Milwaukee Bucks Blog - The Bob Boozer Jinx : Phoenix Suns

Calling John Hammond: Why Michael Redd i$ not on hi$ way to Phoenix

J.D. Mo — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:50:00 GMT

What about the Phoenix Suns need for a high scoring shooting guard did Bucks GM John Hammond miss? The Suns on Wednesday traded forward Boris Diaw and starting guard Raja Bell to the Charlotte Bobcats for the Cats' shooting guard, Jason Richardson. After the trade, Suns GM Steve Kerr had this to say:

“We felt like we needed to shake things up a little bit. We wanted to add a great scorer in the backcourt to give us better balance to take some of the pressure off of Steve (Nash).”

Does that description of the Suns needs by GM Kerr not scream Michael Redd? And why does this sound kinda familiar?

A little over a month ago (34 days to be exact) I remembered that the Suns had put Diaw and backup guard Leandro Barbosa (who sliced through the Bucks D at will Tuesday night) on the trading block last summer. It's on the record. I wrote about it when the Suns were in town to play the Bucks. I even offered some crazy advice:

"Given how active the Bucks look without Redd and that coach Skiles sure wouldn't mind two more quick, active players with playoff experience, Bucks GM Hammond should take a good look at this trade, if Phoenix is willing."

I got a little ambitious about it too and tapped into the Phoenix Suns Realgm.com fan forum to see what Suns fans thought about a Redd for Diaw and Barbosa trade. They were somewhat interested but wanted more, a power forward for instance (doesn't everybody these days? And don't they already have Amare Stoudemire?). One thing Suns fans generally agreed upon, however, was that the Suns wouldn't trade Raja Bell, their starting guard and their best perimeter defender. This is why we discussed Barbosa instead of Bell, whom I assumed was off limits. As it so happens (and didn't happen) he's also the one guy on the Suns (other than Shaq) who happens to be a Scott Skiles kind of player.

Well, the Suns did part with Bell. (Suns fans, how could we have ever agreed to misjudge this so badly?) Now Bell and Diaw are Bobcats, and Jason Richardson is a Phoenix Sun. I can't help but wonder whether John Hammond ever investigated a trade involving Diaw and one of the Phoenix guards for Redd, and why the Bucks couldn't pull off this deal. Such is the speculative life of a blogger in the close-to-the-vest Hammond era, bearing in mind that it is possible that the Bucks simply had no interest in such a trade (oh, it hurt to write that; why am I even attempting objectivity?).

There was no question the Suns were in the market to get better now, this year, NOW while Shaq is still a semblance of the old Diesel and while Steve Nash still has a few tricks up his sleeve at point guard. Very much in favor of a Phoenix deal for Redd at least being discussed is that Jerry Colangelo, the Suns CEO, is at last report an unabashed Redd fan. Colangelo headed up the organization of the 2008 Olympic team and took Mike along for the show. I find it hard to believe that with the Suns looking for a scoring guard, Colangelo would have forgotten about Redd.

Richardson is an excellent player, as Bucks fans saw last weekend in a game the Bobcats nearly stole from the Bucks at home. At 28, Richardson is a year younger than Redd, is more athletic and an all-round better player as far as rebounds, assists and steals. He's shot the ball better than Redd in the last couple of years as well. (That list of basketball things in Richardson's favor has been getting longer). Yet neither player is a Raja Bell type defender, and, yes, there was a time when Redd was the more highly valued player.

There is one facet of Redd's game that still has a higher value than Richardson's: His contract. Redd is paid about $3.5 million more per year than the Suns new guard. Richardson has 3 years and $40 million left on his contract; the Bucks are on the hook to pay Redd $51 million over the next three years.

My conclusion here has to be that $11 million is plenty of incentive to call Charlotte instead of Milwaukee when looking for a shooting guard.

Other players: Rookie point guard Sean Singletary also went to Charlotte, while the Suns got small forward Jared Dudley and a 2010 second-round draft pick.

Nash dismayed by trade: The trade of his best pal, Raja Bell, caught Suns All-Pro point guard Steve Nash off guard, too. In an Arizona Republic story, Nash talks about being "emotionally drained" by the trade and worries about whether the Suns will "blow up" the team after this season.

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Bucks flounder in the 4th: There were times last night when Don Nelson's Golden State Warriors ran circles around the Bucks. There were times the Bucks tightened the defense, hit some shots and clawed back into the game the Eastern Conference way - with toughness. Andrew Bogut and Charlie Villanueva had gained control of the paint for the Bucks with some good interior defense, and it looked as though the Bucks were poised for a road win against one of the NBA's laziest defensive teams. At the end of the 3rd Quarter, it was an 82-81 game, Warriors in the lead.

