Suns and their foes

The Suns have had a unique basketball team the last 4 seasons. A fun, high-flying offensive minded team that can't be stopped. It's an unfortunate truth in all of sports that defense wins championships. I have tried to live in denial of this fact for years, but it is a reality in sports. Defensive minded teams not only win championships, but they also tend to contend for a long time as long as their core talent stays together. Thats not the case with offensive teams.

Couple of things always happen with unique, offenses like the Suns. First of all, other teams start copying the style. There is always a danger of some team eventually learning to play the style better than the original. Secondly, after a couple of years, these offenses get figured out. For example, in the NFL, teams the Rams of the Warner-Martz era was the best show on turf for a while, but before you know it, their run ended. The reason is that the defenses around the league figure out ways to slow such systems. This never happens to great defenses because defense by definition is reactive and the onus is on the offenses to stay a step ahead and they can't do that forever.

The Suns are still a step ahead. It's not easy to stop the Suns though they are pretty much "figured out" in the sense teams know what they want to do. But stopping them is easier said than done. Teams have tried to adjust to the Suns offense by doing things like sending everybody back on defense instead of crashing the offensive boards etc. Things that are usually considered a violation of basketball common-sense, but necessary evil when you are playing the Suns. There is still no stopping the Suns for the most part.

But lately, there have been a team or two that seem to trouble the Suns every-time and I find that very interesting. This could just be a case of bad match-ups, but it's also possible it's something more. Obviously the Suns troubles against the Spurs, especially in the playoffs are well chronicled. I would just explain that as the Spurs being a better team. They play great defense, but they have Timmy Duncan and hence more championship caliber talent. But the number of teams that the Suns have troubles against is slowly increasing.

The Suns lost to the Hornets couple of days back. This is the second time they are losing to this team. They have also lost to the Fakers twice and are having problems handling the Warriors these days. These are all good teams, but is there a pattern here? Are teams beginning to learn to "match-up" better against the Suns? Before you know, you'll start hearing talks about how the Suns window is closing. Of course the Suns have a old team and this version does not have a lot of time on it's hand. But often times, the window doesn't close as much as other team's window opens up a bit wider. In other words, you are as good as you have always been, but some other team just passed you by. Both the Hornets and the Lakers might be en-route to accomplishing this.

So the questions is, are these teams just one of those difficult match-up for the Suns? Or are they just great teams with an ability to beat anybody on any given night? Or have they specifically figured out the Suns system? Or are these teams flat out getting to be better than the Suns period? I guess these are the questions that will be answered this spring in the NBA playoffs. The bottom-line is, the Suns better win one this year or things could get much tougher in a hurry.