With the Suns’ season over and the offseason already in full swing as the team searches for a new general manager and a head coach, questions are aplenty. So instead of the traditional 5-on-5 to recap the season, we’re going to — like the Suns — start from scratch and work through five 5-on-1 sessions. Because if you can’t run an offense during a walk-through with a coach, no chance it’s working against five defenders.

We started off the discussion asking for one word to sum up the Suns’ season. In our second installment, we discussed at the best of the year, AKA, Goran Dragic. Part 3 touches on the most baffling, most indescribable and most surprising of 2012-13.

What part of the season was the most mind-boggling? Feel free to hit on anything from the front office, to coaching, to Michael Beasley.

Michael Schwartz: When you think about it, it would have to be Channing Frye — such a fit and healthy athlete — coming down with a heart condition in the preseason. He was the forgotten piece to this season, and most people don’t realize how much better the Suns’ offense has been when he’s on the floor the past few years whether he’s stroking jumpers or not.

But that was such a long time ago it doesn’t feel like it was still this season, so I will go with how the coaching change went down with not only Alvin Gentry and the Suns “mutually” agreeing to split ways but also assistants Elston Turner and Dan Majerle leaving with him. It was obvious at the time but utterly clear at this juncture that Gentry was not the problem, it was just a situation in which a struggling team felt it needed to make a change because that’s what struggling NBA teams do.

It’s even understandable that Turner might follow his boss out as well but pretty mind-boggling that a Suns institution like Dan Majerle would no longer want to work for the franchise for which he’s an icon. In a vacuum it is also be surprising that both Turner and Majerle would be passed over for an inexperienced coach like Hunter, but considering the support Hunter received from some in the front office it’s not as surprising.

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While Jeff Weltman is considered a favorite to land the Phoenix Suns’ general manager position, the team will also consider two candidates on very opposite ends of the NBA spectrum. While the 48-year-old Weltman sits in the middle of the experience versus upside – as if we’re talking about lottery picks — Boston Celtics assistant general manager Ryan McDonough and Spurs assistant GM Scott Layden span a great width of front office experience.

Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski reported Wednesday that those two round out the short-list of candidates to resume the duties of the Suns’ general manager, and Paul Coro reported that list with the addition of former Pacers GM David Morway.

It could very well come down to what exactly Robert Sarver and president of basketball operations Lon Babby are looking for. Do they go for the proven Layden, the familiar Weltman who they interviewed before hiring Lance Blanks, or the young McDonough?

The embattled but proven vet

Scott Layden has seen it all. His father, Frank Layden, coached the Utah Jazz and helped develop his son’s eye. In 1981, he joined the team as a scout, then began working for his father as an assistant the next year and eventually made his way into the Jazz’s front office. His best work of talent evaluation is hard to beat — he’s considered responsible for drafting both John Stockton and Karl Malone. His time with Utah extended into the 1990s, and before he left for the New York Knicks, Layden left the Jazz with a nice piece in Andrei Kirilenko.

His tenure with the Knicks from 1999-2004 didn’t go as well.

Layden inherited a stable but aging franchise and was criticized for too much loyalty as he failed to develop the New York mindset coming from the calmness of Salt Lake City. He re-signed aging Knicks such as Allan Houston for contracts that weren’t only out of this world but poor considering their ensuing injury problems, and he was responsible for botched draft picks such as Michael Sweetney and — gulp — Maciej Lampe.

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TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott runs through Kendall Marshall’s best tweets in this two-part series.

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With the Suns’ season over and the offseason already in full swing as the team searches for a new general manager and a head coach, questions are aplenty. So instead of the traditional 5-on-5 to recap the season, we’re going to — like the Suns — start from scratch and work through five 5-on-1 sessions. Because if you can’t run an offense during a walk-through with a coach, no chance it’s working against five defenders.

We started off the discussion asking for one word to sum up the Suns’ season. In our second installment, we’re looking at the best of the year, as difficult as it may be.

Is it safe to say Goran Dragic was the brightest spot this ugly season? If so, where did he finish compared to your preseason expectation? If not, what was the brightest part of this dark year for the Suns?

Michael Schwartz: In terms of contrast to expectations, I would have to say Jermaine O’Neal because he wasn’t necessarily going to figure into the rotation when he originally signed with Channing Frye healthy, and he ended up delivering a healthy and overall solid season in which he looked younger than he has the past few seasons (kudos once again, training staff).

