It is easy to nitpick what Amare Stoudemire can't do on the court, but don't overlook what he can do. (AP Photo/Steve C. Wilson)

With the Feb. 18 trade deadline looming, the entire NBA world is wondering what will happen with Phoenix Suns big man Amare Stoudemire.

Endless rumors and speculation have taken the online sports world by storm. Everything from an Amare contract extension with the Suns to an almost-imminent deal with the 76ers has hit the rumor mill in the last month.

Amidst all of this trade speculation, it is easy to only focus on the negatives of STAT: The inconsistency on the glass, the sub-par defense, the laundry list of injuries and the financial commitment that would come with keeping Amare.

But while those things are certainly relevant, don’t overlook the things that Stoudemire does bring to the table.

How often does a guy come around that averages at least 20 points and 8 rebounds in six of his first eight seasons – one of which STAT was limited to three games due to knee surgery? How often is a player able to reinvent himself from a power dunker to a knock-down mid-range shooter in a matter of seasons? How many teams try so hard to get their hands on a multi-talented, athletic big man who can go off for 40 on any given night?

Amare is all of that and then some, and with his history of improvement, it would be ignorant to think he doesn’t still have room to grow.

After breaking into the league in 2002, he was nothing more than an athlete hungry to tear down the rim. But with time Amare evolved his game. First it was the touch around the rim, then the jump shot, now STAT is near automatic from 18 feet and in.  Although he is no longer a human-highlight reel because of a myriad of devastating injuries, Stoudemire has reinvented his skill-set accordingly.

He has gone from strictly a raw talent, to a multi-skilled big man amidst two major knee surgeries and a vision-threatening eye surgery. STAT has improved a new element of his game seemingly every season; maybe consistent defense and rebounding are next. But if you think Stoudemire is only a finesse player now, take a look at his recent poseterization of Denver Nuggets big Nene two games ago, the one step, no dribble throw down from the elbow against the Kings, and his second-place standing in dunks this season among NBA players.

He hasn’t been anywhere near elite status thus far — averaging 21.2 points and 8.6 rebounds per game — but the Suns’ inconsistency has affected his averages a bit. However, when things are going right, STAT is up there with the Dirk Nowitzkis, Chris Boshs and TIm Duncans of the league, at least offensively.

Is it a coincidence that during the Suns’ current five-game winning streak, STAT is averaging 26.6 points, 10.0 rebounds per game and 1.2 blocks per game? Is it a coincidence that the Suns swept a road trip of at least four games for the first time since December of 2006 with Amare averaging 27.8 points and 12.3 rebounds per game during that stretch?

Absolutely not. [Read more →]

Suns fans spend a lot of time considering many potential Amare Stoudmire trade rumors that may or may not be just conjecture, but clearly the one involving Philadelphia and Andre Iguodala has some legs.

According to ESPN’s Marc Stein, Suns VP of basketball operations David Griffin took in Friday’s Philly-New Orleans game in person, and I don’t think this trip had anything to do with Bourbon Street.

Furthermore, CSNPhilly.com quoted an NBA source saying, “Phoenix desperately wants Andre. They are pushing this. That I know for a fact.” Stein corroborates that by writing that the Suns appear “to be the team driving these discussions.”

It’s hard to say what exactly is posturing and what is truth, but there’s one undeniable positive out of all this talk: The Suns aren’t planning on giving Amare away for nothing. It will require serious talent for the Suns to part with STAT.

Could the Suns be floating information about this apparently intense interest in Iggy to aid their negotiations with Amare? Possibly, but I don’t really think so. The Suns and Amare have had enough time to talk that both sides know where the other side stands. Barring a major drop in price on the open market, the Suns know how much it will cost to keep Stoudemire and they have likely internally made a decision on whether they want to do that or not.

In an ideal world Amare signs an extension in the neighborhood of $15 million a year on average, but I don’t think that will happen. If that’s the case, the Suns need to deal him because they won’t have the cap space to replace him with a comparable player.

Although it would be nice to see what this Suns team could do given a full season, this team is not a championship contender, so if the Suns can find a deal that makes them arguably better in the present and certifiably better in an Amare-less future, they have to do it.

This is just my gut, but I think the Suns have decided they don’t want to build around Amare and give him a huge payday, and there are many reasons why they may have decided that, from his injury concerns to defensive/rebounding issues, and frankly you’ve got to trust them on this. [Read more →]

Even as he turns 36, Steve Nash is still putting up MVP numbers. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

As the rest of the nation celebrates Super Bowl Sunday, Steve Nash will celebrate a not so subtle reminder that he is getting old.

