The Suns are the closest team to the 'Showtime'-era Lakers

They would be killed on the board just like us.
Marion is Suns leading rebounder with 11.8 rbs/game.
He's critical to the effectiveness of the small ball of Suns.
Joe Johnson is also a huge part of their success. 15.7 pts on 45% FG and 52% 3pt FGs.

Marion + Joe Johnson = 37 pts 15 rbs 5.5 asts

Tmac also takes away the touchs from Amare, and I doubt he
would be that effective off the ball.

 

I hate to admit it, because the Suns are one of the Rocket rival teams that I always cheer against (along with the Spurs, Lakers, Sonics, and Jazz), but they are looking for real. I bet Cuban is just killing himself over not keeping Nash.

 

The NBA should do everything they can to make sure teams like Phoenix and Seattle have more success in the playoffs and teams like…well, the Rockets have less success. The Suns and Sonics play the way the game should be played. More teams should be encouraged to play that way, instead of slow ugly ball.

 

Even with athletes (Francis, Mobley, Posey, Cato, etc.), the Rockets were still a slow ugly half-court team.

 

I just looked at PHX schedule.

They played 3 good teams so far: sac, dallas, minni

They've lost 2 of them. They are killing all bad teams. Sounds familiar? Think the 02 mavs. The season they won like 15 in a row to start the season. Same style of play, same results.

As stated earlier, playoffs slows down games. You can't really change that. You can't possibly penalize teams for doing all they can to slow the game down. How the game is called is irrelevent. You would have to change rules. For example, much bigger 3 second zones. Or a round robin playoff format, so teams can't focus on one team, and can't really adjust. One example of this is the Olympic format. Euro and Argintine teams thrive in that format. You can bet if they played 7 game series, the games will be slowed down to half court games. American team would ahve came home with gold medals. The reason? Tim Duncan and Larry Brown. Half court teams win in NBA playoffs. If NBA schedules are like Baseball's, where you play the same team 4,5 times in a roll, half court teams would win in regular season too.

 

The Suns are fun to watch, but I don't think they would match up well with the Showtime Lakers. Unfortunately, we will never know. The Magic led Lakers were awesome. They were big, fast, quick, great passers, and superb shooters. I love to see how those classic NBA teams would do against the modern teams.

 

You run when you have an athletic team. The lakers had worthy, scott, cooper with magic orchestrating the break. Circa 2000, the kings with jwill, cwebb, peja,jackson, doug and then mike bibby, even vlad and brad can run with the team. The mavs had nash, finley and dirk. Its more than enough. Now, the suns had nash, amare, marion, richardson and jj. But the difference between the three teams is the lakers had a half court game. They had kareem to go to. Magic can sometimes post up and worthy too. When teams like the spurs, wolves, or the pistons start to make the mavs and the kings play half court sets, problems start to arise. Result, play offs losses, no rings. Fastbreaking teams can win you games, can entertain fans, but no rings. Unless of course you have Magic on your team. And as far as i remembered, he contacted the hiv virus in 91. So no dice here. Its gonna be the spurs, pistons or the wolves in 05. Mark it.

 

Agreed.

Mav and Kings were very fun to watch too. Not as athletic, but far better shooters.