In the 4th quarter, the Bucks forgot everything they did to make it a game and were, for the second night in a row, suckered into a run-and-gun shootout they couldn't hope to win. The Warriors ran the Bucks out of the building 37-15 in the 4th for a 119-96 final score.

It all happened when the centers, Andrew Bogut and Andris Biedrins went to the bench. By the time Skiles put Bogut back into the game it was far too late. Nellie didn't bother putting Biedrins back into the game, as though he knew it was over once the Warriors got rolling. He was right. Skiles resorted to veteran bench point guard Tyronn Lue to restore a sense of order for the Bucks (didn't work). Michael Redd, working well with Bogut in the 3rd, had one of his best games of the year going ... until the 4th. Skiles had this to say:

“We don’t yet get how hard you have to play and how focused you have to be for a period of time to win an NBA game. This is a good group of guys, and we just have to learn that toughness.”

Bucks were also playing their third game in four nights and looked the worse for wear and tear. It wears me out just writing about the Bucks early schedule but I think I've just used the last "Bucks nightmare schedule" card I had by the laptop. The entire stack is gone, and my sources at the Spalding company say that they are not printing any more this season.

Next post: Schedule excuse expires.

Kareem and the Curse of the Coin Flip: Why one Suns fan wanted the Bucks to lose by 50 (not 15)

J.D. Mo — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:21:00 GMT

Found a fun fanblog today, or rather the blogger found the Jinx on Ballhype. Ben's Suns Blog. Ben's a diehard fan who's been following his Suns for 20 years, about the same amount of time he's been hooping. In Milwaukee, I've traced the source of the Bucks woes back to the retirement of Bob Boozer and the resulting jinx at the power forward position; in Phoenix, Ben has traced the Suns history of agony back to a flip of the coin for the rights to draft UCLA center Lew Alcindor.

It was 1969 and the Suns and the Bucks were the NBA's baby franchises. The teams had finished their inaugural seasons (1968-69) with the NBA's two worst records. In the pre-lottery years, the league's two biggest losers flipped a coin to see who drafted first. The Bucks won the toss, selected Alcindor and didn't look back. They brought the title home in 1971, built the Green and Growing Bucks with players acquired in the 1975 trade of Kareem to the Lakers and, save for two down years prior to drafting Marques Johnson, played upper echelon NBA basketball for two decades. Sadly, 1971 was to be our only title, thanks to the jinx.

The Suns, with the 2nd pick, took Neal Walk, a pretty good center in his own right for about five years for the Suns before injuries and a trade to the New Orleans Jazz sent his career into obscurity. Ben picks up the story there and catalogs decades of Suns woe. Unlike the Bob Boozer jinx, which focuses its mojo on a single position on the court, the Curse of the Coin Flip has afflicted the entirety of Suns basketball -- everything from the failure to guard the Bulls' John Paxson in the 1993 Finals to the suspensions of Boris Diaw and Amare Stoudemire in the 2006 Western Conference Finals (this is one powerful, powerful curse).

"So, when we play the Bucks, I want to literally beat them by 50 every time," Ben writes. "Even though it wasn't their fault and we've had consistently better records and playoff appearances. I don't care.

"They are the ones who have a championship."

But don't take my word for it, check out Ben's Suns blog. It's a fun read. And a good trip into NBA history.

Shaq diesels through the Bucks again: The Suns play the Lakers Wednesday night, and coach Terry Porter has Shaquille O'Neal on the "Rest-a-Shaq" plan for back-to-back games. Would Shaq sit out vs. the Bucks and Andrew Bogut? Nope, he played and had field day again, just as he did in Milwaukee.

Midway through the 3rd quarter, Shaq had 21 pts., 7 rebs and 2 blocks. Bogut had 11 and 8 with a block.

Maybe Bogut and Shaq should just play one-on-one. They both seem to have an aversion for fouling each other: When in doubt, let the other big man score, apparently.

I suppose I shouldn't have written that: As I write this Bogut has five fouls. Both he and Shaq are on the bench. They have 38 pts and 18 rebs between them. More of the points are Shaq's (23) and more of the boards are Bogut's (11). Shaq now has 3 blocks (none on Bogut). Nobody's playing much defense in this one -- it's 96-90 Suns at the end of the 3rd.

Bogut and Shaq should take this one down to the playground. There's no snow on the courts in Phoenix.

The Bucks attempt to outscore the Suns is not working vs. the Suns high performance offense. Bogut got ten minutes of rest with those 5 fouls and by the time Skiles sent him back into the game, Shaq had 30 pts and the Suns had upped their lead from 5 to 12. Shaq welcomed Bogut back by hitting a nine-foot turnaround in his face. Ball game. Bucks lose by 15, 125-110.

