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Sporting News: Off and running: Suns set on fast break
Sean Deveney
Posted: April 19, 2005
Less than six minutes into a game against the Suns last week, Lakers coach Frank Hamblen began to see his fears realized. His team missed a shot, and Steve Nash grabbed the rebound, raised his eyes and began sprinting up the court.
Hamblen, like every coach who game-plans for the Suns, had harried his team about the importance of getting back defensively to guard Phoenix's shooters. Red-faced and guttural, Hamblen shouted, "Back! Back!"
Too late. Nash flipped a 40-foot pass ahead to Joe Johnson, who dropped a pass back to the perimeter where Jim Jackson stood for a 3-pointer, hardly a Laker in sight. In all, just five seconds elapsed between Nash's rebound and Jackson's 3-pointer, a lesson in speed the Lakers learned well that night -- these Suns have complete disdain for the shot clock. Phoenix took 84 shots against the Lakers, and 28 (33.3 percent) of them were hoisted after six or fewer seconds had ticked off the 24-second clock, and 54 of those shots (64.2 percent) were taken in 10 or fewer seconds.
The Suns' quick triggers have made them the best story in the NBA this season, helping the team to 110.2 points per game and a stunning turnaround from 29 wins last season to 61 entering the week. That success has been a blueprint for others, pushing an offensive surge in the league. Boston has opened up its offense, leading to 101.5 points per game and a division title. Seattle put Luke Ridnour at point guard, sped up its attack and won its division. Washington has turned its uptempo pace into a triple-digit scoring average and its first playoff berth in eight years.
The return to fast-break basketball has boosted NBA scoring to 97.1 points per team, up 3.7 points from last season. For the first time since 1999-2000, 10 teams are averaging at least 99.0 points. This has been a boon for the league, which had seen its reputation suffer in an avalanche of low scores, poor shooting and defense-minded teams who shun fast breaks like unwanted in-laws.
The bad news for this fun-and-gun approach, though, is that the NBA's playoff drive is upon us. No question looms larger this postseason than how these fast-paced teams will fare. As postseason tradition and cliches dictate, games slow down, scores drop and teams without top-notch defenses just don't win.
There's proof: Last year, the Pistons won the title with a suffocating defense that yielded 80.7 points per game in the playoffs. Overall, teams averaged just 88.0 points in the postseason, and only twice since the Showtime Lakers of the late 1980s has a team won a championship without ranking in the top 10 defensively (the Rockets in 1995 and the Lakers in 2001).
"In the playoffs, it is a grind-out game," says Pistons forward Tayshaun Prince. "It's not about who can go out and score 100 points. A hundred points? It's not going to be that. A team like Washington, or a team like Boston, teams that really score, you might have problems holding them to 80, 90 points in the regular season. But when the playoffs come, they're not going to be able to keep that up. There's going to be too much defense for that."
Of course, those teams beg to differ, and no team can be expected to change its style just because the playoffs have come around.
"We know what we do well," says Wizards forward Antawn Jamison. "We score a lot; we get up and down. That's who we are, and we have used that style to win a lot this year. We're still going to run our break. We're still going to score. Why can't we keep winning just because it's the playoffs?"
If the league hopes to see the high-scoring trend continue, playoff success from one -- or more -- of the NBA's newly minted fast-break juggernauts is a must. NBA teams tend to mimic other successful teams, and, traditionally, successful teams have been defense-oriented. This regular season has been a nifty exercise in uptempo basketball, but the playoffs will determine whether that exercise has staying power.
"Everyone is expecting us to just drop in the playoffs," says Suns guard Joe Johnson. "I have heard it over and over again. The only way to show that we can win in the playoffs is to go out and do it."
