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This past year was a trying one for the Suns, which clearly annoyed Marcin Gortat |
The Suns were the fourth worst team in the entire NBA in the 2012-13 season, worse than every other Western Conference team but just a little bit better than the Bobcats, Magic and Cavaliers.
Playing the team's first games without Steve Nash in years, Phoenix was just a mish-mosh of apt mainstays (like Marcin Gortat and Goran Dragic) and young players trying to find their way (like Wesley Johnson, Kendall Marshall, and Michael Beasley) along with older veterans playing out the end of their careers (like Luis Scola and Jermaine O'Neal).
Putting the loss of a long-time franchise player in Nash to a rival team in the Lakers together with the relative lack of talent on the roster, it is not a surprise that the Suns won just 25 games this past season, going just 8-33 on the road. Add in the resignation of head coach Alvin Gentry on January 18 (and the eventual naming of former player Lindsey Hunter to an interim post), and you get a franchise in flux.
And franchises in flux normally don't win too many games.
But that does not mean that some of Phoenix's players are accepting of the team's resigned-to-defeat state at the moment. For guys like Gortat, who was part of the 2009 Eastern Conference Champion Orlando Magic that fell to the Lakers in the NBA Finals, losing sucks, and he does not want to take much more of it.
But it is not like the Suns' starting center does not have a source of blame for his team's struggles. He puts the onus on Phoenix's younger players, who he cites as having a major lack of character.
From Pro Basketball Talk's Brett Pollakoff: "I think we need some changes," Gortat said. "We need some serious conversations. We need to look in the mirror and each of us has got to ask if we did everything that was necessary to win, or if we did everything that was necessary to perform at 100 percent."
Hard to blame Gortat for being angry at the direction the Suns are going in and the current roster makeup of the team. But if he is expecting results soon, he probably is not going to get them.
