20 Second Timeout

Tony Parker Leads the Way as the Spurs Dismantle the Suns with Clinical Precision

Tony Parker scored a career-high (regular season or playoffs) 41 points on 17-26 field goal shooting, dished off 12 assists and grabbed five rebounds as his San Antonio Spurs turned the Valley of the Sun into the Valley of the Shadow of Death, routing the Suns 115-99 to take a 3-0 series lead and essentially slam shut the window of opportunity for this Phoenix team to win a championship as presently constituted. The game was not as close as the final score. Tim Duncan scored 23 points on 9-15 field goal shooting and he had a team-high 10 rebounds. Manu Ginobili scored 20 points on 7-11 field goal shooting. Yes, those numbers are correct: the Spurs' top three players scored 84 points on 33-52 (.635) field goal shooting. ESPN commentator Jeff Van Gundy declared that in the playoffs you have to "take someone and something away" from the other team in order to have any chance to win. Instead, the Suns took away no one and nothing. As TNT's Kenny Smith has said repeatedly about Phoenix and Denver, they give up way too many easy shot opportunities to their opponents.

Amare Stoudemire led the Suns with 28 points and 11 rebounds but he is very much like Denver's Carmelo Anthony: a prodigiously gifted offensive player who gives up even more at the defensive end than he provides at the offensive end. The only difference between the two players is that every once in a while Stoudemire will make a highlight-worthy blocked shot. Stoudemire's occasional swats do not change the fact that he is a poor one on one defender who also seems to have no clue where and when he is supposed to rotate on defense. Van Gundy could have simply made a tape recording saying "The other big (meaning Stoudemire) is late on the back side rotation" and spent the game at the concession stand eating a hot dog. Of course, Steve Nash (seven points on 3-8 field goal shooting, nine assists) should not be left out of any talk about the Suns' horrible defense; Parker won the point guard matchup over him in a landslide, outshooting, outscoring and even outpassing the two-time MVP. Granted, Parker scored a lot of his points off of screen and roll plays--which Van Gundy and Mark Jackson correctly noted must be defended by all five players, not just one--but has there ever been a two-time MVP who was outperformed this badly by his counterpart in a playoff game? Nash is not injured and his skills have not noticeably deteriorated from where they were when he won his MVPs but in this series he has been no better than the fourth or fifth best player on the court most of the time. In case you have forgotten (or don't know), the other players who have won at least two regular season MVPs are Duncan, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Moses Malone, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. So Nash is on that list but Kobe Bryant--pending the results of this year's balloting--has yet to win a single MVP. Could you imagine any circumstance in which Bryant would be so completely dominated by his opposite number, let alone in a playoff game?

Of course, most "experts" are going to look right past Nash, throw a few barbs at Stoudemire and then lay full force into Suns President Steve Kerr, Coach Mike D'Antoni and midseason acquisition Shaquille O'Neal, who finished with 19 points and six rebounds. The reality is that the Suns proved on several occasions that the Nash-Stoudemire-Shawn Marion trio was never going to win a championship. O'Neal was brought in to provide paint presence and shore up the team's staggering rebounding deficit and, after a brief adjustment period, he did just that. O'Neal is no longer a player who can dominate for four quarters but he can still have an impact on the game, as he showed even during the game three debacle: O'Neal posted a -5 plus/minus rating in 31:07, while Nash had a game-worst -26 plus/minus rating in virtually the same amount of playing time (32:19). In other words, even during this rout the Suns were competitive with the World Champion Spurs when O'Neal was in the game but they got slaughtered when Nash played. Nevertheless, after the Suns lose this series Kerr will be heavily criticized for making the O'Neal-Marion deal and Kerr will likely respond by firing D'Antoni and bringing in a defensive minded coach. Kerr played for championship teams in Chicago and San Antonio that were built around defense and it is obvious that his vision of how the game should be played does not quite mesh with D'Antoni's. The problem now for the Suns is that even if they bring in a different coach and try to become a defensive minded team several of their core players (Nash, O'Neal, Grant Hill) are getting older while the Western Conference is full of young teams on the rise. Even if another coach can get more out of this group it may not be enough to win a title. I should add that I don't think that D'Antoni is a bad coach--but I am not convinced that he is an NBA championship-level coach, either. Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich always seems to be one step ahead of D'Antoni, but Popovich is one step (or more) ahead of a lot of NBA coaches.

There simply is no excuse for the Suns to not only lose this badly at home to the Spurs but to not even be competitive for most of the game. The Suns have now lost three straight games to the Spurs after being the only team this season to never have a three game losing streak--yet the Suns beat the Spurs twice in the regular season after acquiring O'Neal and they outplayed the Spurs for the better part of game one. There is absolutely no question that there is enough talent on the roster to at least be competitive with the Spurs. The problem is that the Suns to do not have a championship level game plan nor do they have championship level mental toughness. At halftime, D'Antoni told his team that they were not playing as if every possession matters. He was right, of course, but part of his job is to indoctrinate his team to play that way from the start of the season. As Mark Jackson said during the telecast, habits are formed throughout the season and cannot simply be created during a playoff series. Here are a couple examples from game three that indicate that the Suns do not value every possession: (1) they let Parker catch an inbounds pass and dribble all the way down the court to score a floater as time expired in the first half, an inexcusable defensive lapse; (2) at the end of the third quarter, Nash had the ball one on one versus Spurs center Fabricio Oberto (after a switch) with more than 10 seconds left but instead of creating a high percentage shot Nash ended up passing to Stoudemire for a three point shot.

Of course, it is not right to just focus on what the Suns did wrong. San Antonio is a marvelous team that probably played its best game of the season. Van Gundy offered a perfect summary of why the Spurs are the model NBA franchise: "I think that the best trait of the Spurs' organization is that from the owner to the GM to the coach to the best player they are a humble organization. They never think they have it figured out. That is why they stay sharp, that is why they stay urgent and that is why they stay selfless." Early in the game, Jackson noted that the Spurs will not outsmart themselves; they were killing the Suns by using Parker in screen/roll plays, so they kept running that action over and over. At various times, Van Gundy and Jackson both criticized how the Suns defended the play, saying that the Suns' defenders took bad angles, gave up too much ground and needlessly exposed O'Neal by switching instead of fighting their way through the screens. All of those things are true but how many times have you seen an NBA team score two or three times on a play and then go away from it and start doing something else? That always drives me nuts; if a play works, wear it out unless or until the other team stops it. That sounds simple but the problem that creeps in for some teams is that other players start clamoring to have touches and shot attempts; Jackson made an outstanding point when he said that Duncan did not start demanding to get the ball in the post but instead let Parker run the show and make the decision to either shoot the ball or pass to cutters.

Labels: Amare Stoudemire, Manu Ginobili, Phoenix Suns, San Antonio Spurs, Shaquille O'Neal, Steve Nash, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker

posted by David Friedman @ 7:13 AM

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