Interesting story in the Times' sports section last week about the end of era for the Phoenix Suns, once the NBA's most fanciful and joyful team, but now, apparently nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the league's above-average defense-oriented ones. Most intriguing is some players' admission that they're unhappy about the change, a break from players typical fare where they strenuously adhere to saying nothing while talk all post-game long. (Sometimes I wonder if professional athletes spend more time practicing their interview patter than their game patter, but it might be that sports reporters don't practice at all.)
Star point guard Steve Nash, always a delight to watch, after the trade of two role players, point forward Boris Diaw and shooting guard Raja Bell: “It’s hard. I have a hard time committing to this as a business. I take this personally, and I take my career home with me. I care about my teammates. When you lose two of your best friends on the team suddenly, it’s hard.”
Diaw, a loose-limbed Frenchman who could never seem to put his whole game together, on the replacement of Coach Mike D'Antoni with Terry Porter, the main reason why one era has ended: “It definitely wasn’t as fun. It wasn’t as exciting for the fans...I’ll always remember Phoenix with Mike. We went from a winning team that was the most exciting team in the league to a half-winning team that wasn’t exciting at all.”
Of course, a franchise's owner reserves the right to change coaches and perhaps this one was right. Under D'Antoni, the Suns had several excellent teams that never quite made the NBA championship round and reached their ceiling. (The Sports Guy was prescient to chronicle this, particularly with a melancholic, wistful, angry recap last May.) Who knows? Maybe the Suns will turn it around this year; they're a respectable 16-11 at the time of writing. Maybe they're a better team in the long-run now. It's nearly impossible to catch Suns games in Boston.
But it will always be hard to shake the memory of those 2004-08 Suns teams. Nash was so thrilling to watch, always on the verge of discovering brilliance, much the way musicians improvise -- find a line you like and drive it home, it always works. (Will there ever be a cooler athlete? A friend once sat near him in a restaurant. He was with his lab mates and the only who know who Nash is. He told me he was ecstatic and had no one to share it with.) Forward Shawn Marion's jump shot seemed to originate under his jersey, if that makes any sense. Guard Leandro Barbosa had these slinky drives that could burrow in anywhere. And Amare Stoudemire had a wonderfully rare combination of deft touch and overpowering determination. In the 2005 playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs, before his knee injury, Stoudemire's strategy seemed to be: Catch the ball at the free throw line, shoot. If it didn't go in, he had an 85 percent chance of grabbing the offensive rebound and shooting again from a closer distance. It worked!
Oh, and here's a clip of Bell's clothesline takedown of Kobe Bryant, a player who embodies all the lifeless, soulless things the Suns thankfully weren't, in the 2006 playoffs. While perhaps no player deserves it, it's a joy to watch this:
More profoundly, Nash's and Diaw's comments remind me of the theme of "Jennie and the Ess-Dog": Remembering that time, those four seasons, back when things were good, when things felt right, when we were free (in this case, running the court with grace and joy, and winning), and how they're not like that any more. Are careers (lives?) only like that for athletes, artists and, like Jennie, fictional characters? Or are they like this for all of us? I worry about that these days.
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