Gentry moves career ahead by staying put in Phoenix

Life with the Suns is good.

There are the 13 wins in 17 games (even counting Thursday night's loss to the Jazz in the latest blown lead), a surge good enough to drive Phoenix to fifth in the West. That surge has it within 1 ½ games of home court advantage in the first round, a surge that, impossibly, began with defense.

In other news, it isn't with the Knicks.

As if life isn't good enough for Suns coach Alvin Gentry, there is the contrast of what could have been. He's a coach when he could have just been an assistant. But that's nothing. Try head coach in Phoenix when he could have been an assistant in New York.

Gentry has scored major points for successfully returning the Suns to their old scoring ways, for deploying two All-Stars and for managing a very professional locker room. In New York, he could have been working with a transitional roster as coach Mike D'Antoni's assistant, getting pilloried along with everyone else there on a team headed for 29 wins.

Oh, the fates. Gentry, a D'Antoni assistant for four seasons in Arizona, stays behind when D'Antoni and much of his staff head to Madison Square Garden in 2008. Gentry picks working under new coach Terry Porter in Phoenix over working with D'Antoni again. Porter unexpectedly gets fired on Feb. 16, 2009, Gentry finishes as interim coach and is named coach on May 9, 2009.

The Suns since then become one of the success stories of the league. They've easily beat most preseason estimates by chasing a top-four spot in the West into March and are on 50-win pace (that's even with seven losses after leading by at least 10 points).

The Knicks since then become increasingly easy targets for abuse. It's hardly the fault of the coaching staff; they were handed a stripped-down roster while understanding part of their role is to play the ultimate stall. Getting by for now as best as possible is the plan until the projected spending of summer 2010. But still, it's abuse.

Not that Gentry thinks about how things turned out or anything.

"Every day," he said.

Strange how the stars aligned, and not just the New York connection, either. The Phoenix portion of things would have been impossible enough to imagine.

First, Gentry only had to wait 51 games to get his crack at the coaching job. Next, the Suns went from 28-23 under Porter to an 18-13 finish under Gentry last season despite Amar'e Stoudemire missing all but two of those 31 games an eye injury.

There's the way Stoudemire has remained productive and focused amid constant uncertainty over his future. There's the way Steve Nash skipped old and opted instead to reclaim his old form. There's the way the 2009-10 standings fell right in line with improbable, with the Suns getting a good start, followed by a wobble in the middle, followed by an 8-3 mark since the All-Star break.

In a season of little predictability, the veteran coach with previous stops as coach of the Heat, Pistons and Clippers has become part of the stability. Gentry has dealt with major injuries to starting center Robin Lopez and key reserve Leandro Barbosa. That was a hit for the depth as the bench grew into a primary concern. But there was the supposedly thin team, in playoff position with Gentry managing the roster so well that no Sun is in the top 45 in the league in average minutes. Just as critical, and perhaps most critical of all, he has brought back the up-tempo game that sparked Nash's rejuvenation.

"I just really thought that if I had any opportunity to stay in Phoenix, I would," Gentry said of the decision to not follow D'Antoni. "No. 1, my family loves it there. No. 2, I just thought that we still had a lot of winning that we could do with that team. I wanted to be a part of it if I could."

Gentry said he had no intentions of getting this chance and how could he have? Porter had just been hired with Gentry already in the program. Gentry couldn't have been laying for the job. No one could have imagined Porter would come and go so fast.

"I just wanted to be there," Gentry said. "I wanted to be an assistant there as long as I possibly could. I had no aspirations of anything, of thinking that this would ever turn into what it did. Obviously it's unfortunate because your fortunes are another guy's misfortunes and you never want to have that as a situation. But that's kind of the way this league is. I've been on the other side of it, too, so I understand that.

"But it's been great. I love the guys and I love the team and I love working with (Suns president and GM) Steve Kerr. I think we've got a great relationship."

Life with the Suns is good.

Scott Howard-Cooper has covered the NBA since 1988. You can e-mail him here.

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