UPDATE 11:17 a.m. ET: The Suns have named player development coordinator Lindesy Hunter as interim head coach, the team announced this morning. We’ll have more on Hunter following this afternoon’s press conference.
PHOENIX — In case you weren’t sure of what the plan was in Phoenix to right the sinking Suns ship, we have some good news to pass along: You’re not alone; the organization doesn’t seem to have any idea, either.
Well over 24 hours after the Suns parted ways with head coach Alvin Gentry, the team has yet to name an interim head coach. It’s hard to imagine that the search will last beyond Sunday, considering that the team is exclusively looking at internal candidates. But the fact that this all wasn’t worked out ahead of time tells at least part of the story of this Suns team that finds itself at the bottom of the Western Conference standings.
Suns president of basketball operations Lon Babby said at a press conference on Friday that he’d prefer to wait until a coach is named to describe the qualities he’s looking for in the person who will guide the team the rest of the season.
“Let’s wait until we pick the guy and then we can describe why we picked him; maybe that would be easier,” Babby said. “There are so many characterisitics that a good coach should have. Not everyone is going to have all of them. There is a tendency when you pick someone to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative and that’s what we’ll do. We’ll pick the right person internally for where we are and where to go but let’s wait until we pick that person. I’d rather describe the reasons or have [GM Lance Blanks] describe the rerasons or have the person describe why they are the right fit rather than do it hypothetically.”
This deflection was pretty much par for the course during Babby’s presser, where he essentially refused to get into the details surrounding the reasons for Gentry’s dismissal, other than to say that management felt that the team was regressing.
“I don’t want to get into the details of evaluating what led to the decision,” Babby said. “This is not something we planned for. As short as a month ago, Robert Sarver was direct and blunt in saying Alvin would be here for the rest of the year. That was our intent all along. That was a commitment that we had made. But sometimes in this business, you get to a point where it just doesn’t feel right and we just reached that point.
“How you get to that point is something that we look at closely and try to learn from, but I don’t think it serves anybody’s purpsoe to share all of the details and all of the reason, either from his side or from our side.”
Assistant coaches Elston Turner, Igor Kokoskov, and Dan Majerle are all believed to be in the running to ride out the lost season with the interim tag, as is player development coach Lindsey Hunter.
Gentry ended up taking the fall for poor front office personnel decisions, plain and simple. Babby said at one point during the press conference that the change at the head coaching spot doesn’t change the team’s plan from a personnel or player development standpoint, and that management’s plan was “intact.”
That would imply that a plan was in fact in place to begin with, which is hard to imagine considering how long it’s taking to simply appoint a current member of the staff to run the team the rest of the way.
