Suns News: Week 14 (1/17 - 1/23)

[bajanguy008]

Great to see/hear Dario

[bajanguy008]

[Shabazz]

What's the deal with Nader? Is he gonna play again this year? Another mysterious recovery timeline for "injury management."

[ShelC]

i don't know what's going on with CP's wrist/hand/fingers but he looked like he was in some pain last night. It's the wrist he had surgery on and has been wrapped all season. Hope it's not something that lingers and gets worse.

[bajanguy008]

[Superbone]

I had to chuckle when the announcers said McGee's finger roll layup was reminiscent of George Gervin.
Because Gervin once said he modeled that move after .... Connie Hawkins!

Laz always coming through with a Connie reference

Hey, when he's your avatar, you've got to!

I know I'm sort of old school, but if you would have seen him play, you'd understand.
It was like the rest of the NBA was riffing Lawrence Welk, and the Hawk was playing Miles Davis ...

I dig, man. I dig.

[Superbone]

"I never thought he would eat KFC!"



It actually took me longer to see #2 than #1. I had #1 immediately, but it took me a minute to get #2.

I got 2 immediately. Looks just like his son. I didn't see 1 until they told me.

[Superbone]

What's the deal with Nader? Is he gonna play again this year? Another mysterious recovery timeline for "injury management."

You know who it hurts the most? Saucy. He's got nothing to complain about. Somehow he gives Payton a free pass.

[Superbone]

i don't know what's going on with CP's wrist/hand/fingers but he looked like he was in some pain last night. It's the wrist he had surgery on and has been wrapped all season. Hope it's not something that lingers and gets worse.

Hopefully it was just one of those jammed finger things that happen all the time when playing basketball.

[SunsRIt]

"I never thought he would eat KFC!"



It actually took me longer to see #2 than #1. I had #1 immediately, but it took me a minute to get #2.

I was just the opposite.

[ShelC]

[pickle]

Rooting for the two CPs to pick up their 3%. And ft in CP3’s case. Maybe he spoiled me last year but I want 90+.

[Flagrant Fowl]

[SunsRIt]

I have a friend who is a videographer that worked with Ayton on a different charity project last week. He said he is the nicest, coolest guy to hang out with.

[Split T]

I thought specialsauce was a doctor, not a podcast host

[Split T]

https://www.espn.com/nba/insider/story/ ... -last-year

Click through if you can, videos on the website.

AT THEIR FIRST team meeting this season, Jarrett Jack, just starting as a Phoenix Suns assistant coach, stood to deliver some motivation for a team coming off an NBA Finals run.

"There are people," Jack told the group, "who don't think you deserved to make the Finals."

The Suns' first three playoff opponents -- the Los Angeles Lakers, Denver Nuggets, and LA Clippers -- were missing star players for all or most of their series against Phoenix. Some around the NBA wondered: Yeah, the Suns were good. But were they mostly lucky?

"We heard the noise," Devin Booker, Phoenix's star guard, says. "But it was almost better hearing it from someone [Jack] who wasn't in our program last year. He confirmed it."

As Jack continued, Monty Williams, the Suns' head coach, interrupted. "Maybe they're right," Williams said of the skeptics. "All the things they are saying [about injuries] -- they're true. But it doesn't matter. We made it to the Finals. We took advantage of the breaks everybody said we got. You all deserved to be in that position."

Players appreciated the candidness. "We don't do the pink elephant thing here," Chris Paul says. "Whatever it is, we are gonna talk about it." Williams and the team's veteran leaders are good at addressing issues directly, but not dwelling on them. That has served them well in high-pressure situations -- including amid the league's investigation of Robert Sarver, longtime Suns governor, over allegations of racism, sexual harassment, and other workplace misconduct reported in an ESPN story.

In private and public, you rarely hear anyone within the Suns mention the health issues they faced last postseason: Paul injuring his shoulder in the first round, then missing Games 1 and 2 of the conference finals after testing positive for COVID-19; Dario Saric tearing his ACL in Game 1 of the Finals.

"We ain't with all that," Paul says of relitigating injuries. "You can only play the games in front of you."

Last season was over, anyway. Their Finals trip guaranteed nothing.

"If it was real, if it's not -- we're gonna find out," Paul says. The Suns were eager to resume their title chase.

"It's good that we are maybe not lavishly praised as a contender," says Cameron Johnson, the Suns' reserve sharpshooter. "It keeps the chip on our shoulder. We enjoy it."

