Source: East Valley Tribune
Steve Nash wished the schedule makers hadn’t served up such a daunting homestand for this particular point in the season — the Los Angeles Lakers, Boston and Detroit.
Yeah, yeah… so throw up the ball already.
It’s too late to put the genie — or in this particular case, Kazaam — back in the bottle. After two weeks of anticipation and endless hype, Christmas has come in February for Suns fans.
Shaquille O’Neal will make his Phoenix debut tonight against the perfect foil, Kobe Bryant and the Lakers.
O’Neal breezed through his final tuneup practice with the team Tuesday and will start in the middle tonight, although his first stint, and likely those that follow, may only last about five minutes.
“He looked great, and everyone else did, too,” said D’Antoni, who has his team at 37-16 and percentage points out of the Western Conference lead with 29 games remaining. “He’s very motivated. He’s done everything the training staff has asked and even more. We’re all enthused and ready to go, so we’ll see what happens. There’s no easing into it. You just dive into the pool.”
O’Neal has talked as big as his 7-foot-1, 325-pound frame since arriving in Phoenix two weeks ago, and wasn’t about to back off on the rhetoric on the eve of his long-awaited start.
“Every time that I’ve won a championship, I’ve looked at my guys around me and looked at their work ethic and said, ‘You know what, I’m going to win it this year,’ ” he said. “I feel that way now.”
Nash is ready to see what he’s witnessed in practice translate into wins and excitement in games — although facing three championship-caliber foes out of the gate isn’t preferable.
“He looks like he’s close to game-shape,” Nash said. “It’s not three cupcakes to start, but we’ll learn a lot about ourselves right away. Maybe it will give us a steeper learning curve playing the teams in front of us.”
And O’Neal said he’ll be out on the break “like Randy Moss and Terrell Owens” knowing that Nash’s passes will be the rewards for his efforts.
“I can remember playing with Scott Skiles (in Orlando). If you were open an inch, the ball would be there and it would be perfect every time,” he said. “When you’ve got a guy who’s looking for you, you run.
“A lot of people think I can’t run but my thing was I’m not gonna be running if you’re not gonna throw it. I know Nash will throw it.”
And Nash knows that for the first time in his career, he has a big man in the middle.
“We’re going to have someone guarding the basket that we can funnel people down to,” he said. “We’ve never had that before. We’re going to have to adjust slightly to his strengths, but where he’s strong, we’ve been weak — that big presence in the paint taking up space and guarding the rim.”
The Lakers, of course, have their own new big man in Pau Gasol, who has had a few weeks to work himself into the lineup and paid off handsomely during a 7-2 road trip that ended just before the All-Star break. And when Andrew Bynum returns within a month from a knee injury, he will team with Gasol and Lamar Odom to form a front line that will rival any in the league and take pressure off Bryant — who will try to play the rest of the season with a painful torn tendon in his right pinkie finger.
“It’s like us — you add a 7-foot big guy to a good team and you know they’re going to be good,” D’Antoni said. “He’s a heck of a player, and makes them better.”
D’Antoni is hoping the Suns will run as much as they have in the past and that their fast-break numbers will even increase with O’Neal igniting the break. He hopes the Suns won’t have to double down low and the offensive rebounds allowed will drop. He hopes having Amaré Stoudemire finishing the break instead of starting it will make the Suns even more lethal.
And he hopes it will all happen by the middle of April.
“Every day is one step closer to the team we want to be,” he said. “There are going to be bumps in the road, but we have 29 games to get it straight and 29 games to win also. We want to make sure it doesn’t become the Shaq Show — that it’s still the Phoenix Suns Show — and find that balance that makes it all work.”
The folks at Nike are at it again!!! This time they reinvent Kobe Bryant and Lebron James as Muppet-Like puppets. Kobe comes off like an old man while Lebron comes off like a 10 year old kid. The commercials are very funny, but i can’t see how Kobe or Lebron could approve of the way they are portrayed in these commercials. TheNBA league office must have had to sign off of these ads. Here are all the ads in one spot.