No fast-break team has better postseason prospects than the Suns. That's because they are the uberrunners, the team that has taken the fast-break experiment to its logical conclusion. Most teams look to run off defensive rebounds, especially long ones. But the Suns run on misses, makes, turnovers and just about any opportunity that comes up. They have the league's craftiest ballhandler, Nash, and have flanked him with two deadly 3-point shooters -- Johnson (47.1 percent from the 3-point line, second in the league) and Quentin Richardson (219 3-pointers, most in the league) -- and interior players Shawn Marion and Amare Stoudemire, who make up for their lack of size with speed, strength at the rim and the ability to throw outlet passes. "There is no team like them," says 17-year NBA veteran and Suns analyst Eddie Johnson. "This offense will wear you down. That's the beauty of the Suns. They never stop. They run for 48 minutes, and they are constantly putting you in a position that you don't want to be in. Who else compares with them?"
The league has seen high-scoring teams flame out in the playoffs in recent years, which adds to the skepticism about the Suns and the league's other uptempo teams. However, Phoenix's high-scoring predecessors have been significantly different from the Suns. The Mavericks, for example, were the league's highest-scoring team for three straight years and could not advance to The Finals. But Dallas did not have the interior threat Stoudemire provides, a player who is devastating on pick-and-roll plays with Nash, one who can get easy baskets in the post and put opponents into foul trouble.
Sacramento has averaged at least 100 points for seven consecutive years but hasn't been to The Finals. But the Kings -- who were led by finesse big men Vlade Divac and Chris Webber for most of that high-scoring stretch -- are not a fast-break team. They are a quick, efficient halfcourt team that gets easy baskets off cutting and passing.
As Johnson points out, "Come on, when's the last time you saw Chris Webber or Vlade Divac in a full sprint on a fast break? They haven't sprinted in years. They're nothing like the Suns."
The difficulty for the Suns will be in holding true to their style. Phoenix is not a great defensive team, but the Suns hold opponents to 44.5 percent shooting, which ranks 14th in the league. That means their defense is good enough to allow their offense to blossom -- which should help, because scoring is sure to drop in the postseason, for a number of reasons.
"Coaches get more deliberate," says one Western Conference scout. "There is more on the line, so they want to slow down and run the right play every time. Defenses just get better because you're playing the same team over and over. And referees tend to let more physical contact go, so there are not as many easy baskets."
But Suns coach Mike D'Antoni does not figure to suddenly start calling plays on every possession in the playoffs. Part of his brilliance as a coach this season has been his willingness to remove the reins from his team, to chuck the playbook and allow the Suns to simply be basketball players. If anything, D'Antoni will prod his team to run more in the playoffs, to force the tempo of the game into the Suns' favor -- Phoenix is just 7-7 when it scores fewer than 100 points.
For the Suns to succeed, their triggers must be as quick as they have been all season. They need to continue their disregard for the shot clock.
"We've reminded our players that the only players who can stop our fast break is us," says Suns assistant coach Marc Iavaroni. "If we stop running and reacting, if we start getting cautious, if we pass up open looks -- those are all things under our control."
If the Suns are carrying the hopes for all the league's fast-break teams, if the potential for routine nights of triple-digit scoring in the NBA's near future is locked into the length of Phoenix's playoff run, then it helps that the league is going into the postseason with its most wide-open field in recent memory.
San Antonio, arguably the favorite to win the title and a team that has beaten Phoenix in two out of three games, is dealing with a persistent ankle injury to star forward Tim Duncan. The East's best team, Miami, has depth problems. The reigning champion Pistons have been inconsistent. As former Cavaliers coach Paul Silas says, "The thing about this year is that there is no beast out there."
This year, perhaps, more than any season in the past 25 years, anyone can win. Even a fast-break team.
"Why not?" Stoudemire says. "You can see our record. We know we are a good team, and we know what we are -- a fast-break team. I think we have started something. I think the way we play, a lot of teams are going to want to play this way. But, at the same time, we have to prove it, and we have to do that in the playoffs."
Sean Deveney is a staff writer for Sporting News. E-mail him at [email protected].