The hovering doubts reminded the longest-tenured Suns of the lead-up to the Orlando, Florida, bubble in 2020 -- which became a centrifuge of team-building already taking on an exalted place in Suns lore. The Suns and Washington Wizards were the worst teams, record-wise, to earn bubble invitations after weeks of wrangling among NBA governors and team officials. Sarver relayed the inner workings of those talks to Williams.

"Robert was fighting like heck to get us in," Williams recalls. Williams kept Booker in the loop, knowing Booker would update the players.

Phoenix finished the pre-pandemic portion of the season 13th in the West, with almost 0% chance of making the postseason. Critics (including this writer) lambasted the inclusion of Phoenix and Washington as a money grab that ran counter to the NBA's stated goal of limiting personnel in Orlando as the pandemic raged.

"You heard the narratives," Williams says now. "Nobody thought we should have been there."

But the Suns had stayed ready. They kept in shape, and in contact. Williams was leaving a workout when he got official word: The Suns were in. About 15 minutes later, his phone buzzed. It was a text from Booker: "Let's go!"

"I was like, 'Oh, he's on a mission,'" Williams says. "I had no idea it would turn into 8-0."

Meanwhile, Willie Green, then a Suns assistant, had been in regular contact with Paul -- who was inside the bubble negotiations as president of the National Basketball Players Association. Paul and Green, now head coach of the New Orleans Pelicans, had become close after two stints as teammates.

Once the Suns were in, Paul, then starring for the Oklahoma City Thunder, offered Green advice that stuck: The team that doesn't complain is gonna be successful. The conditions are not going to be like NBA teams are used to.

Green called Williams and suggested he schedule a team meeting to relay Paul's words -- and steel the players.

"Don't let anyone write your story by complaining while people everywhere are out of jobs," Williams told the team. "Just go hoop."

Green did not tell Williams it had been Paul providing the intel.

Says Green: "Chris impacted our team in the bubble without even knowing it."

And so in a most improbable place began the most improbable rise of a woebegone franchise -- a journey that continues upward, with the Suns entering tonight's game against the Lakers holding the league's best record.


Months before he'd don their uniform, Chris Paul told then-Suns assistant Willie Green the team that didn't complain about the Orlando bubble would win. The Suns listened and exploded to an 8-0 finish -- creating an origin point for their incredible rise.

THE SUNS HAD beaten the Portland Trail Blazers and Milwaukee Bucks just before the suspension of the 2019-2020 season, and felt sparks of something promising.

"It started before the bubble," Johnson says. "You could see a kind of rhythm. Things were starting to click a little. Being able to finish it out was something we really appreciated."

They ignored the playoff math. "We didn't go into the bubble saying we had to go 8-0," Booker says. "We were like, 'We get to play some playoff-like games. Let's make the most of it.'"

Their seriousness struck Williams right away upon the Suns' arrival at Disney's Yacht Club Resort. Teams were given evening time slots for optional practices. The Suns would routinely have 10 or 11 players show up, often the entire team. They hoisted jumpers, played shooting games, and divided up for 5-on-5, 3-on-3, and 1-on-1.

"There wasn't s--- else to do," Booker says, laughing. "We were having two-a-days."

Williams noticed teams scheduled before and after the Suns had only a few players attending those optional workouts.

The Suns' players were inseparable, eating together, playing video games, and talking trash in epic ping-pong clashes.

"We had a lot of young guys, fresh out of college, who didn't have wives or children," Johnson says. "It became like a college road trip. We found joy in the bubble."

With minimal distractions, younger players ironed out weak spots. Deandre Ayton watched more film of elite defensive centers. He doubled down on drills with Mark Bryant, a Suns assistant and longtime big man whisperer.

"The bubble gave me time to lock in," Ayton said last season.

The Ayton leap that helped propel Phoenix to last season's Finals began in those unseen Orlando practices. "The bubble," Bryant said last season, "was when he really jumped."


Cameron Payne latched on with Phoenix just before the bubble, and resurrected his career as an off-the-bench tornado.

The Suns blew out the Wizards to open their eight-game seeding schedule, and then eked out wins over the Dallas Mavericks and Clippers -- the latter on a buzzer-beating jumper from Booker.

"That's when he stepped into his rightful place as our leader," Green says of Booker. "He had been striving toward that anyway. People don't realize how hard he works, how much film he watches, how smart he is. He wants to be great."

Even trudging through losing seasons, Booker believed he had the game and toughness to win on the biggest stages. Jamal Crawford and Booker played 1-on-1 often during the 2018-19 season, Crawford's only year in Phoenix, and when he won, Crawford unleashed the occasional vicious taunt: "You're averaging 25 points and you haven't been in the playoffs!"

