The Suns won today against the Lakers and it was a good game to watch, but not a very impressive performance by the Suns. Their offense was not humming like usual. They did not blow the Lakers out at home, but more surprisingly they never had one of those offensive stretches where they make the opponent feel overwhelmed and overmatched. And this was against a Lakers team that was hurting bad. Kwame just came back from his injury and they are still missing Radmanovic, Luke Walton, Chris Mihm and now they say Lamar Odom might be done for the year. Thats 2 of their starters from last year including their second best player, their biggest bench contributor in Walton who became a great starter for them this year and their biggest off-season aquisition in Vlad-Rad. In-spite of all that, the Lakers had a shot at winning this one at the end as Kobe just shot 11-28 for 31 points. A better game from Kobe, and this might have been a different story. I heard the Lakers are 10-16 or something ugly like that without Luke Walton. Apparently, he is their best "triangulator".
Games like this scare me about the Suns. The moment a big-time, nationally televised, playoff-intensity game shows up, their offense stalls just a little bit! All said and done, this style may not be 100% playoff-proof. The run-and-gun (and fun) and the 3's disappear to some extent as the pressure mounts. Of course a lot of the problems on this day was because of the Lakers. D'Antoni gave them a lot of credit for imposing their tempo on the game. They always play great D and make sure the Suns don't run away with it. The Big-Chief-Triangle didn't win 9 rings for nothing! He knows how to D-Up. But still, I would have liked to see the Suns play better in this game against a depleted Lakers team. Nash had a great game with 23 and 10. There was a great stretch late in this game when Kobe and Nash were dominating at their respective ends of the floor and trading MVP-level punches. It was awesome to watch. Marion had 13-12 and played great D against Kobe and fouled out. Raja Bell may be a little over-rated with his D and I feel a lot more comfortable seeing Marion on Kobe. The Brazilian Blur had 20. Barbosa is one guy who always plays well against the Lakers these days.
The other big story of the day was how the Warriors lost to the Wizards. The Warriors have been finding new ways to lose games for 12 years now. But even by their standards, this game was weird. They go in to Washington to play against their former-friends and current-foes Gil and Twan and play real well to lead by 2 with a few seconds to go. So it's last shot time for the Wiz and they got Agent-0 handling the rock. He drives to the hoop and barely gets the shot off before the buzzer and the shot clanks off the rim. But the whistle blows after the buzzer on Pietrus for a foul on the drive. I am not sure about the call, but Nelly jumps up and down as you would expect any coach to do after such a call. Apparently he called the ref a f'ing idiot and gets T'eed up on top of this foul. So Gil gets to shoot 3 free throws with 0.1 sec on the clock. He nails all 3 in-spite of a Nelly timeout between the 2-nd and 3-rd and waves the Warriors good bye. It's good Nelly is Nelly and not a young 38 year-old coach trying to make name for himself! He can survive this. Interesting week for Nelly after all but conceding defeat in the playoff push early in the week.
Ben Gordon and Michael Redd combined to score 100 points today! Ben had 48 and Redd had 52 on identical 18-32 shooting in a match-up between 2 of the premier pure scorers in the league. Chicago won the game in OT 126-121. Boston needed double OT to beat the T-Wolves. Delonte West, another one of those guys having a better NBA career than people expected out of him coming out of college, had 31 points. There was a Troy Hudson sighting with 26 points. Not sure what happened to this guy after that awesome season 3 years back. KG had 33 and Ricky Davis had 35 in losing efforts.
LA Lakers @ Phoenix - 94 - 99
Interesting games on the board for Mar 5-th (Monday)
Houston @ Cleveland - T=Mac V LeBron with a side of Yao? Yao is expected to play in this one.
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