Luis Scola on Sunday said what many Suns fans have felt all season.
Following another embarrassing loss to the New Orleans Hornets last night, the power forward gave his opinion on how the Suns have played not only on Sunday, but for the entire season.
“We can’t just play the game and pick out the good parts of the game and say we play well for a quarter or two or three. If you don’t play well for 48 minutes, you don’t play well,” Scola said following the team’s most recent loss Sunday against New Orleans.
Of course, Scola wasn’t done with expressing his viewpoints on the current state of the Suns.
“We just don’t know how to play well,” he continued. “We don’t know how to play basketball and that’s why we lose. Until we learn how to play 48 minutes of basketball, we’re not going to win games. I’m surprised we won (23) games playing this way. Many of the games we won, we did the same thing. We just overcame it somehow. I’m also surprised we didn’t fix it. We saw the problem pretty much the first week and we couldn’t fix it. It’s very frustrating. It’s a bad year.”
Scola does make some very valid points. Even games they have won this season, very rarely has Phoenix played well for the entire 48 minutes of the contest.
Starting out well coming out of the locker room has been a big time Achilles heel for the Suns recently. Over the last three games, the purple and orange gang have been outscored by a total of 54 points in the third quarter by two playoff bound teams and a terrible Hornets squad.
Now there a number of reasons why complete games from the Suns have been few and far between this season.
The Argentine mentioned they have failed to fix problems that have been there all season long, which is a nicer way of saying that the coaching staff has failed to make the necessary adjustments. Many fans have been critical of Lindsey Hunter in that regard.
Of course, Hunter doesn’t have a lot to work. The current Suns roster top to bottom, minus Goran Dragic, Scola and a few others, just doesn’t have enough talent to compete with teams across the league night in and night out, so it is hard the Suns struggles completely on Hunter’s shoulders.
As for Scola, it is nice to see him tell like it is. Too many athletes not just in the NBA, but across all leagues in pro sports, tend to sugarcoat things, but Scola was blunt with his assessment of how the Suns just aren’t a very good basketball team.
Scola has been one of the few bright spots for the Suns this season, but he probably doesn’t have a long-term future with the club. Phoenix will probably want to get younger at the position while continuing to develop Markieff Morris, so Scola could be traded during the summer.
The Suns can’t trade him until later in the summer though due to him being an amnesty pickup from the previous offseason. Scola will have two years left on his contract at about $9 million, which should make him attractive to a team looking for a quality veteran big man.