Between them, Bogut and Shaq finished 21-28 from the floor - 75%. Most of the misses were Shaq's -- Bogut was 7-9 and had no assists. Makes me wonder why the Bucks couldn't figure out how to get Andrew more touches. Five Bucks took more shots than Bogut: Michael Redd, R.J., Charlie V (nice shooting night for Charlie, 9-15), Crazy Luke Ridnour and Ramon Sessions. Crazy Luke and Ramon are not good shooters (7-24 vs. the Suns). Get the ball to the big man when he's on fellas.

Let's look at R.J. and Michael Redd vs. the Suns. Not bad - they shot 36 times and made 17 including three 3-pointers: 37 points, not including free throws, on 36 shots. That's good enough to win most games, but not good enough to win a shootout that Steve Nash suckered your team into -- especially when the defense is apparently buried in a Milwaukee snowdrift. The Suns weren't playing much D either - especially in the paint, evidenced by Bogut and Charlie V tallying 32 pts, not including free throws, on 24 shots.

What's more efficient? Getting the ball to the bigs or course vs. the Suns porous defense. I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't some resistence among the guards and forwards to push the game to the frontcourt players. I'm also wondering whether the perimeter players believe they are better than they really are. That's a problem, a lingering Milwaukee Bucks problem.

Coach Skiles? You really should have found a way to let Shaq and Bogut decide this one on the playground. Bucks have now lost 21 straight games in Phoenix.

Cavaliers set NBA buttkicking record: No team in NBA history has kicked you know what like this season's Cleveland Cavaliers. In blowing out the Raptors 114-94 in Cleveland Tuesday night, the Cavs won their ninth straight game by more than 12 points, the first time that's ever been done. The Cavs led 59-51 at half and delivered the knockout blows with a 25-2 run to start the 3rd quarter for an 84-53 lead. Along the way Lebron James set the franchise record for career steals, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas stepped atop the Cavs all-time career rebounding list.

Four previous teams had eight game streaks of 12-point+ wins: Clyde "The Glide" Drexler and Terry Porter's 1990-91 Portland Trailblazers; Michael Jordan's 1996-97 Bulls; the "It takes five" Detroit Pistons of 2003-04; and, surprisingly, the Houston Rockets last year, who tore through the patsies of the East during their 22-game winning streak. The Bulls and Pistons won the NBA title the seasons they did it; the 1991 Blazers lost to Jordan's Bulls in the NBA Finals; the injury beset Rockets were the exception, as they lost to the Jazz in the first round of the 2008 playoffs.

In case you were wondering, yes, Raptors center Jermaine O'Neal did play and wasn't a factor, obviously. The Raptors are now at full strength and still struggling after firing coach Sam Mitchell.

Jim Boylan - In the spirit of Al McGuire

J.D. Mo — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:53:00 GMT

Find Bucks assistant coach Jim Boylan in that suave, Billy Dee Williams cool, disco days meets "The Great Gatsby" photo to the right and win the first ever Bob Boozer Jinx door prize. Hint: Boylan's the kid from Jersey City, New Jersey.

The photo, from the Marquette archives, via a Sports Illustrated 'Where are they now?' feature, is the official team photo of the 1977 NCAA champions. Boylan is farthest to the left, seated in the back of the '34 Packard, wearing the only all-grey tux. Left to right from Boylan: Bill Neary, Ulice Payne, Butch Lee, Jim Dudley, Gary Rosenberger (in the passenger's seat), Bernard Toone, Jerome Whitehead, Craig Butrym, Robert Byrd and Bo Ellis.

It seems odd, yet somehow fitting, that Boylan would take a seat furthest in the back -- he was nowhere near the back of the ride on the '77 Warriors. As the starting point guard, he was in the drivers' seat more often than not. But then, no player is behind the wheel of the Packard in the team photo, an important, and quite deliberate pose. Warriors coach Al McGuire was nothing if not a basketball artist; his motif was the essence of "team."

Or, as McGuire might have told the story of the photo shoot years later and probably did, the coach had reserved the drivers' seat for himself but left his tux at the drycleaners and had to bench himself for the photo shoot, the sort of thing that McGuire would do. There was something magical about Al McGuire when he told a story, spinning myth and street legend with wisecrack yarn and Manhattan snap.

Up until his death in 2001, when asked who, of all the players he coached, his favorite point guard was, McGuire would get serious and the answer was always the same: Jim Boylan. Sometimes he'd say Boylan was his favorite player, period. Boylan reminded Al of Al.