"He had no comeback," Crawford said late last season. "You could tell it burned him up. He didn't give a s--- about his own stats or anything. Book used to ask me what the playoffs were like. I knew he was built for it."

Phoenix outscored bubble opponents by almost 13 points per 100 possessions -- by far the best overall scoring margin.

"We worked our tails off, and it was translating into games," Williams says. "A lot of times you work, but it doesn't translate that quickly into games."

Five months had passed between the suspension of the season and the end of the seeding games -- more than an entire extra offseason.

"Whatever year each player was in when they got to the bubble, it was already like they were in the next season," Green says. "If they were in Year 2, they were really in Year 3."

That undefeated run would earn the Suns an improbable spot in the new play-in tournament if the Brooklyn Nets upended Portland in the final seeding game -- hours after the Suns had wrapped their last win.

As the Suns left the arena, the Nets entered. The teams crossed paths. Friends exchanged pleasantries.

"'We're going to go to work for y'all,'" one Nets coach told Green. "'This is not a tank game. We're going after this.'"

About 20 members of the Suns watched from the Yacht Club bar. Portland won by one. Caris LeVert, then of the Nets, missed a potential game-winning jumper. The Suns left the next day.


Chris Paul, then with OKC, was impressed with what he saw from the young Suns in the Orlando, Florida, bubble in 2020. Less than a year later, he'd lead them to 51 regular-season wins and their first NBA Finals appearance since 1993.

THEY WERE DETERMINED to carry over their progress into the 2020-21 season. In the locker room after their final bubble win, as they awaited tipoff of Nets-Blazers, Williams wanted players to feel the anxiety -- the lack of control -- of their season hinging on the performance of others.

"'We can't be in this place again where we are waiting for someone else to control our destiny,'" Williams told the team.

Paul, then with the Oklahoma City Thunder, had not seen Phoenix's packed late-night practices and had little inkling of what was going on behind the scenes, he says. But he was impressed with their performance, and knew from his longtime association with Williams -- including playing under Williams in New Orleans -- that the Suns' culture was strong.

"I already looked at them through a different lens," Paul says. "Regardless of their record, I knew because of Monty they would play with purpose. Some teams, you get a lead, and you're like, 'This game is not over.' Because of who their coach is and what their principles are, you know this team is not allowed to lay down. And I already knew Book was like that, too."

Paul had known Booker for years, partly through one of his secret rituals. Each time Paul's team was eliminated from the playoffs, Paul continued working out full throttle until the end of the NBA Finals -- only then allowing himself any downtime. It was one way of training his body and mind for a Finals run Paul hoped would happen one day.

Some of those workouts took place under the auspices of Creative Arts Agency, which represents Paul and organizes springtime workouts for incoming draft prospects. Booker hired CAA ahead of the 2015 draft; Paul got to know him in those pre-draft sessions, and came away impressed with Booker's drive, he says.


A month before the 2020-21 season, the Suns acquired Paul -- with Paul's blessing -- from the Thunder. It was a mutual statement of belief in what had happened in Orlando.

Paul had also taken note of Jae Crowder's moxie in the bubble. During one Oklahoma City-Miami game there, Paul and Duncan Robinson of the Heat got into a testy exchange that culminated in Paul hurling the ball off of Robinson and out of bounds.

"Jae was the only person on their bench who said anything to me," Paul recalls. As free agency opened in late November 2020, Paul and Booker called Crowder and recruited him to Phoenix. Crowder joined, rounding out what has become one of the league's sturdiest starting fives alongside Paul, Booker, Ayton, and Mikal Bridges.

Post-bubble life did not start smoothly. Phoenix opened last season 8-8. The Paul-Booker pairing was playing stilted, your-turn-my-turn basketball. Opponents were mauling the Suns when Paul and Booker played together.

Paul and Crowder brought two strong personalities. "When you have competitive guys, there are going to be emotional times in games," Williams says. "My first two years in New Orleans, I wasn't ready for a team like that. Now I see how badly they want to win."

Williams played the long game. He maximized the minutes Paul and Booker played together, wagering chemistry would develop.

The numbers flipped. Phoenix went 34-8 over its next 42 games, threatening the Utah Jazz for the West's No. 1 seed. They began dominating Booker-Paul minutes. Around two star guards -- and a rim-running behemoth with soft hands in Ayton -- the Suns built perhaps the league's most sophisticated pick-and-roll attack: a whir of actions, some intended only as decoys, synched up on either side of the floor to maximize confusion.

Their greatness almost snuck up on them. "We went into the season just hoping to see how good we could be," Green says. "And then we looked up and had 30, 40, 50 wins -- and it was like, 'Wow, we got a really good team, guys.'"

