I’ve never had a chance to actually be as good a ball player as I wished I could be. Back in high school, I tried my best to cover up the fact that I’ve only learned how to dribble the ball two years before I finished intermediate. But in all that time, I fancied watching the game; Commenting and analyzing the way it’s played, cheering for hoop heroes and cursing dirty players. After all, it’s hard to escape the fact that all of my brothers have joined small-town leagues and have accumulated accolades playing the game. Watching basketball has always been a family affair, and one that doesn’t always end up as well as we’d hope for. More often than not, we’d find ourselves divided between ideologies; Crispa or Toyota, the Beermen or Ginebra (both pre and post Jaworski eras), and even Detroit or the Spurs. In all those times I’ve noticed how different they have viewed the game. After all, unlike me, they have always played it in a competitive way. While I would have to content myself in articles, televised games, and commentaries to draw objective conclusions regarding heated topics such as, who should have won the finals? Who should a team get in the draft? Who should a team trade? Should they even trade, who should they trade for? Who should have been MVP?

Until the middle of 2004, I’ve never had any favorite team in particular… until the time the Small-ballin’ Suns started making headlines on a game dominated by size. Being a rebel myself, I’ve admired their view of playing against the flow. Of neutralizing your inadequacies (size) by capitalizing on what you have (speed).  The suns system of small ball differs from any other team seemingly running small ball. Don Nelson’s philosophy in particular is more of a loose system. Hard to read, with the chaos they are wreaking, and thus effectively draining the energy of their opponents.  The Sun’s however, are more of a calculated type of small ball. From theory to application, from practice to the actual game, you can see why their system is meant only to be played by them. They score more because they shoot a ridiculous amount of times. They don’t seemingly focus on half court offense because they push the ball faster, because they have a 7-second shot clock in their practices. And they can run, because they were trained to run. They move up and down the court more times than any team in the league. More possessions meant more opportunities to score. Rather than focusing on the rebounding wars to increase the number of times a team would take possession of the ball.  On a world dominated by a rule, they were the ones who literally went around that rule. Notice that the tenses on the last line is on the past… for they have just raised the flag and bent on the same set of rules they were trained to go around with… trained to solve given the handicap. And they were doing it quite fairly since they are (that I’m not sure since they are currently playing without an essential part of the system, more on that later) still at the top of the West. 

The run and gunnin’ Phoenix Suns have just traded their feared and coveted "swiss-army knife" Shawn "the Matrix" Marion (along with Marcus Banks), for the lumbering "shadow of himself" Shaq "Has-been Deisel" O’neal.

Many have speculated that this was a direct response to the Lakers acquiring Gasol for 10 bucks and a red balloon, their loss to a Parker-less Spurs, and their shameful performance against top-tier West teams. But that was beside the point. Sun Tzu once said that "no country has ever benefited from a protracted war", and I fear that this team is on the verge of not benefiting from this transaction.  The Phoenix Suns have made their point, have almost outran teams towards the championship that it took two controversial suspensions to derail their campaign.  They even sent Kurt Thomas to Seattle to shed out his 8-mil, and for what? To take in the Diesel’s 20-mil up to 2010?

As a non-conformist, as a spectator with no particular favorite, it took alot of innovation to have me pick out a favorite NBA team, given the difficulties of following the games in a Southeast Asian country… and I think, now that they have fallen out of my favor, it would take a championship for them to get my enthusiasm up again…

Silently though, I wish they do…

(See also this article by ESPN columnist J.A. Adande… We share the same sentiments…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.