In his postgame quotes last night, Suns head coach Mike D'Antoni called out the fans for contributing to an overall lack of energy:
"I'm not really impressed. We are okay. We should have had more energy, we should have played harder. And the crowd is worse than we are. They are deader than we are. Are they waiting until April to yell at us? Well we are yelling at them. Everybody needs to get a little pep in their stomp. This is fun. So right now we need to pick it up, the fans need to pick it up and let's work for something. They are not going to give it to us."
As previously noted, I was at the game last night. I would somewhat agree with Mike D'Antoni's assessment if I were comparing the crowd at the US Airways Center with crowds in other arenas I have been to. However, compared with my prior visits to USAC, this seemed pretty normal. I think it may be the time of year. The prior two years I came to games on the tail end of particularly ugly slow starts from the Suns, so the crowd seemed to take a wait-and-see attitude before really getting into the game. This time, I think it was more a case of the game's outcome feeling fairly inevitable from the opening tip (like others have suggested in the comments to the recap), and even though the starters were still in the game, the fourth quarter and even part of the third really kind of had a "garbage time" feel. It seemed like the crowd as well as the Suns were just playing out their 48 minutes without much of a reason to be fired up. Or to put it another way, it's probably not a good sign for crowd energy when three obnoxious Knicks fans five rows down can be heard over the entire section. Overall, though, it didn't seem all that different from the previous two games I have attended here, but my sample size is so small that I'm probably not the right person to say.
Questions for Paul Coro
I am trying to hook up with the Arizona Republic's Paul Coro this week for a little Q&A if the scheduling works out. If anyone has any questions for him, you can ask them in the comments to this post and I will add them to the list. (If we can't get it done this week, I'll save the questions for later--this will happen eventually even if it's not this week). As for my own questions, they will mostly be along the line of "What is it like to do what you do?", although I'm sure I'll slip in a one or two about the Suns.