Crowder recalls an assistant coach informing him about halfway through the season that Phoenix had the same record against teams above and below .500. "It was telling me," Crowder said last spring, "that we could beat anybody."

Losses ate at them. Williams found himself in after-midnight text exchanges with Paul and Booker after defeats, both players stewing.

As the playoffs neared, Williams wasn't sure what to expect. "I didn't know if our young guys could handle that kind of run," he says. "Book was ready, but D.A., Mikal, Cam, and Cam -- that's their first time in that situation. I tempered my expectations."

Even down 2-1 to the Lakers, Williams liked what he saw. "Their games weren't changing," he says. "You get to the playoffs a lot of times, and young guys don't play the same way. Our guys didn't change. They didn't tighten. That's when I started to think, 'Man, we got a shot.'"

They navigated huge opponents -- the Lakers and Nuggets -- and a Clippers team that played super-small lineups without a center.

"That Clippers series was the 'ah ha!' series for Deandre," Bryant said last season. "They played small, and we were able to keep him on the floor."

They went up 2-0 in the Finals before losing four straight to the Bucks. After Milwaukee's clinching win, Williams let his players see his pain.

"I was vulnerable with them," he says. "We fought together and cried together. I told them a few of my shortcomings, and said, 'OK, that's it. We are moving forward.'"


Suns coach Monty Williams knew complacency wouldn't be an issue for his team after a surprising, exhausting 2021 Finals run. "I know the makeup of our group," he says. "I knew the hurt we all experienced in Milwaukee would be enough." AP Photo/Paul Sancya
WILLIAMS WAS CONFIDENT there would be no Finals hangover. Knowing Paul and Booker, getting so close would only leave them hungrier.

"I know the makeup of our group, that they would not come in and say, 'Oh, we're good, we made it to the Finals,'" Williams says. "That doesn't mean we are gonna make a deep playoff run again [this season], but I knew -- the hurt we all experienced in Milwaukee would be enough."

Phoenix is even better this season: a league-best 24-5, with the No. 7 offense and No. 3 defense. They are deep, with assets to make a minor upgrade via trade.

They have added more layers to what was already the NBA's most complex pick-and-roll system.

Take this set Phoenix used to close out the Pelicans -- featuring an unusual baseline cut from Booker, from weak side to strong side:


Garrett Temple, defending Paul, approached Paul during the ensuing timeout. "That's a tough-ass play,'' Temple said, according to both. "Who called that -- you or Monty?"

Paul smiled. "That was Monty."

"If you ever watch after [out-of-timeout] plays or the first plays of a quarter, I look over at Coach a lot like, 'Man, that was nice,'" Paul says.

Meanwhile, Booker walked off the floor after canning that jumper and approached Williams: "I've never seen that play."

"I've never run it," Williams responded.

The play was designed to punish the Pelicans for blitzing Paul. The Suns are building counters for every response they see to their core sets. Overplay the "stack" pick-and-roll -- a play the Suns use more than anyone, featuring a perimeter player hitting Ayton's guy with a back screen -- and they'll turn it into an unexpected handoff:


They might feign a typical double-drag for Paul, only for it to morph into a back-pick for Ayton:


"We've done some things that might be a little different, but it's the players," Williams says. "We give them structure, but none of this works without Chris and Book. We don't want guys running plays. We want them making plays."

Variety and pitch-perfect spacing helps maximize the impact of Phoenix's spot-up guys. All of them -- Johnson, Crowder, Bridges, now Landry Shamet -- are smart and creative, adept at impromptu flare screens and drifting cuts.

"It's deliberate practice," Johnson says. "Monty is a lot of fun to play for in that regard. You almost feel spoiled."

The style keeps role players engaged, which translates to ferocious effort on defense.

"This style of play -- this flow -- I knew it translated to my game," Crowder said last season.

The Suns will spend the rest of the season honing all the little things that combine to make a great team. They know the only way to earn universal respect is to keep winning, but also how hard making the Finals again will be -- how much good fortune any champion needs. They are aiming to build something that lasts.

"We are not out to prove anything to anybody," Booker says. "We are winning, and we do it in a way that is sustainable. It might seem like we went from the bottom to the top quick, but I'm not surprised. A couple of players can change everything. This system and culture -- it's fun to be part of it."

[Mori Chu]

Wow, great article. I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks for posting.

[Split T]

Ya I really enjoyed it too! Some great insights. I loved how CP3 doesn’t ever take time off until the finals are over, even if he’s not in them.

[ShelC]

I love this team.

[bajanguy008]

Yea
That was top top stuff