The Phoenix Suns are not off to a great start to the 2017-18 season. They fired their coach, traded away one of their best players, and just generally look like a bad basketball team.
Bad basketball has many forms, but the worst form —a lazy bad team — is easily exposed by a certified good team, which the Boston Celtics are. The two teams played on Saturday night, and while Boston only escaped with a 116-111 win, the game did give us a hilariously terrible sequence between the two that showed just how uninterested the Suns are in playing defense.
As Twitter star Steve Noah astutely pointed out, the Suns as a team looked completely gassed to the point where no one even pretended to play defense for a bit.
This is the last game of open gym. pic.twitter.com/ucpr0ODaTw
— Steve Noah (@Steve_OS) December 2, 2017
That’s two straight, completely uncontested shots for Marcus Smart while all five Suns players basically stare at him from inside the paint and wait for what they hoped would be a rebound. That the ball sailed past all of them and right to Smart was hilarious enough, but then they proceeded to get out-worked on Smart’s second shot by Jayson Tatum. It led to another 3-point attempt, this time from Al Horford, who was all alone.
Thankfully, he made it, which gave Phoenix the ball back because otherwise they would have just stood there all night while Boston kept chucking up field goals. Everyone knows the Suns are going to be bad this year, but it would be nice if they at least tried.
