deadline moves brought a focus to the Suns' issues, they are not new.
"It's really kind of been that way all year," Hornacek said. "Some games they come out. Early on, it seemed like it was the top teams that we came out and were all fired up for, and the lesser teams in the standings that you're supposed to beat, those teams were beating us. We lost a lot of those games early....We always say that we're a young team. But to me, I hate to use that as an excuse, youth. I think Alex Len battles hard for the most part, and P.J., and Eric does at times. But we don't have any All-Stars on our team. We can't think we're going to get by in games without a full effort every night."
Tucker felt the effort was sufficient Monday, at least in the second half, even if it didn't end in a victory. He wouldn't use the trades as an excuse for the recent stumble (the Suns had lost five of six prior to the deadline) and noted that the Thunder have made a lot of changes, too.
"Our turnovers, our easy baskets (allowed), that's not personnel stuff," Tucker said. "That's one-on-one, guys making plays, taking care of the ball, that has nothing to do with that. So I won't make that excuse."
Tucker did agree with Hornacek that "playing tougher, that's what it's come down to. It's not giving up offensive rebounds, it's not letting your man beat you one-on-one, it's not giving up turnovers and everybody not getting back."
Otherwise, they don't have much of a shot to get back into the eighth spot, not with the Thunder expecting Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook to return, and the Pelicans expecting Anthony Davis and Ryan Anderson back soon enough.
As Hornacek said, the Suns don't have any All-Stars. Monday, their third-team All-NBA player of last season, Dragic, was now on the other side, using his limited time to help achieve a victory that, in his view, "meant a lot"; his reaction to a step-back three-pointer had said that for him, when he followed it by yelling and grinning as he backpedaled to the Heat huddle.
The Suns didn't shower him with praise Monday, as Markieff Morris called the reaction to his foul "over-exaggerated," and Tucker said that his former teammate mostly hurt Phoenix in transition: "It was us turning the ball over. It was all us doing it to ourselves. He was getting open threes. He got fast-break one-on-ones. It was us shooting ourselves in the foot."
They've done that too often lately, and all that's left is to limp into the offseason, where maybe they'll rediscover the magic they showed only a year ago.
Ethan Skolnick covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @EthanJSkolnick.
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