There is no shortage of physicality on this Suns team. Alex Len has put on 40 pounds – the good kind – since his freshman year at Maryland. P.J. Tucker has made an NBA living by getting his pickup truck frame in opponents’ faces and on the floor. Tyson Chandler earned the title of “enforcer” straight out of high school. Eric Bledsoe is a 6-1 tank.
Yet when it comes to toughness, Suns Head Coach Jeff Hornacek feels different muscles come into play.
“When you say tough, I don’t always think it’s physical,” he said. “Yeah, it’s a big part of it, but a lot of it is mental. When things are going bad, are you tough enough to not go crazy and try to get it back quickly? Are you a team that says ‘We’ll get it back with our defense and we’ll score and we’ll get back in the game that way.’ There’s a lot of parts to being tough.”
Phoenix is counting on the addition of Tyson Chandler and the maturity of younger players – including Eric Bledsoe, Markieff Morris and Alex Len – to generate a proactive front in the toughness department. At the very least, they’ve been tough on each other.
“I think some of our young guys are taking those steps too,” Hornacek said. “They’re speaking up in practices, which is great. Tyson probably leads that, but the other guys are talking. That’s what we need. You can’t have one guy saying ‘we’ve got to pick it up.’ The whole team’s got to do it. I see that now. These guys are getting on each other. They see one of the five guys isn’t pulling [his] weight, they’ll say something.”
There will be times when saying nothing is just as effective. When Phoenix’s new defense-first mentality is challenged, Hornacek hopes to see his players respond with well-timed tenacity.
“Young guys, sometimes they get caught up in it,” Hornacek said. “They get cracked, they don’t pick the right times to crack somebody back. They might do it the next play when the referee’s watching. Now the guy gets two free throws and he’s laughing. It’s the little tricks that you learn as the years go on.”
Phoenix will need all those tricks and more in a brutal Western Conference. The talent at point guard – a position at which the Suns have doubled up with Bledsoe and Brandon Knight – has never seemed deeper. Chandler will team up with Len to give the Suns a quality counter to the Gasols, Jordans and Cousins of the world. All of them will test a Phoenix team that has relied on speed and lacked in strength in years past.
“When guys find a player that’s mentally weak, they’re going to pick on that guy,” Hornacek said. “They’re going to get after you. If you’re not physical, they’ll post you up, they’ll hit you early and get you out of your game.”
It is why Jeff Hornacek yells at players for not diving for loose balls, why he claps over a simple-but-effective rotation on defense, and why Tyson Chandler will race from the end of the bench to midcourt, roaring like a madman for a teammate who has shown maximum effort for the sake of a single possession.
Never let up, and the opponent might just let up on you.
“I think when you play physical and you’re mentally tough, you put some fear in the other team,” Hornacek.
