The Whip of the God of Basketball

The Suns players couldn't believe their ears. Fox-Leon's first formal training session after coming to the Suns was to have the main players play against the new fringe players?

Steve Nash was the first to speak: "Fox, are you kidding me? I think we should get to know each other first."

Nash is the leader of the team and is very familiar with Leon, so he can offer advice. But Leon was obviously not prepared to accept Nash's opinion. Instead, he asked the players on both sides to put on training clothes and take out his whistle. Obviously, he was going to be the referee of this confrontation.

Seeing that the new coach was serious, the players had to wear training uniforms of different colors. The main team wore white vests and the substitute team wore gray vests. The main team is Stoudemire, Nash, Bell, Marion and Diaw, and the substitute team is Brent Barry, Turiaf, Jaskovicius, Dudley and Barea.

Stoudemire looked very relaxed. He didn't care about this sudden confrontation. While warming up with the ball, he still joked with Bell. But Bell looked very serious and said: "Coach Fox is not the kind of person who makes arrangements casually. Remember Boris, when we first joined the Celtics that year, we also had such a game. At that time We're on the bench."

Bell and his former Boston teammate Boris Diaw said that it was 2003, when the Celtics formed an unprecedentedly powerful lineup, and Bell and Diaw were just two inconspicuous newcomers. But at the beginning of the team's training camp, Leon organized a match between the substitute team and the main team. As a result, the talented main team defeated the substitute team with all their strength. , people like Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce no longer dare to underestimate the enemy and practiced extremely hard throughout the training camp.

It seems that Leon will use this trick again in Phoenix. It seems that the lineup of the opposite bench team is quite reasonable. The right back has a forward and a center, there are breakthroughs, passes, and three-pointers. There are veterans and young people. If they are integrated well, If we play, it's really a decent team. And I heard that Leon opened a rookie training camp for newcomers. They trained together for more than a week. I don’t know what kind of training methods Leon used.

Both Bell and Diaw were a little uneasy. Both of them had been tortured in Boston. Life should not be too easy after arriving in the Suns. Especially Diaw, who shined in the 2006 season when Stoudemire was injured. Successfully got a big contract. Now he feels that it is time for him to enjoy life. Unexpectedly, Fox-Leon became the head coach of the Suns.

When he learned the news, he was on vacation in France. As soon as he heard the news, he immediately gave up the idea of ​​basking in the sun and ran back to the United States to train and lose weight.

Before the start of this training, neither Bell nor Diaw had met Leon. After meeting today, Leon looked more majestic than before. When he was in Boston, as long as he stood on the sidelines, everyone would be obedient. No one dares to be lazy in training. Thinking that his days in Phoenix would be the same as before, Dior felt like his heart was about to break.

Leon went to the locker room, took off his suit, and put on a set of sportswear. Wearing short sleeves, he revealed his strong arms, and there were still a few scars on his strong muscles, which were still left on the boxing ring in the bar. medal. This made him completely different from the fat and white D'Antoni, and the players felt a little nervous for a while. There were only five players on the substitute team, and they were in a very relaxed mood, because before the start of the training camp, Leon had already told them that they would play this match.

As for how to play the match, Leon made detailed arrangements and conducted targeted training, which gave the five players who had never played together a basic game strategy. Of course, the most important thing is not strategy, but heart.

……………………

The match started with Leon's throw. Turiaf and Stoudemire competed for the ball. Stoudemire's bounce was better and he was the first to touch the ball. Nash took the ball and the Suns started to attack. As the undisputed core of the team's offense, Nash's possession rate in the offense is almost over 90%, and he does a very good job of controlling mistakes.

This summer, Nash has not relaxed his training, dribbling, shooting, and strength at all. At the age of 33, he is still honing his basic skills like a rookie. The person facing him in this game is Jascovicius, a player who has proven unable to survive in the NBA, a player who almost left the United States and returned to Europe. Nash heard before that Leon compared Jaskevicius to the demon knife of the sun. He didn't know where the demon was in Jaskevicius.

