Suns Had Everything ... Except Patience

The only thing lamer than focusing on one team all the time is ... focusing on a past team for my entire Monday’s output? Well, too bad. The 2004-05 Suns shocked the world, and I wish they’d been successful in altering the course of the universe. It’s their specter that’s beginning to stir up Nash to NYK rumors, and it will loom over that organization for some time. No matter how many aggressive moves they make, in part to make a break with the past.↵
↵
↵But what do the players themselves think? What if that team had just gone on forever? I’m glad you asked, because Quentin Richardson has an opinion or two on the matter. From The Arizona Republic:↵↵⇥“If you look at it, we were really just a healthy Joe Johnson away from being able to compete with San Antonio. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes that’s the way the NBA is. They think they have to do this or that to fix something, when the reality is if you give us another one or two or three years with our same core group of guys, we would have won a championship.”↵⇥
↵⇥
↵⇥“The most frustrating part about it all, when you’ve been around the league you know when you have a special group of guys with that blend of talent and the kind of egos that allowed it to work, allowed everybody to be who they were. You don’t come across that a lot.”↵↵

Is this sentimentalizing, or romanticizing, the past? Probably. For one, I’ve always felt that the team made Richardson himself a worse player. And they still would’ve had to contend with the Amare injury, which would’ve introduced Boris Diaw to the world, which would’ve brought on a salary cap nightmare even if they had somehow re-signed Johnson. But I think the reason why fans -- and to some degree, the players involved -- still wonder about what could’ve been is that the 2004-05 Suns really seemed to stand for something, like each other, and qualify as must-watch every night. More Q:↵↵⇥“Everybody is making money and having good careers, but at the same time we all realize and acknowledge that we had something pretty good. Even from coach. We had a great coach that everybody got along with. You never get that -- all the players on the same page and the coach likes everybody and everybody likes the coach. We had a rare thing, and it was pretty much dismantled in the snap of a finger.”↵↵And that’s not even the most wistful quote from this article. You could argue that the Suns kept together the core of Nash and Amare, but in retrospect, that team was closer than we thought at the time, more than just a novelty act, and full of players who would’ve come back hungrier and more tight-knit the next season. I get being restless and unpredictable, since that only fits with everything the Suns said with their play. But if there’s one lesson they could’ve learned from “real winners” like the Spurs, it should’ve been patience, not the lackluster search for size and toughness.↵