The ball hits the rim, bounces around several times and then just barely falls through the hoop and a gritty Miami/New York series is over and the favorite goes home and the other team moves on. A ref in Sacramento decides the NBA would rather watch the Lakers play so he makes some questionable calls and the Kings go fishing instead of advancing. A game-changer point guard goes down with an injury and a season of work is all for naught. Two key players leave the bench in a "brawl" and have to sit out the game that could have propelled them to a championship.
Although I agree with this, I think there's a huge gap between a 50-and-fade team and a team that is just a lucky bounce or two away from a title.
However, I'm with you that a 50-and-fade team shouldn't be a failure. The context is that, although you and I have both been Suns fans for a long time, I've been on this board a long time, and you haven't. And I can tell you that the whining on this board about not winning a title, year after year, decade after decade, can get very tiring.
It's the illogic of it all that drives me crazy. Last summer, most of this board was, in a perverse way, happy that the Suns were bottoming out. Getting top talent through the draft -- even if you then cash that talent in for veterans via trade, or use its presence to lure free agents -- is really the only way to build a contender, we agreed. Heaven forbid the Suns put together another mediocre season, we warned. Much better to be patient, to establish a culture of defense and responsibility, to not be seduced yet again by fast breaks and three-pointers, which aren't reliable come playoff time.
Not quite everyone on this board said this, but the consensus was very strong.
And now, we have exactly the kind of team that, less than a year ago, most people said they
didn't want. And yet that is forgotten; almost all of those people are now happy. "The rebuild is over!", some boast. "We're just a player or two away!"
I don't really care about titles. I joined the ride just after the Cinderella team of 1976, so I've been through most of it. I'm okay with 50-and-fade seasons, really.
But to read another cycle of this board convincing themselves that the Suns are on a contending track, then throwing a collective tantrum when it becomes clear that they were fooling themselves -- I don't think I can take it.
I've been through that so many times, and if you look objectively at the current Suns versus some of their other "good and growing" years, this one really doesn't look that hot. I could believe that the Johnson/Chambers/Hornacek teams were close and just needed the right trade, or that the Nash/Stoudemire/Marion teams were close and just needed the right combination of health, role players, and the occasional timely defensive rebound. But I can't believe that this team is close, or even close to being close. It isn't that I've grown pessimistic, or that I don't want to be burned again, or any of that other emotional nonsense -- it's that this team really doesn't look that good to me.
That doesn't mean you don't keep trying to put a contender together even if the likely outcome is 50 wins and a loss in the playoffs.
A team whose likely outcome is 50 wins isn't a contender.
There is a
huge gap between a team that wins 50 games and one that wins 57+. The closer you get to the top of the ladder, the harder it is to climb each rung. A team that wins 46 games one year might be close to winning 52 the next, but to get from 52 to 58 is a totally different story -- it means that you're winning most of your other games against the league's other 50-win teams, instead of splitting them.
I'd love for someone to say, "You know what, I wanted the team to bottom out and build a contender methodically around premium talent ... but I've changed my mind. It's more fun to be in the playoff hunt, and I don't want to keep holding my breath for everything to fall into place for a title." I'd say, "Great! I really admire that attitude." But instead we have people who are dead committed to a particular plan of action, until the wind changes direction, after which they say, oh right, this is what we wanted to do all along -- and don't even realize that they're contradicting themselves. I can't deal with it anymore.
