There’s a word that Phoenix coach Igor Kokoškov is known to shout out to his young team to remind them to remain focused, “move the ball, pass and cut, set a screen,” not “stand and watch” and essentially revert to their better intuition during broken plays, as he said before Tuesday’s Spurs-Suns game.
The word?
“Basketball!”
Although there’s a more pointed, Pavlovian purpose to Kokoškov’s call to action, it doubled as the simple chorus that I kept coming back to on Tuesday while taking in a game that devolved to its most basic basketball nature, all the way to its thrilling but equally nonsensical conclusion.