Suns front office remains confident despite losing Gordon
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Print | Originally published: Jul 14, 2012 - 2:07 pm
July 14, 2012: Hornets match Suns' offer sheet
The Suns held out hope.
But in the end, they had to know the chances of prying away Eric Gordon from the New Orleans Hornets and new owner Tom Benson was going to be a long shot.
"[We] gave him the best possible contract that we could give him and if they choose to match, they choose to match but I feel like we've done everything we can do," said Suns president of basketball operations Lon Babby earlier in the week.
That said, the Suns believe they have accomplished a lot this offseason---with still plenty of work to be done.
"Whatever skepticism that (the fans) had over not knowing Lance (Blanks) and not knowing me very well I would hope they begin to dissipate with the actions we're taking now," said Babby.
"I hope that we're definitively answering questions they had. 'Do you have a plan?' Well, obviously we had a plan. 'Are you going to use the draft?' Well, we know have 10 draft choices (over the next three years). 'Is your owner committed to competing at the highest levels?' Obviously he is. He's willing to spend the money and make the investment in our player development and in our medical staff and our training staff and every aspect of what we're doing. 'Are you going to be able to attract free agents to Phoenix?' Everybody questioned that. I think we're in the process of definitively answering that in the positive.
"All I can do is my job every day," continued Babby, who is about to enter his third season with the Suns. "And at the end of my tenure---whenever that is, people will judge what I did and how I did it and form those judgements. But as I've said before, I can't run this franchise like a windsock. It's not an opinion poll. I've got to do what I think is right and then hopefully over time people will begin to have confidence in our judgement.
"I think we're in a much better place now with a much clearer path moving forward. It's obvious what we're doing now in ways that it couldn't be for the first two years just because of our circumstances.
"We're not going to get everything accomplished in one summer. If it turns out we need to keep our powder dry that's what we do. If we have an opportunity to get better that's what we'll do."
