It wasn’t Jerry Colangelo’s money, any more than it was his call.
But the Phoenix Suns were the flagship of his long sports entrepreneurship, the desert seed planted 40 years ago. It stands to reason that any man whose franchise legacy is priceless has a vested interest in the future.
Colangelo was a 28-year-old general manager in the team’s first year, 1968. He had a couple of coaching runs and wound up fronting an ownership group from 1987 until 2004, the year he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
“I maintain a title as chairman, and I am available to consult,” Colangelo said Friday from Atlanta, on a different kind of road trip, accompanying his wife and daughter while they tend to an antiques business at various shows. “For this deal, Steve Kerr and Mike D’Antoni did ask for my opinion. We talked about the pros and cons. At the end of the day, I was supportive of going forward.”
Who can say now that by the end of the season, or the two subsequent to this one, Kerr the team president, D’Antoni the coach and the owner Robert Sarver will have invested in a Suns championship or wasted tens of millions for an antiquated version of Shaquille O’Neal?
Given the pros, cons and likely consequences of doing nothing, how could they pass?
“We’ve had tremendous success over the years,” Colangelo said, “but we haven’t won it all.”
Not with the team that pushed the Celtics hard in the 1976 N.B.A. finals or with the Charles Barkley-led group that was one stop away from forcing Michael Jordan’s Bulls to a seventh game on the road in 1993 or with the contemporary eye candy assembled by Bryan Colangelo, the son of the franchise Supernova, now administratively relocated to Toronto.
Why would a team with the best record in the Western Conference sacrifice a core player, Shawn Marion, and compromise its intrinsic run-and-gun playing style to accommodate a soon-to-be 36-year-old and increasingly stationary or sidelined O’Neal?
Because the best record this week could become the fourth or fifth-best next week in a conference so stacked with quality that its 10th-place team, Portland, would be fourth in the East.
Because Tim Duncan and the defending champion Spurs — who defeated the Knicks, 99-93, in overtime Friday night at Madison Square Garden— are still in the way and because the Lakers keep getting bigger and better and because Steve Nash isn’t getting any younger.
The best pair of point guard eyes west of Jason Kidd turned a youthful 34 Thursday but the legs tick to a different body clock. If this is about a closing window, why not add O’Neal’s strength to make sure it doesn’t slam shut?
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As Jerry Colangelo said, you can marvel at Nash’s nifty assists, the Suns’ video-game scoring tabulation and their average of 59 victories over the past three seasons, and you still come away with zero titles.
“The biggest question in the playoffs was always about our halfcourt game,” Colangelo said. “And until someone wins in playing the Phoenix style, that was going to be a question.”
It was one already answered by the Suns the last three years, when they were welcome catalysts in reversing the trend of tedium that had overtaken N.B.A. offenses but, in the final analysis, not much more than a sexy marketing scheme.
A preferred style is one thing. A team limited to that style is another. One day back in the early 1980s, a coach of some renown, Red Holzman, eavesdropped on reporters covering his excitable young Knicks, arguing whether they should run or play half-court. He later sidled up to one and said, “Don’t write that stuff,” though not that blandly.
He explained that championship basketball invariably had to be a compendium of styles and strategies, and a roll call of N.B.A. champions would bear that out, starting with the most recent. In their playoff series with the Suns last spring, the supposedly staid Spurs won games by scoring 114, 111 and 108 points.
With a presumably healthy if diminished O’Neal, the Suns, who defeated the SuperSonics, 103-99, on Friday night, can diversify their offense, and they will have someone to at least challenge Duncan, Yao Ming and the other conference giants, freeing Amare Stoudemire to terrorize power forwards.
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O’Neal is still 7 feet 1 inch and 325 pounds of obstruction, a four-time champion and a locker-room presence. Coming from Miami, how can he not be re-energized by another chance to win and thwart Kobe Bryant in the process?
“Some people have already discarded the idea that Shaq can do for us what Kareem did for the Lakers at the end of his career, but we’ll see,” Colangelo said, speaking of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, without choking on the name.
He lost the 1969 coin flip that landed Kareem in Milwaukee and settled for a competent center named Neal Walk. But that’s sports, the difference between good and great typically no more complicated than heads or tails, or playing a hunch.
The better option, in this case, than doing nothing, just running and running, until Steve Nash is on empty.
NYTimes.com
