Troubled Suns hand reins to Canadian Triano
PHOENIX — Phoenix point guard Eric Bledsoe was sent home Monday, a day after the Suns fired coach Earl Watson and replaced him on an interim basis with Canadian Jay Triano.
Bledsoe sent a tweet that read “Don’t wanna be here.”
General manager Ryan McDonough said Bledsoe told him that he was at a hair salon and that’s what the tweet was about, that it had nothing to do with the Suns. “I don’t believe that to be true,” McDonough said. So Bledsoe was sent home. McDonough said he’s already received calls from teams about Bledsoe’s availability and he planned to answer them. McDonough said Bledsoe had asked to be traded before the season.
McDonough also acknowledged his relationship with Watson “wasn’t great” and that it is “time for a new voice, a new direction.”
The Suns also fired assistant coaches Nate Bjorkgren, Jason Fraser and Mehmet Okur. Tyrone Corbin was elevated to lead assistant and Ty Ellis, head coach of the Northern Arizona Suns G League team, will fill one of the vacant assistant roles. Marlon Garnett was promoted from player development co-ordinator to bench coach.
Watson’s firing came three games into the season, two of them among the four most onesided defeats in franchise history. McDonough said those ugly losses weren’t the sole reason for the firing.
“We had a number of meetings over the summer about some of the changes we would have liked to see in terms of style of play and player development and accountability,” McDonough said, “all those things that go into winning and helping players develop and improve. Unfortunately, we didn’t see those changes.”
McDonough said Triano would be head coach the remainder of the season.
Triano, 59, came to the Suns as associate head coach in the summer of 2016 after four years as an assistant to Terry Stotts in Portland. Triano was head coach of the Toronto Raptors from 2008 to 2011. He is also head coach of the Canadian National Team.
Triano described himself as a basketball guy and said he didn’t know if he wanted the job beyond this season.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Triano said, “but I’m going to embrace it 100 per cent and dive into it like I have everything else in my career.”
Bledsoe had been averaging 15.7 points per game, second behind Devin Booker, and was the team’s on-court leader.
The candidates to replace him are Mike James, who was undrafted in 2012 but played internationally before coming to the Suns this season, and Tyler Ulis, a second-round pick in 2016.
The Suns have allowed a whopping 128.7 points per game, by far the worst in the league. They were blown out 124-76 at home in their season opener Wednesday, the most one-sided loss in franchise history.
“I know it’s been a short period of time [three games], but as the days went by there were more and more things that we were uncomfortable with,” McDonough said, “so we arrived at this conclusion to make the change.”