A break from the regularly scheduled programming....
I've been following the Phoenix Suns fairly closely the last several years and I can tell you that the results so far this post season have left me, shall we say, distraught.
Last night I was reading through a Suns thread here and came across a familiar narrative. While certainly sports narratives do not deal with life and death issues (or distract from them) as political narratives do the process is exactly the same. Repeat some BS enough times it becomes conventional wisdom, leaving it to us lonely bloggers to set the record straight. Anyways, here is a comment I was going to leave at the thread but decided I would put here for the record.
I'm just using the following as an example of what I hear repeated all the time on comment threads, and in newspaper columns, and on sports blogs and from the blowhards on Around the Horn about the Suns so-called inability to advance in the playoffs. It is a very familiar refrain.
"Suns are a nice team that win 50 plus a year and take a dump in the first and second round year after year after year. No need to watch the regular season because this is where we end up."
It's bad enough putting up with this crap from ESPN but man do I have to see it here on a Suns thread as well? While I don't give the Suns much of a shot this year god damn let's at least get our facts straight. Obviously, to begin with this year isn't even over yet - don't tell me you won't be making time Sunday afternoon for game 4 if the Suns win game 3 by 20. But much more importantly to my point, if they are to lose the series this will be the first time they will have lost in the first round in the Nash era, or in other words the first time in the current streak of playoff appearances. The first time.
Let's just look at what actually has happened. This is year 4. Year one the team came out of nowhere to reach the conference finals, lose to injury one of their better players prior to the final and finally succumb to an experienced Spurs team. Not the first round and definitely a successful season. Year 2 minus Kurt Thomas and Amare somehow the team makes it all the way to the conference finals again only to lose in 6 - they were even leading in that game by 7 in the second half as I recall only to finally, ultimately wear out. So don't you think that team with Thomas and Amare doesn't roll all the way to the title denying Shaq the ring? Anyways, bottom line once more a trip to the conference finals and once again you must label this a successful season considering the injuries. So last year was the year. That was when it was supposed to happen. And that "loss" I will never believe was a fair and just outcome to the series. And now it seems the time has past.
That said, I didn't want the Shaq trade because this group deserved one more shot with at least that core group (though the team really should have kept Thomas). Never forget that the day the trade was made the Suns had the best record in the West ... and if the suspensions last year hadn't happened would even beating the Spurs be an issue? I say it wouldn't. Remember how good things looked in that brief time after the victory but before it became obvious the suspensions were going to happen.
Not getting another shot with the original group and apparently going down in the first round this season are bad enough. Don't take way their history too. Sometimes I almost think the endless repetition of this giant myth is what caused the Shaq trade to happen.
I'm really tired of these mindless narratives that get spouted by so-called sports experts who really haven't the foggiest idea what they are talking about. oh yeah..and go suns.
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