D'Antoni

Talk of the Phoenix Suns firing Mike D'Antoni seems petty misguided to me -- there are some things to be said in favor of the idea, but realistically what better coach is going to emerge? Meanwhile, it's pretty clear that over the years Phoenix has been sabotaged by management. Not necessarily even by bad management, just stingy management -- the Nash/Stoudemire/Marion core was very successful and won a lot of games, but the teams fielded always lacked bench, depth, and flexibility.

And the Suns could have had more depth pretty easily -- they were the sort of squad usable veteran role players like to sign with, and they could have used their first round draft picks on players. Instead, they never made the sort of signings that Boston did to fill out its roster this year or that Miami and San Antonio have done in the past, and they essentially sold draft picks. There were totally cognizable reasons for that behavior -- they saved money -- but they weren't good-faith efforts to field a championship-quality basketball team and they were Mike D'Antoni's fault so it seems perverse to blame him for not bringing any rings to Arizona.