At this time, Stoudemire stepped forward and set a pick-and-roll for Nash. The two picked-and-roll. Nash sent the ball to Stoudemire with a scalpel-like ground pass. Stoudemire Damaier stepped inward and took off for a one-handed dunk!

This is the best pick-and-roll cooperation between Nash and Stoudemire. It is one of the strongest two-person cooperation in the entire league and is almost unstoppable. Even the Spurs and Duncan couldn't limit their combination, let alone this group of improvised substitute players.

After the goal, Nash and Stoudemire high-fived each other. It seems that after a summer, their cooperation has not been lacking at all. After scoring this goal, the five main players relaxed a lot. It seemed that the opponent was not trained by Leon to be super defensive. Jaskovicius still looked so slow, and Turiaf looked so slow. Sluggish to react and completely unable to keep up with the rhythm.

However, the substitute team's counterattack came quickly. The little Jose Barea ran wildly with the ball and crossed the half court in a moment. At present, the main team has not yet made a good allocation of who will guard Barea and who will guard Jaskovicius, because both of them are point guards. Upon seeing this, Bell took the initiative to stick up. Barea's progress was blocked, but Jaskevicius immediately came up to respond. Barea passed the ball to Jaskevicius, and then Brent Barry arced from the left. A pick-and-roll was thrown to Jaskovicius.

Obviously, Nash's defense was poor and gave Jaskevicius a chance to break through from the center. Marion had to step forward to cover the defense. Jaskevicius did not rush forward and passed the ball back to Barry, who was on the left. Got a chance to take a three-point shot from outside the three-point line.

Diaw wanted to cover up the defense, but Barry passed it to Dudley who was ambushing in the corner. Dudley took a look and shot a three-pointer! The ball didn't go in. It seemed that he, who had just graduated from college, was still a little unaccustomed to the NBA's three-point line distance.

However, Turiaf inside got an offensive rebound and easily deceived Stoudemire, causing Stoudemire's defensive foul. Leon blew the whistle without hesitation and Turiaf made two free throws. In the end, Turiaf made one of two free throws and recovered one point for the substitute team.

D'Antoni looked at the offense of the substitute team and felt that their cooperation was unexpectedly tacit and they moved the ball very quickly. When the main team's defensive targets and strategies were unclear, it was likely that they would lose sight of one thing.

Sure enough, in the next few minutes, the main team was unstoppable on the offensive end, and the old and young substitute teams had no way to guard against the cooperation of Nash and Stoudemire. They had the advantage from the beginning, but they were never able to widen the score gap and kept it at around 3 points. Because they simply couldn't contain the bench on the defensive end.

It is unbelievable to say that the offense of the substitute team is simply smooth. They did not play many fast breaks, but constantly used pick-and-rolls in positional battles to create opportunities for dislocation, passing and cutting. And Turiaf, as the team's inside man, never comes out for pick-and-rolls, but always grabs offensive rebounds inside, which puts a lot of pressure on Stoudemire. He can't defend and miss people. He always picks up offensive rebounds for Turiaf and causes himself to foul.

The four people on the outside, Barry, Barea, Dudley, and Jaskevicius, blocked each other. Among them, they used Jaskevicius and Barry as the center of the pass, focusing on the left and right sides of the top of the arc. There will be a pick-and-roll from the side, and at the same time, there must be someone lurking in the bottom corner to shoot a three-pointer.

After watching a few rounds, D'Antoni understood Leon's routine and why the main team struggled so hard on the defensive end. First, there was a problem with their defensive focus, which focused on pressing the ball holder. The second is that D'Antoni really didn't do much to help the players practice defense in the past... Now D'Antoni especially wants to call a timeout to give guidance to the main players, but Leon will not give a timeout.

The two sides obviously became more and more involved as they played, and they were a little bit red-eyed. Nash made a three-pointer during the offense! However, Jaskovicius immediately retaliated in the counterattack and also hit a three-pointer! It seems that after today's match, the main team will inevitably be criticized. I wonder what kind of whip Fox-Leon will use on their heads.