Take a deep breath – everything will be fine. Maybe.
Regardless of how deep the team is (it’s not like they are that deep, but they certainly have far more depth than they have had in recent years), the reserves are never going to have enough time against their opponent’s reserves to dig the team out of early holes that the starting lineup has created.
Is this a fixable issue?
Hopefully! Otherwise 37 wins, 30 wins, even 20 wins, are going to be awfully difficult to come by, and falling behind early causing games to once again be over well before halftime will continue to be the norm and not the exception.
Phoenix Suns
I, for one, believe that this team is set up to be a Houston Rockets look-alike, a roster that needs to launch 3’s with a near reckless abandon, using the roster’s full compliment of shooters to help the offense evolve into a more modern, analytical style that could be enough to separate themselves from other re-building teams in the Conference.
It should be noted, though, that with the incredible 24-45 from 3 they shot in game three against Portland (sans Booker, Ayton, and Rubio), the team finished the preseason 46-133, for 34.5%, which last season would have only placed them 24th in the league in 3-point percentage, although still 1.6% better than their own 2018-19 regular season rate.
*This also means though that minus that one game with the three key starters, the team actually finished 22-88, for a miserable 25.0%.
We’re only about a week away from the start of the regular season, so soon enough the time will come when we know exactly what this offense will be, and whether or not new Head Coach Monty Williams had been hiding his new offensive and defensive strategies in plain sight, waiting to unleash the roster to it’s full potential against the Sacramento Kings on October 23.
If this is the case, then all the worrying and grinding of teeth as we wait in simple hope for a turnaround season will have been for not.
That said, for those of us who have made the occasionally light references to the 2004-05 Phoenix Suns, Phoenix’s first with Steve Nash (ala Ricky Rubio), and a number of additional shooters (ala Cameron Johnson and Dario Saric), that team played the traditional eight-game preseason schedule and finished 7-1 (second best in franchise-history), including a 124-96 rout of the Sacramento Kings on the final night, the only night of the preseason in which the Suns played out the rotations like a regular season game.
Obviously nobody expects the 2019-20 Phoenix Suns to be anything close to the team of 15 years ago, however, any sort of similarity of which fans could grasped during the preseason would have helped the level of excitement and positivity grow as we head into the games that actually count.
Unfortunately, no such hope has been offered.