quote:
Hornacek empowered his players like no other coach in the NBA. He gave Dragic and Bledsoe the reins and just about every role player a green light. Never mind the starting backcourt; from Gerald Green to the Miles Plumlee to the Morris twins, practically everyone in the rotation had a career year.

quote:
Dragic said, "He understands the game. Some coaches, they're not players, but Jeff was a player so maybe he sees things differently, he sees things same as we do on the court and maybe because of that it's much easier for us players to understand him. He gave us freedom, he gave us a lot of confidence. Even in training camp if you're not a shooter, he was already encouraging you to shoot. That's just those little things, that everybody is feeling great, confident. It's really fun to play like that.

quote:
Hornacek said he wanted to give his ballhandlers responsibility, and if they were looking over at the bench for a play call it meant they were going slower than he wanted. With a relatively young roster coming off a 25-win season, relinquishing control like that is much easier said than done. It's what this group needed, though, and the belief they had in themselves was evident all the way back in summer league.

Clearly more to it than just rolling the ball out and we don't know if this will last for PHX, but they were a hell of a team this year.

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Posted by TigerinATL

Member since Feb 2005

61582 posts

Posted on 4/16/14 at 8:23 am to corndeaux

quote:
Clearly more to it than just rolling the ball out

I don't think there needs to be much more to it. Tyreke got all the glory last game, but what we saw him do against OKC was very much a team effort. Plays weren't being run other than Tyreke Kamikazi, but guys were moving off ball to make themselves available instead of what we've seen so much of the year, 2 guys involved in the offense and 3 guys standing around "spacing" the floor. I think you could build a pretty potent offense around Evans/Holiday/Morrow/Anderson/Davis with Evans running the offense and everyone else following simple rules of playing off him. I'd much rather see that than the bullshite top of the arc weave that wastes 10 seconds looking like player movement but not really doing anything useful.

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Posted by Galactic Inquisitor