Elton Brand and Shaquille O'Neal - Something in Common

(The following post was written before the news that Elton Brand would require season-ending surgery.)

It is a very, very imperfect comparison, but the Sixers' acquisition of Elton Brand has some interesting similarities to the Suns' trade for Shaquille O'Neal last year. The Suns had been a running team with the most potent fast break in the NBA. With Steve Nash the orchestrator and facilitator, and the likes of Boris Diaw, Amare Stoudemire, and Shawn Marion filling the lanes, why wouldn't they run? But in consecutive seasons, Phoenix came up short in the playoffs in the powerful Western Conference, in one instance agonizingly so, and a consensus seemed to develop that the team as constructed wasn't equipped to go all the way.

So GM Steve Kerr rolled the dice big time and brought the aging Big Diesel to the Valley of the Sun for Marion and others. A couple of months ago, Kerr completed the makeover and traded off Diaw and Raja Bell, apparently deciding to emphasize a half-court offense and get more use out of Shaq. What makes the situation even more unusual is that they're actually sitting the 37 year-old Diesel every few games to accommodate his age and ailing body. Roger Clemens established the precedent of playing half a season and now we have part-time basketball players. The upshot of all this is that the Suns are still very inconsistent. They are in second place in their division but they have lost 8 of their last 12 including some very bad performances against some very bad teams.

So what does this have to do with Elton Brand and the Sixers? The Philadelphians had established themselves late last year as a premier running team as they swept into the playoffs and everyone expected they would continue in this mode in 2008-09 - they certainly had the young athletic personnel for it. But there seemed to be a lingering suspicion, in the front office and elsewhere, that they had hit a wall, that they had maxed out with their cast of characters. Enter Brand, the perceived savior of the half-court offense. And enter the struggles early in the season with the inability to restart the fast break, and the inconsistencies lately, interposed by a solid stretch when, by a strange coincidence, Brand was rehabilitating his shoulder.

Yes, the comparison with O'Neal is a stretch. Shaq is much older and is one of the most unique players the NBA has seen. Elton Brand is surely better suited to run the court than Shaq but the Duke alumnus' injuries in recent years seem to be aging him prematurely. If the Sixers and/or the Suns thought they would have to abandon the fast break, or at least significantly curtail it, would they still have made the trades?