Sean Deveney
Posted: April 19, 2005
Less than six minutes into a game against the Suns last week, Lakers coach Frank Hamblen began to see his fears realized. His team missed a shot, and Steve Nash grabbed the rebound, raised his eyes and began sprinting up the court.
Hamblen, like every coach who game-plans for the Suns, had harried his team about the importance of getting back defensively to guard Phoenix's shooters. Red-faced and guttural, Hamblen shouted, "Back! Back!"
Too late. Nash flipped a 40-foot pass ahead to Joe Johnson, who dropped a pass back to the perimeter where Jim Jackson stood for a 3-pointer, hardly a Laker in sight. In all, just five seconds elapsed between Nash's rebound and Jackson's 3-pointer, a lesson in speed the Lakers learned well that night -- these Suns have complete disdain for the shot clock. Phoenix took 84 shots against the Lakers, and 28 (33.3 percent) of them were hoisted after six or fewer seconds had ticked off the 24-second clock, and 54 of those shots (64.2 percent) were taken in 10 or fewer seconds.
The Suns' quick triggers have made them the best story in the NBA this season, helping the team to 110.2 points per game and a stunning turnaround from 29 wins last season to 61 entering the week. That success has been a blueprint for others, pushing an offensive surge in the league. Boston has opened up its offense, leading to 101.5 points per game and a division title. Seattle put Luke Ridnour at point guard, sped up its attack and won its division. Washington has turned its uptempo pace into a triple-digit scoring average and its first playoff berth in eight years.
The return to fast-break basketball has boosted NBA scoring to 97.1 points per team, up 3.7 points from last season. For the first time since 1999-2000, 10 teams are averaging at least 99.0 points. This has been a boon for the league, which had seen its reputation suffer in an avalanche of low scores, poor shooting and defense-minded teams who shun fast breaks like unwanted in-laws.
The bad news for this fun-and-gun approach, though, is that the NBA's playoff drive is upon us. No question looms larger this postseason than how these fast-paced teams will fare. As postseason tradition and cliches dictate, games slow down, scores drop and teams without top-notch defenses just don't win.
There's proof: Last year, the Pistons won the title with a suffocating defense that yielded 80.7 points per game in the playoffs. Overall, teams averaged just 88.0 points in the postseason, and only twice since the Showtime Lakers of the late 1980s has a team won a championship without ranking in the top 10 defensively (the Rockets in 1995 and the Lakers in 2001).
"In the playoffs, it is a grind-out game," says Pistons forward Tayshaun Prince. "It's not about who can go out and score 100 points. A hundred points? It's not going to be that. A team like Washington, or a team like Boston, teams that really score, you might have problems holding them to 80, 90 points in the regular season. But when the playoffs come, they're not going to be able to keep that up. There's going to be too much defense for that."
Of course, those teams beg to differ, and no team can be expected to change its style just because the playoffs have come around.
"We know what we do well," says Wizards forward Antawn Jamison. "We score a lot; we get up and down. That's who we are, and we have used that style to win a lot this year. We're still going to run our break. We're still going to score. Why can't we keep winning just because it's the playoffs?"
If the league hopes to see the high-scoring trend continue, playoff success from one -- or more -- of the NBA's newly minted fast-break juggernauts is a must. NBA teams tend to mimic other successful teams, and, traditionally, successful teams have been defense-oriented. This regular season has been a nifty exercise in uptempo basketball, but the playoffs will determine whether that exercise has staying power.
"Everyone is expecting us to just drop in the playoffs," says Suns guard Joe Johnson. "I have heard it over and over again. The only way to show that we can win in the playoffs is to go out and do it."
