In Jeff Hornacek’s first season in Phoenix, everything fell right into place.
After being predicted widely to be the worst team in the Western Conference and to vie with the 76ers for being the NBA’s worst team, the Suns found a perfect combination of chemistry and talent and Hornacek led them to a stunning 49-win season that fell just shy of the playoffs.
Hornacek’s charge this season is to try to get his team back to the same level and reach the playoffs in the brutal Western Conference – only this time, everyone knows they are coming.
“We really didn’t know how [last year] was going to turn out,” Hornacek told The Post earlier this week, “but the guys played for each other, and that was big.”
The Suns have gotten off to a respectable start, going 5-3 through heading into Friday night’s home game against Charlotte. But it’s been a balancing act on a few levels for Hornacek, who not only has a team that is still one of the least experienced in the NBA, but also has to deal with significant changes to the team’s roster.
Gone from last season is Channing Frye, a stretch-center who presents unique matchup issues, after he signed as a free agent with the Magic this summer. The Suns did go out and sign 5-foot-9 dynamo Isaiah Thomas, a move that both accentuated a strength and created a problem.
Last year’s Suns excelled behind their two-headed point guard monster of Goran Dragic and Eric Bledsoe, who allowed Hornacek to run a system similar to the one he played in with the Suns for several seasons in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Hornacek pledged to do that when he took the job last summer, even before general manager Ryan McDonough got Bledsoe from the Clippers for Jared Dudley as part of a three-team trade with the Bucks.
Now, Hornacek has to try to juggle the minutes of Dragic, Bledsoe, Thomas – who scored 20 points a game with the Kings last season – and guard Gerald Green, who went from being a starter last season to coming off the bench behind Marcus Morris.
“We approached it at the beginning of the season,” Hornacek said. “I just told them, that’s how it’s going to be. There’s going to be nights when certain guys, you have to be happy for everybody.
“It’s about the team winning. Of course, there’s going to be times during the year when we make a decision like that and we lose a game and a guy is going to say, ‘Well, if I was in the game, we would’ve won.’ That’s going to happen, but you just have to believe in your teammates.”
That’s easier said than done on a team full of young players. The Suns have experimented briefly with playing Dragic, Bledsoe and Thomas all at once, but against teams with any kind of size that’s going to be a very difficult lineup to pull off. Those lineups make Bledsoe a 6-foot-1 shooting guard and Dragic a 6-foor-3 small forward.
In most situations, one of those three guys will be watching from the bench when the game is being decided in the fourth quarter. The odd man out in Wednesday’s win over the Nets was Bledsoe, who finished with 11 points on 4-for-5 shooting in 23 minutes while Thomas played the entire fourth quarter and scored 12 points to help carry the Suns.
Hornacek knows he’s going to face that kind of decision on a nightly basis.
“It hasn’t been tricky to navigate the [who is] playing part of it, because the guys that are playing well, we just keep them in,” he said. “Sometimes guys want to have their guaranteed minutes, and sometimes you can do that, but that’s where the tricky part comes.
“There’s going to be nights [where guys don’t play], and guys just have to accept that.”
Making that balancing act a little simpler for Hornacek is that Bledsoe’s future is no longer an issue. The dynamic guard and the Suns agreed to a five-year, $70 million contract in late September after a summer of contentious back-and-forths between the two camps. Bledsoe flirted with the notion of signing the one-year qualifying offer and then becoming an unrestricted free agent, like Greg Monroe did with the Pistons.
Hornacek said getting Bledsoe locked up long-term was crucial for the Suns because of his impressive defensive capabilities, and went on to make a lofty comparison for Bledsoe’s ability to defend the pick-and-roll.
“He’s got a unique ability … coming over pick-and-rolls, which is a big part of the game nowadays, he has a way of getting around them,” Hornacek said.
“I always looked at myself [as a player] and I probably wasn’t that good at pick-and-rolls, but John Stockton [Hornacek’s teammate in Utah] could always get over those pick-and-rolls someway, somehow … so, when you have a guy who has that ability, you want to try to keep him.”
Nine of the 15 players on the Suns’ roster are 25 or younger, and they have four players in their first or second year in the NBA. So while they are trying to break through into the playoff chase out West, they also are trying to develop that youth. Alex Len has become a consistent rotation option after the No. 5 pick in the 2013 draft essentially didn’t play as a rookie because of a variety of injuries and with Frye and Miles Plumlee ahead of him in the rotation.
