Jeff Hornacek Is The Future:
In a season with nine rookie head coaches, Jeff Hornacek has easily been the most impressive. In one offseason, he’s taken an expected Western bottom-feeder and turned them into the current eighth seed in a brutally competitive conference. He’s put Eric Bledsoe in a position to succeed while also harnessing Goran Dragic‘s appetite for offensive mayhem with a series of dizzying pick and rolls and ball movement galore. He’s given Miles Plumlee an opportunity to make a name for himself, found a way to make the Morris twins effective off the bench and all this without even mentioning that Gerald Green is a viable role player again.
But has a coach ever been fired in his first season for being too good? Obviously that’s a joke, but could the Suns put Hornacek on the IR with “tendinitis” or something like that down the stretch of this season? In case you missed this sentence the first time, let me repeat it for you: The Phoenix Suns are currently eighth in the Western Conference. It was all fun and games when we were only like 10 games into the season and the Suns were in the top five, but we’re already done with 25 percent of the year now. This is the face of every Suns fan trying to figure out whether or not to be excited about every new win:
Pretty much every Phoenix fan’s face watching the Suns win games: don’t know whether to be excited or upset. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Like Brad Stevens is doing with the Boston Celtics in the East, this Phoenix team is good enough to contend for a playoff spot … in the loaded West! They probably don’t have the firepower to keep this up for a whole season and actually grab that playoff spot, but they could contend for it. For the millionth time, that’s not the point of this season. As unnatural as feels, Suns fans should do a little fist pump after every Phoenix loss when no one’s looking.
Because as fun as Phoenix is to watch under Hornacek and as comforted as Suns supporters should be that they’ve found their GM/coach/Bledsoe for the future, this team is still missing one (or two) pieces. There’s a reason McDonough stockpiled so many 2014 draft picks: it’s the most loaded draft in over a decade. Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Julius Randle, Marcus Smart, Dante Exum and Joel Embiid are all franchise-changing players. It’d be a shame for the Suns to get caught up in playoff aspirations for one season and sacrifice future title contention in the process. The Suns are one-fourth of the way from that becoming a reality.