Book Review: :07 Seconds or Less

I have three complaints—all of them minor—about Jack McCallum’s fascinating :07 Seconds or Less that I’d like to get out of the way before I begin praising the book so incessantly that you’ll probably think I owe him money:

1) The subtitle, “My Season on the Bench with the Runnin’ and Gunnin’ Phoenix Suns,” struck me as a bit of a false advertising, because 95% of the book concerns itself just with Phoenix’s 3-round playoff run. There are a few “flashbacks” to key points earlier in the year, but the recounting certainly does not start with the preseason and progress on an exhaustive, game-by-game basis up to the Suns’ eventual Western Conference Finals submission to Dallas. And the few occasions McCallum does discuss any of the key regular season occurrences, they “mysteriously” seem to involve the same two or three games every time. I only want to point this out because McCallum goes to great lengths in the introduction to impress upon the reader that he was basically embedded with the team for a year—practically 24/7. However, either that January 2nd game with the Knicks had hugely significant repercussions for the team, or McCallum was only with the Suns for a handful of games prior to the playoffs.

2) As I will discuss later, this book is a real “ground’s-eye” perspective of the Suns organization in action, rather than a broad overview of a modern-day NBA team’s philosophy on attacking the game, assembling personnel, marketing their product, etc. This book is for an NBA team what the movie Black Hawk Down was for the conflict in Somalia: not a lot of high-level overview of the “big picture,” but instead a close-up study of on-the-fly decision-making. All that said, I would have appreciated a bit more on the background and origins of Phoenix’s style of play, which most people would agree was trailblazing and refreshingly distinctive when it manifested a few years ago. Specifically, how did it all come together, this “7 seconds or less” strategy? Was it a conscious effort by the coaching staff, or was it more improvisational? In fact, I could be wrong, but I do not even remember the phrase “7 seconds or less” explicitly defined in the book, although most fans probably understand it prior to reading the book.

3) This may be a trivial complaint, but using the word “enervating” 7-8 times in a 300-page book is a little too often in my opinion (even if one of the team’s main obstacles was overcoming Steve Nash’s late-season fatigue).

Okay, so with that out of the way, here is one of my favorite things about the book: contrary to what we all thought, the Suns are not one of the more loveable teams out there. In fact, more often than not, they’re actually kind of a bunch of jerks. Of course, you probably already thought that about Tim Thomas, and 7 Seconds dutifully has a couple of chapters devoted to his selfishness (I particularly loved how the coaching staff and the other players openly refer to him as “The Rental”). But who knew that Amare Stoudemire was such a prima donna? That James Jones is overwhelmingly lazy and unmotivated? Even “Saint Steve” has a few renegade transgressions, such as pretending not to hear plays being called in by the coaches. And although I’d forgotten how moronic Raja Bell’s unprovoked forearm was to Kobe Bryant in that epic Suns-Lakers series, it’s fascinating to hear just how little Bell seems to have learned from his tantrums through the years. “Bell admits to a history that includes more than a few scuffles on and off the court,” writes McCallum, and he “attended a couple sessions (of anger management training) but nothing much came of it. ‘I didn’t dig it,’ he says. ‘I never thought I had an anger problem.’”

However, the undisputed king of the immature malcontents ends up being—shockingly, at least to me—Shawn Marion. The Matrix is portrayed as titanically insecure and consumed with jealousy over the public’s adoration for Nash and Stoudemire. Even during what was arguably the team’s most joyous moment of the season, their rousing Game 6 victory over the hated Lakers, we find Marion sulking by himself in the corner of the locker room, barely suppressing his bile. The author tells Marion, “great game,” and he replies with, “'We win, it’s everybody but me; we lose, it’s my fault. I don’t understand that.’” Marion remains staunchly convinced that all criticism from the coaches—no matter how broad—is either directly or indirectly aimed at him.

Which brings us to the real stars of this book, Mike D’Antoni and his coaching staff, which includes his brother Dan, Marc Iavaroni, Alvin Gentry, and Phil Weber. As the playoffs drag on and the team’s organizational strife (resentment over Stoudemire’s irresponsible attitude toward rehabilitating his knee, Eddie House’s perpetual clamoring for more playing minutes, Marion’s ongoing pathological obsession with his perceived lack of respect) threatens to supersede their injuries as the primary reason for their downfall, I found myself wondering why D’Antoni and his staff were so highly-regarded in the first place. After all, it seems as if nothing is done to address any of the myriad interpersonal conflicts, as players simply continue on with their own destructive self-centeredness. Nor does D’Antoni seem to be much of a rousing speech-maker. Yet as if on cue, McCallum provides us with the book’s signature passage, in which he himself struggles to assess D’Antoni abilities as a coach:

“What I do know is that the closer you get to someone’s work process, the more you resist calling it genius. That’s because what you see at work are the sweat glands, not the brain cells. Had you been able to observe Hemingway pecking away in front of his old Royal, tossing away page after page until he got it right, you probably would conclude: ‘Damn, that guy rewrites a lot.’ D’Antoni and his coaches rewrite a lot.”

I found this insight, which occurs roughly halfway through the book, to be remarkably enlightening. It really is true: the closer we zoom in on a person’s profession, a person’s life, the more mundane and unspectacular each of the daily activities appears, just as a high-powered microscope reveals the flaws and cracks of a diamond. But the truth is, D’Antoni and his staff achieved a minor miracle last year by going deep in the playoffs with players no one had heard of before (chiefly Bell, Leandro Barbosa, and Boris Diaw). Moreover, they created such an aesthetically pleasing and potent style of play—with Nash and Marion as the cornerstones—that they have effectively architected what many feel is the NBA’s free-flowing renaissance. This book simply focuses so thoroughly on every one of those incremental steps that the chaotic rough edges seem just as pervasive as the sublimity of the overall sculpture.

And to be sure, the coaching staff sweats. They’re up at all hours, agonizing and brooding over strategies and match-ups, all the while haunted by the knowledge of their own limitations once that ball is tipped. The players, meanwhile, simply rest up and then execute. This player-coach dynamic reminded me a little of Tom Wolfe’s depiction of the engineers in The Right Stuff, who probably deserved far more credit than the astronauts. It was the engineers who labored and fretted while designing and perfecting the wondrous space shuttles, yet it was the astronauts who received all the accolades simply for sitting in them.

Obviously, D’Antoni’s players are not mere passengers, but neither is their sheer talent what solely drove (and drives) the Suns’ success. Somehow, everything connects and enjoins, even if the closer we examine it, the more unstructured it appears. In short, it’s a team effort, and it’s a non-linear process. It’s also real life, so there’s petty bickering and seemingly illogical shortsightedness—it’s probably a lot like where you work, in other words. Ultimately, it’s that mystery of how parts can comprise a body of work that transcends its components that is the essence of 7 Seconds, as well as what makes it so compulsively readable.