The end of exciting basketball

The game tonight between the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs was a disappointing one for fans of fast break basketball. Actually the Suns don’t play fast break basketball anymore, they barely do run and usually Nash is ahead of the pack when they do run. I am a fan of the way Steve Nash plays, he plays smart and has a knack for where his teammates will be.

Tonight Steve Nash played smart for the first half of the game but, the second half was when he started playing like a rookie. Steve was passing when he should be shooting and forcing passes when his teammates weren’t ready to get the ball. A good point guard should know when to pass and when to shoot, so tonight was a bit of shock to see a good point guard like Nash play like he did. Nash finally started to shoot in the last 6 minutes of the game but, by that time it was a little too little, a little too late.

In Game one it was Amare who made a crucial mistake in the first overtime session by charging into a Spurs defender instead of taking a foul shot jumper or passing to Shaq for a dunk down low. This Phoenix team is starting to look like the Dallas Mavericks in 2004, 4 all stars but, they don’t complement each other. In 2004 the Mavericks played the Kings in the first round and lost to a struggling Kings team. The reason the Mavericks lost was because they split apart a team that lost to the Spurs in a close series just a year before that. They got back better players but, the new players didn’t complement the existing team.

I’m not sure if the Suns would be any better with Marion still on the team because his attitude was posionous in the locker room. Shawn just couldn’t accept that he was the third option on the Suns team and that his offensive game is limited. After going to the Miami Heat he still had couldn’t average 20 points a game on a team who would let him take as many shots as he would like to take.

Is this the end of an era of exciting fast break basketball, where we had Phoenix and Golden State both scoring in the 130 point range on any given night? The Suns are getting older and Nash with his bad back won’t have too many good years left in him. Then you have the Warriors who haven’t been able to get a commitment out of Don Nelson to stay in Golden State for more then a one year contract. I would hope that young teams could play fast break ball because as great as the Celtics, Hornets, Spurs and Pistons are, they still don’t run the floor enough. Structured offense is great in crunch time but, during the course of a 82 game season we need to watch some up and down exciting basketball. What if the Cavaliers and Magic ran the floor, how exciting would it be too see Lebron James and Dwight Howard double their points in the paint, just by running. A basketball fan can dream can’t he.