No fast-break team has better postseason prospects than the Suns. That's because they are the uberrunners, the team that has taken the fast-break experiment to its logical conclusion. Most teams look to run off defensive rebounds, especially long ones. But the Suns run on misses, makes, turnovers and just about any opportunity that comes up. They have the league's craftiest ballhandler, Nash, and have flanked him with two deadly 3-point shooters -- Johnson (47.1 percent from the 3-point line, second in the league) and Quentin Richardson (219 3-pointers, most in the league) -- and interior players Shawn Marion and Amare Stoudemire, who make up for their lack of size with speed, strength at the rim and the ability to throw outlet passes. "There is no team like them," says 17-year NBA veteran and Suns analyst Eddie Johnson. "This offense will wear you down. That's the beauty of the Suns. They never stop. They run for 48 minutes, and they are constantly putting you in a position that you don't want to be in. Who else compares with them?"
The league has seen high-scoring teams flame out in the playoffs in recent years, which adds to the skepticism about the Suns and the league's other uptempo teams. However, Phoenix's high-scoring predecessors have been significantly different from the Suns. The Mavericks, for example, were the league's highest-scoring team for three straight years and could not advance to The Finals. But Dallas did not have the interior threat Stoudemire provides, a player who is devastating on pick-and-roll plays with Nash, one who can get easy baskets in the post and put opponents into foul trouble.
Sacramento has averaged at least 100 points for seven consecutive years but hasn't been to The Finals. But the Kings -- who were led by finesse big men Vlade Divac and Chris Webber for most of that high-scoring stretch -- are not a fast-break team. They are a quick, efficient halfcourt team that gets easy baskets off cutting and passing.
As Johnson points out, "Come on, when's the last time you saw Chris Webber or Vlade Divac in a full sprint on a fast break? They haven't sprinted in years. They're nothing like the Suns."
The difficulty for the Suns will be in holding true to their style. Phoenix is not a great defensive team, but the Suns hold opponents to 44.5 percent shooting, which ranks 14th in the league. That means their defense is good enough to allow their offense to blossom -- which should help, because scoring is sure to drop in the postseason, for a number of reasons.
"Coaches get more deliberate," says one Western Conference scout. "There is more on the line, so they want to slow down and run the right play every time. Defenses just get better because you're playing the same team over and over. And referees tend to let more physical contact go, so there are not as many easy baskets."
But Suns coach Mike D'Antoni does not figure to suddenly start calling plays on every possession in the playoffs. Part of his brilliance as a coach this season has been his willingness to remove the reins from his team, to chuck the playbook and allow the Suns to simply be basketball players. If anything, D'Antoni will prod his team to run more in the playoffs, to force the tempo of the game into the Suns' favor -- Phoenix is just 7-7 when it scores fewer than 100 points.
For the Suns to succeed, their triggers must be as quick as they have been all season. They need to continue their disregard for the shot clock.
"We've reminded our players that the only players who can stop our fast break is us," says Suns assistant coach Marc Iavaroni. "If we stop running and reacting, if we start getting cautious, if we pass up open looks -- those are all things under our control."
If the Suns are carrying the hopes for all the league's fast-break teams, if the potential for routine nights of triple-digit scoring in the NBA's near future is locked into the length of Phoenix's playoff run, then it helps that the league is going into the postseason with its most wide-open field in recent memory.
San Antonio, arguably the favorite to win the title and a team that has beaten Phoenix in two out of three games, is dealing with a persistent ankle injury to star forward Tim Duncan. The East's best team, Miami, has depth problems. The reigning champion Pistons have been inconsistent. As former Cavaliers coach Paul Silas says, "The thing about this year is that there is no beast out there."
This year, perhaps, more than any season in the past 25 years, anyone can win. Even a fast-break team.
"Why not?" Stoudemire says. "You can see our record. We know we are a good team, and we know what we are -- a fast-break team. I think we have started something. I think the way we play, a lot of teams are going to want to play this way. But, at the same time, we have to prove it, and we have to do that in the playoffs."
Sean Deveney is a staff writer for Sporting News. E-mail him at [email protected].