But yes, Dragic was the brightest spot of this dark season although he wasn’t quite as good as my preseason expectations for him. Last season in 28 games as a starter in Houston, Dragon averaged 18.0 points, 8.4 dimes and 3.5 boards while shooting 49 percent. This year he put up a 14.7-7.4-3.1 line on 44.3 percent shooting. I doubted he would duplicate the Houston numbers over the course of a full season, but as the focal point of the Suns’ attack I thought he would come a bit closer and shoot a little better to boot.

That being said, Dragic is the one piece the Suns can exit this season knowing is a building block. He is the prime of his career turning 27 in a few weeks and is the one player from this season who should remain amid the rubble of a disastrous campaign.

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Various reports around the NBA indicate that Jeff Weltman is separating himself in the search for the Suns’ next general manager. Soon after Lance Blanks was relieved of his duties, Paul Coro led the list of replacement candidates with the Milwaukee Bucks assistant GM. He later tweeted that Weltman and former Indiana Pacers general manager David Morway were frontrunners.

Sorry if you thought Sir Charles was coming to save the day.

Weltman had previously been a finalist to land the job in the summer of 2010. But Phoenix chose Blanks instead, and it’s becoming more clear that if the Suns were to have a do-over — as they did with the career of Goran Dragic — they would.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this weekend that Weltman was granted an interview with Phoenix. And on Monday night, ESPN’s Ric Bucher reported some juicier tidbits, including the possibility of Suns owner Robert Sarver looking to “cash out.”

Jeff Weltman, as has been reported, is the frontrunner to be the Phoenix Suns’ next GM, and one source said he was team president Lon Babby’s preference when he first joined the Suns but that owner Robert Sarver was eager to tap the San Antonio Spurs’ braintrust and therefore preferred the now-deposed Lance Blanks. The bigger question is, how much longer will Sarver be calling the shots? One source says the increased evaluation of franchises inspired by the Seattle-Sacramento fight over the Kings has Sarver wondering if it’s time to cash out.

More on this later. Now, it’s important to look at what the Suns are looking for and what Weltman can offer.

Who is Jeff Weltman?

To begin, he’s taken a similar route as many of basketball’s best young minds. The son of a former NBA executive, Harry Weltman, Jeff got his start in the league as a video coordinator with the Los Angeles Clippers in 1988. He’s worked his way up to director of player personnel from 1994-2001. He became an assistant GM for the Denver Nuggets for the next five years, took some time off, then spent a year in Detroit before his current five-year run in Milwaukee.

Fox Sports Arizona’s Randy Hill writes that even in a smaller role, Weltman has been significantly influencing his teams as a scout and talent evaluator.

He became the assistant to legendary player-turned-general manager Elgin Baylor in 1994, and he had a big impact on the Clippers’ roster shakeup on draft night 2000.

Although the Clippers weren’t able to parlay their talent upgrade into appreciable success right away, Weltman did play a big role in moves that landed rookies Darius Miles, Keyon Dooling and Quentin Richardson as well as first-year swingman Corey Maggette that evening. The Clippers eventually built a talented young roster that included the aforementioned players along with Lamar Odom and Elton Brand.

That’s exactly what Lon Babby is searching for, and it’s important to remember he isn’t necessarily leaning toward someone with general manager experience.

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With the Suns’ season over and the offseason already in full swing as the team searches for a new general manager and a head coach, questions are aplenty. So instead of the traditional 5-on-5 to recap the season, we’re going to — like the Suns — start from scratch and work through five 5-on-1 sessions. Because if you can’t run an offense during a walk-through with a coach, no chance it’s working against five defenders.

Let’s not even get into how much we all overestimated the Suns — even the admittedly negative Dave Dulberg overshot the win total estimation — but what’s one word to sum up the year?

Michael Schwartz: Transition. We all knew this was coming, right? We may have all been overly bullish on the Suns, but before the season I posed the question of which team was definitively going to be worse than the Suns in the West? Perhaps Sacramento, maybe New Orleans, even possibly Houston before the Rockets pulled the trigger on the James Harden deal. But unlike in prior years when the Suns were a lock to at least battle for a playoff spot, they seemed to need some good fortune just to stay out of the West cellar.

With the way the last few years were spent trying to fine tune a Steve Nash roster to get as close to the playoffs as possible without any star successor on the roster, we knew it could get ugly when Mr. Two Time finally left town, and of course it was. Every team cycles through losing seasons eventually, even a team like the Suns with the fourth-best winning percentage in NBA history (I at least think that’s still the case). This year will be known as Year 1 post-Nash and the start of the rebuilding project.

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