The mediocrity that surrounds the Phoenix Suns this season seem to have gotten to the All-Star Saturday today in Phoenix. I personally prefer the Saturday festivities to the game on Sunday, but this one was not all that. The 3-point shootout was weak and the slam-dunk contest had it's moments, but nothing more. I like that the guys are getting creative and are using all kinds of props from phone booths to all-green outfits that signify kryptonite, but the dunks themselves were not as good as last year.
There were a few good ones. I liked Nate Robinson's jump over Dwight Howard. That was incredible. I like the one where Howard dunked the ball off the edge of the side-board and didn't even need more than one attempt to nail that. The Rudy Fernandez dunk was also good, but he needed 200 attempts to make it work. The best part of that dunk was Kenny Smith's funny comments about Rudy's choice of Pau Gasol and J.R.Smith's choice of Sonny Weems to throw these passes. They are not exactly Steve Nash or CP3, though Pau Gasol did a decent job with those passes.
The rookie-Soph game happened yesterday night and I am glad I didn't watch even a second of it. That game should easily be the worst basketball game of the year. It's just like the All-Star game with no defense and everybody trying extra-hard to put on a show, but it's much worse because the talent, experience and the maturity level is ten times worse than that of the All-Stars. No wonder, tickets were available for 5 bucks each for this game on Stubhub. All that remains now is the All-Star game tomorrow. It has some potential to be interesting given how good LeBron, Kobe and Wade are playing and competing these days, but it's still just an All-Star game.
Phoenix is at the center of the NBA world right now for both the right and wrong reasons. It's hosting the All-Star game and is front-and-center in all trade deadline talk. Plus the Arizona Republic is reporting the Suns are going to fire the coach Terry Porter. I support that decision. He has not had any significant impact on the defense - may be he can't, given this Suns personnel. But the bottom-line is , this defense still sucks. So his only contribution has been confusing and derailing the offense. All Porter does is go to Shaq and Shaq has been decent, but this is not the Shaq of 2001. You got to have a better offense than just going to Shaq every time especially if you have talent like Nash, Amare, J-Rich and Barbosa. I hate coaches getting fired too soon, but I don't see an option in this case.
As for the trade deadline, there are a lot of rumors out there about Amare. It's funny how he is saying things like "I have no idea why the Suns would like to trade a super-star who is also still getting better". They want to trade you because you don't play defense, you don't rebound and you just disappear for long stretches of the game. This guy was an unstoppable monster a few years back, now I don't even think it's a bad idea to trade him away. He is the youngest asset the Suns have and I would hate for him to become a monster again somewhere else, but still it kinda makes sense the Suns are trading him. I like that the Suns seem to consider Nash untouchable, though I am a little surprised given his age and Amare's age. Amare still thinks Kerr is a good GM, but has accused the owner Robert Sarver of being money-minded.
Kerr should be a smooth-operator if he is still able to be in the good books of Amare and Shaq. But he has not distinguished himself as a GM yet. One bad decision after another starting with getting rid of Marion for an old Shaq. I was half hoping he would trade Amare to the Heat and get Marion back. But Marion has now ended up in Toronto with the Heat getting Jermaine O'Neal. That trade makes no sense for the Heat given O'Neal's track record of injuries. Pat Riley is saying he has cleared a lot of cap space for 2010 with this trade. For what, I don't know given that Wade is their own player and is one of the prized free agents of 2010. I guess at least he is trying to do something and if O'Neal is healthy, this could work. I think Toronto might trade Bosh next and I wouldn't mind swapping Amare for Bosh.
No comments:
Post a Comment