Even the fans themselves gave up early with the lower bowl of the Footprint Center almost half-empty even before the game officially ended.
As the Nuggets were busy with a fourth-quarter time-out, the Suns just looked dejected. The full bench just sat in quiet and Kevin Durant, whom the team had spent an exorbitant amount to acquire, shielded his face with a black towel.
“It sucked. It was a bad feeling. It was embarrassing,” said Durant would later say. “They came out and hit us in the mouth, and we couldn’t recover.”
The basketball star only scored 8 points in the first half, finishing Game 6 with 23 points overall.
He had joined the Suns in February and there was this hope that he would reinvigorate the team that suffered a stunning Game 7 defeat at the hands of the Dallas Mavericks last season.
There was certainly a lot of reevaluation going on following the loss with head coach Monty Williams saying:
“Last year’s team was more of a ball-movement, body-movement team. This year we were more pick-and-roll-oriented and iso-oriented,” said Williams.
“It’s two different situations altogether. So that’s something that we need to take a look at to see what kinds of combinations of players we have that fit a style of play. But it’s hard to make assessments about those kinds of things 20 minutes after a loss.”
There doesn’t seem to be much hope for the future of the Suns either. As Durant himself put it: “It’s hard right now to see what the future holds for our team.”