I came across a great story on the Chicago Bulls website about Jim Boylan and the Bulls after Boylan took over for Scott Skiles last December. What caught my eye was the following quote from Boylan:

“I told the guys that we shouldn’t concentrate so much on winning. Let’s concentrate on letting go of the things we can’t control and free ourselves to be the kind of players we know we are. Live in the moment.”

That quote from Boylan, Bucks fans, is the Al McGuire basketball philosophy to the letter. It was infused throughout the basketball world in the late 1970's and early 1980's when McGuire was on top of that world and players, especially those on Al's home turf in state, were told to just play "in the moment" and forget the scoreboard. The coaches would let you know when to look at the scoreboard and the clock. It was all very mystical and Zen, long before Phil Jackson won championships and wrote "Sacred Hoops." It was very McGuire.

Boylan, at age 52 -- after two college coaching jobs (Michigan State under Jud Heathcote and head coach at New Hampshire) and five jobs as an NBA assistant (including his first with Mike Fratello in Cleveland and two with Skiles, in Phoenix and Chicago) -- is still Al McGuire's point guard.

The Bucks job is Boylan's sixth assistant post in the NBA, reunited for a third run as Skiles' lead assistant. He joins Skiles' most impressive staff to date, with Lionel Hollins from the Memphis Grizzlies, a 20-year NBA assistant and Kelvin Sampson, one of the best college coaches in the game. Rounding out the staff are Kohler's own Joe Wolf, an up-and-climbing NBA coach-in-the-making from the CBA and the D-league; and Bill Peterson, the coach who developed Finley, Nowitzki and Nash in Dallas, and was responsible for Ramon Sessions development last season for the Bucks.

They've have all been "hired" for two weeks or more now (the Bob Boozer Jinx blogs about Skiles and his assistants are archived here.) This is a staff geared to develop its own stars, not to coach somebody else's 2nd or 3rd tier NBA "stars." Boylan's story with the Chicago Bulls offers even more insight. On a Skiles-Boylan team, the ball will move and the tempo will be up in transition. It's been described as an Eastern Conference version of the Phoenix Suns phenomena -- Eastern Conference because, on a Scott Skiles team, defense will be played.

When Skiles left Chicago in Boylan's hands, Boylan sped up the tempo even more, and the Bulls talented point guard, Kirk Hinrich shot less. Sometimes he didn't shoot at all, as though he were channeling Boylan style of point guard play. The Bulls stat hounds ignored the scoreboard and the shooting stats, and instead tracked ball movement and pace like it was religion.

Looking ahead to next season, don't expect overpaid shooting guards to freeze the Bucks offense by palming the ball, holding it with the dribble, then lowering a shoulder into the teeth of the defense with no passing mindset. Sloughing off in transition won't be a good idea, either.

Monday, I'll have a take on Bill Peterson and his development work, and I'm projecting a suprising revelation in the mix. For now, check out some more Jim Boylan in-action photos from J.E. Skeets yahoo blog "Ball Don't Lie." It's true -- Boylan does kind of look like the evil president from "24."

The catcher's crouch:

The "I just might kill Hinrich during this timeout I'm about to call" pose:

One final coaching note: Former Bucks coach Terry Porter (2003-05) is back on what New York Post columnist Peter Vecsey calls the NBA "coaching carousel." The buzz in Phoenix says he's the leading candidate to fill the job Mike D'Antoni vacated last week. Porter, an asssistant with Detroit the past two years, is believed to be the first candidate Suns GM Steve Kerr interviewed for the job, Charles Gardner reported yesterday at JSOnline. Vecsey saw opportunity coming for Porter a month ago in his column, and I swiped Vecsey's crystal ball for a day or two in an early BBJ post.

Bucks fans may never know why then-Bucks GM Slickless Larry Harris rescinded the vote of confidence he gave Porter at the end of the Bucks injury-riddled 2004-05 season. When Bucks owner Herb Kohl fired Harris in March, he told us the firing of Porter was "Larry's decision" -- but then Herb had been labelled a meddler by ESPN's Marc Stein and was on the defensive about that "growing reputation" and perception.

In any case, Porter got a bum shake from an impatient GM who didn't have a plan for building the Bucks. Porter deserved another year, if for no other reason than it is bad policy to treat a hometown hero with such little respect when being a hometown hero is part of the reason Porter got the job in the first place.

Terry's been coaching in Detroit the last couple of years -- under Flip Sanders, one of the coaches Harris supposedly fired Porter to bring to Milwaukee (I've come to doubt that's the real reason Porter was fired) -- which says something about how well-regarded Porter is in NBA coaching circles. Suns GM Kerr is looking to bring a defensive edge to the Suns, and who better than the top assistant in Detroit? Phoenix, with Nash and Stoudamire and Shaq, looks like a good opportunity. It's about time Porter got a second chance to head a team.