I Said I'd Do It, And Here We Are

All the way back in June, I did that post about "liberated fandom", a term I attributed to Freedarko. While discussing them, I amde on offhand reference to comparing the failure of the Suns with Shaq to the Biological Species Concept, then said I would get into that. It took six months, but I'm going to give it a whirl.

Starting point, the Biological Species Concept. There's considerable discussion in the biological scientific community about how to define "species". The Biological Species Concept is one proposed explanation, and probably the one most people have a passing familiarity with. Basically, two organisms belong to separate species if they are unable to produce viable offspring. For example, under the BSC horses and donkeys are considered separate species because the product of their mating (a mule) is sterile.

The method of producing separate species is frequently the result of some barrier coming between two segements of a single population. Say there's an ice age. With the water freezing into glaciers, sea levels worldwide drop. A strip of land rises above the water, connecting the mainland to some island*. Part of a population of some organism expands out to that island across the strip of land. Individuals move back and forth for several generations, keeping the populations genetically similar. Then the ice age ends, sea level rises, and the individuals are trapped on the island, isolated from the mainland. There's no exchange of genetic information (in the form of sex and reproduction) between the two populations. Over the course of several generations (how long that is depends on how long a generation is for the species), the island population becomes genetically distinct, since they only have their own small group to breed with. They're also exposed to unique selective pressures the mainland population is not, and vice versa. Point is, given enough time, the island population will become genetically distinct enough they can not succesfully breed with the mainland individuals (who have been changing over the same time span in their own way), if they are somehow brought together.

The BSC has certain flaws. Wolves and coyotes are considered separate species, but coyotes are able to interbreed with wolves in North America. A concept based on sexual reproduction is somewhat useless when dealing with single-celled bacteria that primarily use asexual reproduction. But it's just one of two dozen or so different definitions. So how does all this relate to the Phoenix Suns?

Phoenix, under D'Antoni, went to the extreme end of "run n' gun" style basketball. Seven Seconds or Less to shoot and all that. Defense wasn't completely ignored (I believe the Suns were usually in the middle of the pack in opponents' field goal percentage), but the emphasis was one getting shots quickly, and trying to lure your opponent into playing the same way, with the idea being they aren't conditioned for it like Phoenix is. Problem was, Phoenix couldn't make it to the Finals with that strategy. They kept running afoul of San Antonio, a team self-disciplined enough to resist the siren song of run and shoot. The Spurs were going to take their time, attack the basket, concentrate on slowing down Phoenix and not allowing easy shots. In the battle of wills, the Spurs were imposing theirs with greater success. So Steve Kerr's apparent response was "if you can't beat 'em, join'em". Emphasis on offense wasn't producing championships, so maybe more focus on defense would work. Thus Shaq, the imposing interior presence was added, to bring the Suns more in line with the blueprint of recent championship teams.

In this scenario the Suns are the small population that went out on the island, and the Seven Seconds or Less years are the time between ice ages, with the sea level is up. Shaq's arrival is the start of another freeze, and the Suns attempt to reintegerate back into the larger NBA population. Except they'd been gone too long. Having built a team in one form, they weren't able to so easily become defense-minded. Nash is weak defensively, Barbosa was undersized for a point guard, Diaw the same for a center/power forward. What's more, the Suns traded the most versatile defensive player they had (Marion) to get Shaq, who is quite large, but not really quick enough to come off his man and make driving to the hoop inadvisable (I mean he lacks lateral quickness). The Suns were too different an animal to easily adjust to the new challenges they faced by eschewing their offense-first syle. I think I've thrown natural selection into the mix there at the end.

Of course, the nice thing for NBA teams is that given enough time, they can change again. If they get a coaching change and some appropriate personnel. So they don't find themselves locked into a particular blueprint the way organisms can**.

* An example would be the island of Trinidad, off the northern coast of South AMerica. One species that demonstrates this distribution pattern is the tayra (Eira barbara), a member of the msutelid family. Though the individuals on Trinidad haven't been separate long enough to be a unique species from the ones scattered through Latin America. Not to our current knowledge, anyway.

** Turtles, for example. The shells are great as a defense mechanism, but the physiological changs they've undergone to get to that point - the ribs broadening out and moving outside the skin to form a shell, their clavicle and pelvis being located inside the shell, which helps them get their limbs inside the shells, but limits mobility - have locked them into a set pattern. It's unlikely turtles could become speed-dependent to escape predation, or walk on two limbs, or become arboreal, because they've become too specialized.