Effort is the secret to the Suns’ recent success

Watching their first few games of the season, one could be forgiven for not knowing what on earth the Phoenix Suns were doing — or even what they were trying to do.

The Suns were blown off their own floor by the CJ McCollum-less Blazers in their season opener, and then they dropped a close one to the Lakers before getting walloped by the Clippers. After those three games, they were being outscored by 31 points a night. Predictably, they fired coach Earl Watson, replacing him with assistant Jay Triano. The same day, starting point guard Eric Bledsoe tweeted he wanted out of Phoenix altogether (not a single person believed the hair salon story), and the team decided later to send him home while they looked for a suitable trade.

Less than a week into the season, it looked like things were already beyond repair. It’s one thing for a team to get blown out, but it’s another for them to look as listless and uninterested as the Suns did during their first few games of the year. As individuals and as a group, it simply looked like they didn’t want to be on the floor. And while zeroing in on effort as the reason for a team’s struggles is something that happens far too often, with the Suns it was accurate.

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Something’s changed since Triano took over. The Suns were already playing at a breakneck pace under Watson, but there’s considerably more zip to every offensive action over the last week-plus than there was early on, and the change in give-a-[expletive] on defense is night and day. More than anything else, it’s that which both Triano and Suns players say is what’s led to this recent streak of four wins in five games, including victories over playoff contenders like the Jazz and Wizards.

“Nothing’s changed system-wise,” rookie forward Josh Jackson told The Step Back after a recent win in Brooklyn. “We’re just focused more and trying harder. It was just — really — effort. Our first few games, I don’t think we really gave too much effort.”

Whenever you talk to the coach of a young team, they almost always say they want to build out their program by being good on defense, playing hard on one end to create opportunities on the other. That’s standard coach-speak. Triano is no different in this regard.

“Work ethic,” he said, when asked what he wants the identity of his young team to be. “Work ethic and the fact that you have to play both ends of the floor. We haven’t been very good in defensive transition. We haven’t been very good at the defensive end in general. That work ethic translates to easier things offensively and our guys will figure that out.”

Young teams do tend to struggle defensively — mostly because they don’t know what they’re doing just yet. And when you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t talk. And when you don’t talk, you wind up losing your guy because you don’t know that you’re about to be hit with a screen, or that you don’t have help on the strong side.

“They’re trying,” Triano told The Step Back. “That’s a natural thing. I don’t know very many young players that have come into the league and that are very good at communicating. I think that’s something that grows with confidence and with the comfort level when you play games. And a lot of our guys really haven’t played enough games to really be at that point yet.”

The Suns are the second-youngest team in the NBA by minutes-weighted age. More than half the players in their rotation are still working on rookie contracts. Of the 10 players getting double-digit minutes a night, seven of them are 24 or younger and five are 21 or younger. It’s understandable for them to get lost. It’s understandable for them to get beat mentally.

But the young players getting heavy minutes will one day become veterans, and so they need it drilled into their heads over and over that they have to talk to each other on defense.

Tyson Chandler is the guy tasked with getting the Suns to that point. He’s known around the league as one of the best on-court communicators, and he’s done it on teams good and bad, old and young, for 16 years. He knows the Suns likely won’t truly rise until he’s gone, given the age differential between himself and the team’s young core, but he feels confident the information he shares will eventually be beneficial to them all — even if they don’t totally get it in the here and now. He feels that way because he went through the same thing as a member of the Baby Bulls in the early 2000s.

“I didn’t necessarily understand what Scottie Pippen and Antonio Davis and Othella Harrington and those guys were saying to me at the time,” Chandler said. “I was trying to comprehend it but didn’t necessarily understand it. Five years later, it all clicked. It all made sense. And then as time went along — even later when I was chasing a championship in Dallas — a lot of what Scottie Pippen was telling me about what it takes (or what Chauncey Billups was telling me that summer before when I was on the USA team), all of a sudden made sense to me because I was in that kind of atmosphere.”

“So, the wisdom that I’m giving them now, I expect some of it to have an immediate impact, but I [also] don’t expect a lot of it to,” Chandler continued. “I expect it to help them throughout their careers. The great thing about these dudes is this is a locker room full of great guys. It’s really a locker room full of great young guys with great personalities that actually listen and want to get better.”

For the #Timeline Suns to not go the way of the Baby Bulls, they’ll need to soak up Chandler’s lessons and a whole lot more. They’ll have to not only buy into the program, but figure out exactly what it is they want to be. It’s one thing to say you want to play fast, try hard and not give up anything on defense, but it’s another to figure out how you want to leverage the youth and athleticism within your faster pace, and how you want to go about stopping the other team from scoring points.

For now, the Suns are keeping things simple. They’re pushing the ball as hard as possible because it’s easier to get shots before the defense is set, and because all of the young guys involved still feel more comfortable using their athleticism to make plays in the open floor than they do in the halfcourt.

Mike James, the team’s new starting point guard, is a 27-year-old rookie, but he seems to have a feel for who should get the ball, and when, and where. And not being the center of every single action every trip down the floor like he often was under Watson has been beneficial for Devin Booker — the centerpiece of the team’s latest rebuild — because while defenses still obviously consider him the primary threat, they’ve also had to divert attention elsewhere. He’s finally ripping nets at the rate we’ve always thought he would, given how sweet his stroke looks, and he’s dishing out dimes at the highest rate of his career as well. He’ll likely never be a plus on defense, but that’s why the Suns used draft picks on guys like Jackson and Davon Reed.

If they can get positive two-way play from Dragan Bender and/or Marquese Chriss (Bender has looked much better under Triano than he ever did under Watson), that’s the makings of a group that can cover up for Booker’s flaws on one end while allowing him to carry the load on the other. With the wingspan and athleticism of that group, it’s easy to envision them flying all over the place to try to contain opposing offenses, but for now, the Suns are playing a stripped-down style of defense where there are a few unbreakable rules.

“One of our rules that we have is we always have strong help,” Jackson said. “So, just in case one of our teammates gets beat, you have somebody there to help him. We always start with one foot in the paint on help defense instead of starting on our man, then trying to jump to help, then trying to jump back. We start in strong help and if the guy passes the ball, we try to close out on our man.”

These principles are essentially verbatim what Triano volunteered when asked the same question, so something here is working. “I think we’re on the right track,” Triano said. “I think these guys have bought in to what we’re trying to do and I think they feel that. And we were rewarded with a couple wins. Hopefully it’s something we can continue to build on.”

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Building with a clear idea of what kind of team they want to be would represent a change of pace for the Suns, the most directionless team in the league over the last couple seasons. Even if they can’t keep up the kind of defense they’ve played during this five-game stretch throughout the rest of the year — and the safe bet is on the defense breaking down and this hot streak fading away, soon; again, young teams tend to be poor defensive teams — it’s at least clear the message is no longer going in one ear and out the other.