You might not know it by watching the Suns on a daily basis, but Steve Nash is 36 today, an age at which no point guard has ever sniffed the kind of production Nash is giving the Suns this season.

As a 35-year-old, Nash has averaged 18.4 points and 11.1 assists in 33.7 minutes per game without missing a single contest. That’s 0.4 and 0.2 points behind his career-high scoring averages from his MVP years, which means Nash isn’t far off from becoming the oldest player to set a career high in scoring, and he’s just 0.5 and 0.4 off his best assist years. His PER (23.52) is even threatening his career-best PER season of 2006-07 (23.87).

Unlike stars in certain other sports who put up ungodly numbers as they aged with bodies that didn’t even resemble their rookie physiques thanks to some, ahem, chemical enhancement, Nash looks the same as he did when the Suns drafted him in 1996. The difference for him is that he’s evolved mentally into such a smart basketball player that he can practically run a perfect pick-and-roll in his sleep.

It’s insane to think that Mark Cuban was afraid to give a 30-year-old Steve Nash big money because of fears about how he would age. Instead of trending downward, Nash has played the best ball of his career (save for the first half of last season) since his return to Phoenix.

In this way, Nash reminds me of another Valley athlete whom we all had our attention focused on at this time last year: Kurt Warner.

Warner, like Nash, played at a Hall of Fame level at the tail end of his career for the Cardinals before retiring this offseason at the age of 38. Like Nash, Warner was no physical specimen, but nobody thought football better than him.

It was impossible to confuse Warner on the football field. He seemed to know what was coming before the defense even did, and the execution of his pin-point passing was legendary. His teammates knew if they would get open just a sliver, Warner would find them for a positive play.

Which NBA player could that paragraph describe as well?

Yep, you know it, Nash. Nobody reads an NBA defense better than Two Time, and if you give one of his teammates an ounce of space, MVSteve will find him for a bucket. Every game he makes one or two plays that are incomprehensible, plays that nobody else in the league can make. [Read more →]

Amare Stoudemire and the Suns were all smiles after this perfect trip. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

When I left US Airways Center back on Jan. 26, I wondered if the Suns would dig themselves an insurmountable hole in an incredibly bunched up Western Conference by the All-Star break.

After heartbreaking losses against Utah and Charlotte to cap a stretch of seven defeats in nine games, the Suns had moved to the bottom of the Western Conference playoff hunt and looked to be in dire straits with a home game against Dallas and then a tough four-game road trip preceding a home date with Portland and the All-Star break.

The thinking made sense because Dallas is in the upper echelon of the West and the Suns had lost 12 of 13 on the road entering this week.

However, after beating Sacramento 114-102 on Friday to cap off a perfect road trip, their first sweep of a trip of at least four games since December 2006, the Suns have vaulted into fifth place in the packed West because of a win streak that occurred at the strangest yet most opportune time.

A week and a half ago I was bracing for the realization that the Suns’ league-best 14-3 November was just a mirage. They were blowing leads, breaking down in the clutch and all the Amare Stoudemire trade rumors were taking a toll on the court.

Facing this brutal stretch against teams near them in the standings, their first five-game winning streak of the season pushed the Suns back to the middle of the West instead of burying them far below the No. 8 seed line.

“We are getting some momentum, but I think we are consistent,” Nash told Suns.com. “We are playing a little harder and a little sharper mentally, and our focus is better. It has given us confidence to stay with it. Before, I think we overanalyzed and thought too much. Sometimes, you make up for your mistakes by playing hard and being competitive. I think we have seen a better streak of that.”

For the better part of two months the Suns blew every lead in the book and then made up a few of their own. I was ready to play “Suns Blown Lead Bingo” because they hit almost every number between 13-20 when it comes to blown leads, not to mention a few 24s. It got so ridiculous that as the Suns built their leads you could only wonder how large the advantage would get before they would blow it. And blow it they always did.

To run up those large leads, the Suns played extremely well in stretches of just about all their games during their December-January malaise save for a couple blowouts at the beginning of December and the Memphis and Charlotte calamities in January. It’s just that once the bleeding started, they had no way to staunch it.

Tonight after the Suns took a 21-point lead midway through the second quarter, they predictably let it drop to 10 points three minutes into the second half.

If this game were played before the last few games, the lead would have been gone a couple minutes later altogether and then the Suns would have spent the fourth quarter fighting for their lives and then probably losing to the Kings after executing poorly down the stretch.

