Phoenix Suns’ Babby: Team stuck to plan and stood pat at the trade deadline
Feb 20, 2014, 10:13 PM | Updated: 11:49 pm
The NBA’s trade deadline came and went, and the Phoenix Suns did nothing.
All along, the organization maintained it would not sacrifice part of its future for a deal that might help its present, so it really comes as no surprise that a deal wasn’t struck.
“We established the principles we were going to follow and we adhered to those principles,” president of basketball operations Lon Babby told the Dan Bickley Show with Vince Marotta on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM Thursday.
Babby said based on what the team’s criteria was, there was no deal out there to be made.
So the Suns, with a 32-21 record, young talent, future cap space and a bevy of draft picks, will press onward with what they’ve got.
It’s not a bad position to be in, really.
“A big part of it was the chemistry and we wanted our guys to know that we believe in them,” Babby said of the hesitancy to make a trade. “Just tinkering that was a great risk and we’re just playing so hard and fighting so hard that we felt like this group should have the opportunity to take it as far as they could.
“We believe in them.”
That’s not to say the Suns did not talk with other teams or have ideas floating around. Babby said activity picked up in the final hour or so before the deadline, adding that his group went over all the possibilities just to make sure they weren’t missing anything.
“We had a pretty good sense of resolve about what we wanted to do and what the right things to do were,” he said.
Besides, it’s not like the Suns had to make a deal. In fact, it was a pretty quiet deadline, with only a couple deals being made.
“I think it’s getting harder to make those kind of deals at the trade deadline,” Babby said, pointing to many factors, including a strong 2014 draft class and shorter contracts handed out to players. “It’s just the dynamic is more difficult. There are only a handful of teams that are in a position to be successful that are going to take a risk, and those teams that are successful probably felt, in a lot of ways, like we did, that we’re not going to mess around with something that’s worked so far.”
