The Phoenix Suns are a Professional Basketball Team

By ANDREW FLYNN, Managing Editor

Eight games in, the Phoenix Suns are looking like a professional basketball team. Kind of.

Don’t take the last two games as any sort of beacon of hope that they’ll breeze through the rest of the season, because they definitely won’t. They’ve been good wins, yes, but they’ve also been against teams that one could easily classify as sub-par…let’s break it down.

Most recently, the Suns played a tired and road-weary team from Milwaukee. Aside from the fact that the Bucks haven’t won in Phoenix since the second Reagan Administration (1987), they were 2-5 coming into the Valley of the Sun, and without their best big man, Aussie Andrew Bogut. Their star (relatively speaking) is good for solid enough defense and a 15-10 output on a regular basis. Not there, so there’s a hole. And where there’s a hole, the Suns can usually find a way to turn it into a track meet. When they have their athletic players in, anyways.

So the Suns won against Milwaukee 109-93 after putting the game in the deep freeze in the third quarter. That’s when they were able to rest Steve Nash, who can always relish time off of the pine and flat on his back. His aching, weary, almost-40 back. Can’t believe the guy dished out 17 assists in only 27 minutes the other night, that’s just flat amazing. Coach Alvin Gentry has said that Nash will also rest alongside aging swingman Grant Hill whenever they can, especially during the third game of the brutal back-to-back-to-backs, of which the Suns have two sets of this season.

We’re 4-4 at the moment, with a challenging game against the Lakers tonight. It’s not crucial that the Suns really win this one, I certainly don’t expect them to. The Lakers played last night at home against the Grizzlies, and eked out an eight-point victory. So this is where the Suns have a tiny leg-up on Los Angeles, they didn’t play on Monday night. Should we control the tempo in the first two-and-a-half quarters, winning will be possible. But it’s gotta be a tight, fast-paced tempo, and every player has to be laser-focused on whipping Kobe and what’s left of his Royal Purple & Gold Gang.

After this, the Suns will have 57 games left. Nobody pens them in for a playoff spot, at all. In the heart of hearts, I don’t even think they expect to playing in May. It is a long time until then, however. Should they all buy into the team like they appeared to during the last two games, a whole lot stranger things have sure happened in this life.

And that’s my giving a damn.

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A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Training Camp

Yesterday was a day in the history of American sports that will be remembered as one that was book-ended by ridiculousness with plenty of infamy to cover the space in the chewy center of it all.

Booger-eyed and hardly awake at the hour of 8:30am, ESPN Radio greeted me on KTAR with news that Albert Pujols was to sign a fairly rich $260 million long-term contract with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or whatever the hell they’re formally called. I’m hardly a baseball fan, so to hear Mike & Mike dissect it while getting ready for work was more background noise than anything else. That sure is a shitload of money. Maybe he’ll get by after all with that type of income.

Midday at work, it was around 2pm when my lunch break hit. More ESPN radio while I had to run a few menial errands while attempting to find some kind of tasty sustenance. At the time of the day, it sure did look like Amare Stoudemire, formerly of my beloved Phoenix Suns, was going to get a nasty and unexpected comeuppance that only a few people ever saw coming: he’d be traded to New Orleans from New York for Chris Paul. I spent the remainder of the lunchhour in a gleeful mindset drenched in schadenfreude. That fucker deserved not to be the King of New York. After only one year. All the bitching he did while he was here, goodness.

The final five hours of work blew by, and curiosity hurried me out of the building to the nearest radio I could find. More NBA trade drama. Chris Paul was traded from the Hornets to the Lakers for Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom, among other considerations. Or not.

It wasn’t more than a few minutes later where a couple of the night-time ESPN knuckleheads were tossing around big words like collusion and tragedy (big for them, anyway), all because apparently a few of the league’s team owners didn’t like this trade, and sure let their furrowed brows extend into the vision of David Stern. So Stern then held up the trade like my mother trying to pay with a check in line at our local Smitty’s (back in the 1980’s, that is). No trade, and then the fucking basketball world exploded.

It’s always an effort to keep up with breaking news from the NBA, especially when so many different stories are happening all at once. Twitter is good for attempting to stay dialed in. This athlete says this, and that reporter tweets that. It’s entertaining as all hell, but sure is time-consuming as a motherfucker.

At the time this is published, there is no trade that has been successfully made for Chris Paul. Will he end up going to LA? Or maybe to the Knicks? Or quite possibly to another dark-horse team that no one else ever playing into the fold?

What is known is this: training camps for all 30 NBA teams begin today. And not all the players will end up showing to those training camps. Chris Paul included.

To set the whole matter of bringing Chris Paul from N’awlins to the City of Angels after all, there is only one solution that pops into my mind. The newly-inked Albert Pujols should purchase the New Orleans Hornets and immediately trade Chris Paul to the Lakers. That would safely bookend the giant sports stories inside the city limits of Los Angeles, and would ensure two high-profile names be new residents of Southern California.

But I sure hope not, seeing how the Lakers are the worst. Maybe the Suns will end up being that dark-horse candidate after all.

And that’s my giving a damn.

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