This time Gentry promptly called a timeout, Nash drained a three from like 30 feet and then Amare followed that up with a couple power slams off Nash assists, including an alley-oop, with all this coming not much more than a minute after the timeout to put the Suns back up by 17 all of a sudden. Phoenix proceeded to score a couple more buckets to make this an 11-0 run, and before the Kings knew what had hit them the Suns had gone on a 22-3 run over the course of about six minutes to put this one away.

The Suns finally showed the killer instinct lacking since November, running up their biggest lead since taking a 32-point advantage on Nov. 27 in Minnesota.

“We feel as good as we’ve felt all season knowing we’ve gone through a rough stretch,” Grant Hill said on the Suns’ postgame show. [Read more →]

Suns 114, Kings 102

Suns

Kings

Four in a row? All against winning teams? And three straight on the road?

Did I sleepwalk my way into a Delorean with Marty McFly and take a trip back to November?

Although that would be interesting, it seems I have in fact not gone back in time.

Great Scott! That means the Suns are playing good basketball again! And they aren’t just playing good basketball, they are playing their best basketball.

Amare Stoudemire has turned it on despite constant trade rumors, averaging more than 25 points per game over the last four games and 13.3 rebounds over the last three (that coming after a dazzling one-rebound performance against Dallas). This is the Stoudemire the Suns need around all the time. If he can score and rebound consistently, the Suns are a different team.

With the center tag team of Robin Lopez and Channing Frye playing well, the Suns seem to have stopped worrying and just playing good basketball.

Snapping Denver’s nine-game home winning streak was a big boost for the Suns, despite the fact that Carmelo Anthony didn’t play. You could say the Suns are on a roll. That’s why winning tonight in Sacramento could be the most important game of this road trip.

The once-promising Kings are no longer flirting with .500. In fact, they can’t even smell .500. However, this season the Kings have been able to challenge the Suns in both meetings. The Suns won the first game in Phoenix by eight points and the second game in Sacramento by just four.

I’m almost certain that Suns coach Alvin Gentry would say this is your standard trap game. With everything going so well right now, it would be easy to get complacent and lose to a 16-32 team. It’s on both Gentry and the players to make sure the focus is there despite the Kings’ impressive mediocrity. [Read more →]

The Suns can do no better than Andre Iguodala and Samuel Dalembert in an Amare trade. (AP Photo/Michael Perez)

The hottest Amare Stoudemire trade rumor of the day revolves around the Suns packaging Leandro Barbosa with STAT to Philadelphia in return for Andre Iguodala and Samuel Dalembert. According to ESPN’s Chad Ford, the Suns are interested in such a deal but Philadelphia is not for now.

If I were Steve Kerr, this is a deal I would seriously consider pulling the trigger on.

Although in a perfect world I would still prefer Amare to be signed to a reasonable extension, if the right deal is out there then the Suns have to do it considering the possibility of losing Amare for nothing this offseason or sweating through a lame duck year only to lose him next offseason.

There are two key ingredients I think the Suns should require in any Amare trade:

1.  A potential future All-Star.

2.  A big man.

If a player like Al Jefferson or Michael Beasley who happens to satisfy both requirements gets dangled, then great. But one way or another those are the two pieces the Suns need to get back in any such deal, and this trade does just that.

Iggy fills up the box score on a nightly basis, averaging 17.3 ppg, 6.9 rpg, 5.7 apg and 1.0 steals per contest. The biggest downside on the court to Iguodala is that he’s not a three-point shooter, hitting just 31.4 percent of his long-range shots this season and 32.3 percent for his career, but he’d be dynamic in the open court with Nash.

The other downside is his contract, which pays him $12.3 million next season, $13.5 mil in 2011-12 and $14.7 million in 2012-13 before he has a chance to pick up a $15.9 million player option the year after that. If the Suns like the UA product, they better really like him because he will be at least one of the faces of the franchise in the post-Nash years under this scenario.

Dalembert, a native of Haiti, is a salary albatross on the books at $12.2 million next season, but he can still play a little. He’s an athletic 6-foot-11 performer averaging 7.5 and 9.7 to go with 2.2 blocks per game, and he’s only a couple years removed from a 10.5-10.3 with 2.3 blocks.

With Iggy on the perimeter and Dalembert down low, the Suns would be a much improved defensive team, and they would have quite the shot-blocking trio of Dalembert, Lopez and Lou. [Read more →]