Jeff Hornacek joined Arizona Sports’ Doug & Wolf for his weekly radio show Tuesday, and spoke candidly on the state of the Suns.
The biggest takeaway?
“There are two ways to look at things when things get bad,” Hornacek said. “You either quit or you keep fighting.
“We’re not going to quit.”
Indeed, the schedule has not been kind to the Suns of late. However, they played very well against Cleveland and Oklahoma City – two of the league’s best teams. The key, Hornacek says, is to keep grinding and keep working to improve.
“It ended a stretch of 20 games in 34 days,” he said. “You can just tell they were beat. It’s one of those things where you go through one of those stretches and if you’re playing great basketball it’s great to play that many games. But when you’re not, you don’t have the practice time or ability to try and fix things on the fly. I thought our guys were in good spirits when they came in [for treatment] yesterday. You just have to go back to work. Our guys are ready to do that.
“We’ve had a tough stretch, but it’s a good opportunity to get going again.”
Despite the struggles, Hornacek said the team is playing hard and showing positive signs moving forward.
“They’re trying to do the things we ask, they just look slow out there right now,” Hornacek said. “People may take that as they’re not playing hard. Well, they’re playing hard; they’re just worn out. We’ve had to play some of these guys big minutes, especially these last four games since Eric [Bledsoe] went out.”
Because of injuries over the past few weeks to Eric Bledsoe and Tyson Chandler, the Suns’ youth (Devin Booker, T.J. Warren, Alex Len, etc.) has had to bump up the amount of minutes they play each night.
“Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Jeff Green in their second year when they were young – they only one 28 games with those guys playing,” Hornacek said. “Those are three pretty darn good players. [The young guys] just have to hang in there. We have to continue to teach. We’ll give them an opportunity to succeed and hopefully get it turned around.”