But development isn’t taking the place of winning in Phoenix, where the Suns – who could get another lottery pick this season from the Lakers if it falls outside the top five picks (as unlikely as that seems).
Hornacek knows making the playoffs won’t be easy – though the door could be opened for a team like the Suns to step through it with the Thunder’s hopes in jeopardy following injuries to Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook – but that hasn’t stopped him from making that the goal for his young team.
“I would say it would be disappointing because you want to take a step forward,” Hornacek. “You don’t want to stay where you’re at and go backwards. But, again, when the season ends, there’s going to be two or three teams that are outside looking in going in.
“But I think you’re just going to have to accept the fact that the West is dang good, and if you miss out by a couple games, you still might have had a decent season. So I think that’s how you have to look at it.”
Rose’s thorny issue
“I know a lot of people get mad when they see me sit out or whatever, but I think a lot of people don’t understand that when I sit out it’s not because of this year. I’m thinking about long-term. I’m thinking about after I’m done with basketball,” Rose said.
“Having graduations to go to, having meetings to go to. I don’t want to be in meetings all sore or be at my son’s graduation all sore just because of something I did in the past. [I’m] just learning and being smart.”
After Rose has sat out basically the past two-and-a-half years because of various injuries, it would be ridiculous for the 26-year-old not to be focused on his future.
The better question, rather than focusing on some comments Rose made, is to look at whether or not this guy will be able to stay healthy enough to make the impact the Bulls need to achieve their championship aspirations.
Rose has already sprained both of his ankles and suffered a hamstring injury in the first two weeks of this season. How can anyone, after the way the last few seasons have gone for Rose, expect him to stay healthy through April, May and June? It’s always fun to see the best players playing their best on the biggest stage. But whether or not Rose can actually do it is another matter entirely.
Silver lining fantasy pockets
The NBA announced earlier this week it was partnering with fantasy website FanDuel, which allows people to wager money on daily fantasy lineups. Many consider it to be a gambling site, given the amount of money that traffics on it daily, something the league contested in a statement to The Post on Thursday through a league spokesman.
“Fantasy games have long been considered legal and distinct from sports betting,” the league said in the statement. “One-day fantasy is a popular and legal way for fans to further connect with our game.”
The NBA isn’t the first league to make such a partnership – the NHL announced a partnership with DraftKings earlier this week – but the NBA’s decision was an interesting one in the wake of Silver’s comments in February that more and more cash-strapped states would follow Nevada’s path and implement legalized sports betting.
“It’s inevitable that, if all these states are broke, that there will be legalized sports betting in more states than Nevada, and we will ultimately participate in that,” Silver told Bloomberg in September.
But then Silver made an even bolder statement in Friday’s New York Times, writing an op-ed calling for the legalization of sports betting nationwide.
“Let me be clear: Any new approach must ensure the integrity of the game,” Silver wrote. “One of my most important responsibilities as commissioner of the NBA is to protect the integrity of professional basketball and preserve public confidence in the league and our sport. I oppose any course of action that would compromise these objectives.
“But I believe that sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated.”
Inevitable labor strife
The National Basketball Players Association’s new executive director, Michele Roberts, continued her media tour this week with ESPN, and repeated several of the main talking points she’s told The Post and others over the past several weeks: She’s morally opposed to salary caps, rookie scale wages and maximum salaries.
Roberts’ comments that the owners are “replaceable” but the players aren’t was consistent with previous remarks, though it was met with a strong rebuttal from the NBA saying – shockingly – everyone working together to make the league thrive is why it is successful.
All of this is white noise. We are still a little under three years away from the first opt-out date in the current collective bargaining agreement for either side. But there are two key takeaways from all of this:
1. Don’t expect the union to partner with the league on any kind of “smoothing” proposal to ease in the new television money, which should lead to a salary cap in 2016 that could exceed $90 million.
2. Expect NBA reporters to be spending the summer of 2017 on sidewalks outside various New York City hotels, because it appears inevitable there will be some kind of labor dispute.
It may be a long ways away, but it’s crucial to monitor: The future of the league will hinge on the outcome of any such negotiations.