Suns' disappointing season was borne of immaturity
With 79 down and four to go, the Suns have been excised from what had become a Keystone-Kops-style race for the eighth playoff seed in the NBA's Western Conference.
Let's hold on for a check of the math. In an 82-game season, it should be three games remaining, correct?
Absolutely, but for teams unable to reach the postseason -- especially one year after generating a highfalutin level of expectation -- we can add the seemingly essential blame game to the overall total.
Instead of indulging in the fine art of finger-pointing, however, let's attempt to distill all ingredients of this disappointment into a single area of draft-lottery-recidivist credit.
That means we're not here to specifically blame the myopic tendencies of deposed sixth man Isaiah Thomas or the rotational roulette of Coach Jeff Hornacek or the home-run cuts from general manager Ryan McDonough or the timing of Goran Dragic's agent or the Orlando Magic's overpaying of Channing Frye.
We're not going to howl at the Morris twins for avoiding rebounds for the first two-thirds of the season or refusing to talk to reporters or talking too frequently to referees.
And we're not even here to study Gerald Green's need for a road map while presumed to be on defense or Eric Bledsoe's proclivity toward throwing the ball to the opposing team.
Instead, let's define this season like so:
The Suns terrifically overestimated the maturity level of their opening roster. For the record, that reference has very little to do with on-court experience.
Before digging deeper, let's hark back to media day last October when McDonough -- with the issue of positional duplication as a talking point -- pointed out the Suns were attempting to become more Spurs-like in distribution of minutes.
Considering how the Suns seemed to run out of steam last April, it certainly made sense.
McDonough reminded us Gregg Popovich didn't have a single player average 30 minutes per game during a regular season preceding the Spurs' run to their fifth O'Brien Trophy.
And if playing limited minutes is good enough for the champions, how could Suns player quibble with a little less burn here and there, right? OK, McDonough didn't add the inference tucked inside that last sentence, but he also left out an important detail.
Unlike many of those selfless Spurs players, the Suns weren't suiting up anyone who's accomplished much of anything -- on a team basis -- in the NBA.
With 17 games as the L.A. Clippers' stunt double for Chris Paul, Bledsoe was as close as the Suns had to a postseason sage. Dragic hadn't participated since roughing up the Spurs for a momentous fourth quarter back in 2010.
The Spurs have a team full of players with postseason bona fides, so the concept of rationed, regular-season minutes made sense to them. The only statistic that mattered was the number of championships they could earn. When you understand the real goal in a team sport, it's easier to buy in.
The 2014-2015 Suns players, in contrast, had very little big-picture cred to play with.
This doesn't mean McDonough expected this year's Suns team to behave like the Spurs or that he had illusions of the season-opening roster getting anywhere near their level . . . ever. But with the Spur-ification of the entire league in full swing, even the notion of this Suns team -- or, at least, some of its players -- having the maturity level to handle a time-share situation was a bit Quixotic.
With maturity questions on the table, the elephant in the room, of course, was the smallest player on the Suns' roster.
But while Thomas became the catalyst for all manner of downshifting from the feel-good season of a year ago, trading for Bledsoe in 2013 was the launch point for much of the entire mood swing.
Behind Hornacek's approach of allowing players to do what they do best, McDonough's first season was defined by Suns -- new and old -- enjoying career years. The biggest "get," of course, was Bledsoe, who was considered the most talented player available that summer.
Although the Suns already had a talented point guard in Dragic, he hadn't exactly demonstrated build-around-me chops. And after he and Bledsoe began leading Phoenix to many more victories than defeats -- working in double-point-guard concert -- Dragic alone wasn't enough to sustain this level of success while Bledsoe was out.
So what was McDonough to do when Bledsoe became available . . . say no? Well, if he had, the Suns may now have Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker, right? Perhaps, but while they were running to 48 wins with Bledsoe playing only half of the season, very few were quibbling.
Unfortunately, Team Dragic eventually decided Goran should be defined by how often he was assigned to dribble the ball across the time line, rather than how often he ran screen-roll after Bledsoe gave him an entry pass.
And Thomas, still balancing the same shoulder chip that had inspired him to become a college star and a 20-point-per-game scorer after being drafted 60th, didn't exactly embrace the concept of team-oriented adjustment, either. He championed the premise of playing the three best offensive players at the same time, but -- like most of his teammates -- pouted when Hornacek opted to roll with players who were playing well in a particular game. If the Suns had an elite-level player or two, it would have been much easier to define roles over prolonged stretches of the season.
McDonough has attempted to acquire star talent, but LeBron James didn't grow up in Phoenix.
Meanwhile, Hornacek continued preaching team-lifting sacrifice, but his players -- like fans who gravitated toward each of them -- decided the sacrifice should be made by someone else.
With injury and a different type of post-trade-deadline roster imbalance muddling the season's final third, a coach and general manager who could have been elected to high office in this town a year ago now are criticized for augmenting this fire fueling by also trying to win.
But it really makes little sense to schedule a blame game without including an entire team.