‘Your play worked again!’: Suns’ miracle Game 2 win was former Phoenix coach’s masterpiece

Jay Triano was dead asleep Tuesday night.

“We’ve been working out guys; all our young kids are in here now,” said Triano, now an assistant coach with the Charlotte Hornets. “So I’m up in the mornings. (Tuesday) night I was like, man, I’m really tired. It was the third quarter, so I hit record and went to bed. I’ll watch it in the morning.

“I woke up, and there were 100 messages on my phone.”

Between Triano’s head hitting the pillow and his waking up Wednesday morning, a little something occurred out in Phoenix.

(Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

When Triano saw it Wednesday, he knew why his phone blew up. It was his play.

After Deandre Ayton’s game-winning tip dunk to help the Suns beat the Clippers in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals, with 0.7 seconds left — the culmination of a perfect inbounds pass from Jae Crowder on the baseline, combined with a crunching pick by Devin Booker on Ayton’s man, Ivica Zubac — Suns Coach Monty Williams quickly gave Triano credit for originally designing the play. Williams was honoring the “Coach’s Code,” in which every coach acknowledges he or she has adapted — or, if you like, stolen — many of the plays in their playbook from other coaches, for whom they’ve either played, or served, or watched from the opposite bench.

In this case, Williams cribbed from a play he saw Triano’s Suns run the day after Christmas in 2017 — under similar, though not identical, circumstances — that produced a game-winning dunk at the buzzer by Tyson Chandler off an inbounds pass from Dragan Bender.

The NBA’s network found its way into Triano’s phone quickly.

“GMs, video guys around the league, our staff, ex-players,” Triano said by phone Wednesday. “They’re all hitting me, saying ‘It worked! It worked again. Your play worked again!'”

Every coach has a last-second lob in their book. When Triano was a young coach, he attended a practice at which coach Mike Fratello began with an end-of-game situation that Fratello had seen on TV the night before. But Triano’s version had a quirky twist, one owing to his years playing and coaching internationally.

Under international rules, a ball that’s on the rim can be knocked off by a defender, or dunked in by an offensive player, without the player being called for goaltending or offensive basket interference, as they would be in the NBA. It got Triano thinking.

“I was coaching the Canadian national team,” Triano said. “We had a young player named Sim Bhullar, who was 7-foot-5. We were playing Mexico, and in our pregame, I said, ‘If the ball goes out of bounds, and Sim’s in the game, I want you to just shoot it and hit the rim.’ Internationally, once the ball hits the rim, it’s live. So as we were practicing it, the ball went up on the rim, and Sim went up, and it kind of hit his hands. And (the players) went, ‘that’s goaltending.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s not really goaltending, because it (the inbounds pass) can’t count.’ So I started looking at it. So I took that play from the practice, and I put it into my book.

“So when the (NBA) referees came around to do their individual team seminars, I would pull them to the side at the end and I said, ‘What would happen if somebody did this?’ And they said, ‘No, it can’t be goaltending, because it’s not a shot that would count, so there’s no goaltending, either offensively or defensively.’ I said, ‘OK, that’s going into my book.’ I had it for when there were three-tenths of a second. I’m always looking for different things — like, game’s over, there’s two-tenths of a second. Well, there’s gotta be something.”

When the Suns were tied with the Grizzlies at 97 in 2017, with six-tenths of a second left in regulation, Triano dusted it off. They’d walked through it a couple of times during recent practices.

“I told Tyson, ‘Even if your knuckles touch the rim, and it hits your knuckles on the way down, it’s gonna count,'” Triano said. “And he was like, ‘No way, no way.’ … They scored and tied the game, and I called a timeout. And as I was walking to the bench, the players just jumped on me. They said, ‘We’re running that play.’ I said, ‘Well, there’s time to catch and shoot.’ And they were like, ‘No, no — we’re running that play.’ I was like, OK.

“I put Bender in the game, because I wanted to have a 7-footer (inbounding). They put Marc Gasol on the ball. I said I’ve got to be able to throw it over the top. I said (to Bender), ‘Throw it right at the rim.'”

After Chandler’s dunk, multiple Memphis players on the bench signaled goaltending. The Grizzlies’ coach did not.

“Yeah, I remember that damn play!” Cavaliers coach J.B. Bickerstaff texted Wednesday. At the time, Bickerstaff was the Grizzlies’ interim head coach.

“When we saw the alignment, we were trying to make our guys aware,” said Bickerstaff, who also knew the rule.

Nearly four years later, there were a couple of big differences. One, the Suns were behind the Clippers, not tied. Two, Crowder was inbounding from the baseline. Bender was 30 feet from the basket when he made the sideline out of bounds pass in 2017.

“If it goes out right underneath the basket, I don’t know how Crowder gets the ball to the rim,” Triano said. “But it went out on the angle, so it was perfect. I’d put a guy under the basket, because you can goaltend it. … It was great on Monty’s part to put Book in it, because you can’t really help off of him. (Nicolas) Batum can’t switch. If he jump-switches (onto Ayton), then Book’s going to the corner for a fadeaway, and it’s a quick catch and shoot.”

A franchise-level, big-time scorer since coming into the league, Booker is not normally tasked with screen setting on last-second plays. He is normally the person for whom a screen is set. But in this situation, you do what you have to do to help the team. So Booker, listed at 206 pounds, threw his body into Zubac, listed at 240, to free up Ayton for the lob. He could not recall the last time he screened for someone else on a game-winning shot.

In the postgame Zoom Tuesday night, Booker said, “When it comes down to late-game situations, you can get away with a little bit more. I know if I can just make (Zubac) change direction a little bit, at least take a step under to let DA get a chance to get his feet together … to give him a clear line to the rim.”

In Chicago, at the pre-draft combine with Cleveland’s staff — and while celebrating the Cavaliers getting the third pick in the draft in Tuesday’s lottery — Bickerstaff knew what was coming.

“Yeah, we were watching it as a group, and we discussed it before it was happening,” Bickerstaff said.

It is a badge of honor for coaches to “borrow” from others.

“We all steal everybody’s plays,” Triano said. “It’s kind of a fraternity, the coaches. A play happened this year, I think Atlanta ran it, and they ran it like a hammer play. I got like four texts right away from coaches I had worked with in the past, saying ‘Hey, they just ran your play.’ It’s kind of cool.

“And, believe me, I stole it. I stole it from a guy in Australia when I was playing. The lob into the rim was kind of mine — I never saw anybody else do it. But I remember looking at Paul Westphal when he was coaching the Suns; he had the play where he threw it off the backboard to (Charles) Barkley, because it’s kind of a misdirection. The guy threw it off the backboard, and Barkley ran to where the ball bounced to, because nobody had touched it.”

And Triano’s still got a few tricks up his sleeve.

“I’ve got a couple more secrets — I can’t tell anybody,” Triano said. “End-of-game situations. I watch every game, so you go, ‘What can I do in that situation? I’ve got to be creative.’ I’ve got one where, if you’re on the free throw line, and you’re down three, and there’s two seconds to go, what can you possibly do? Anyway, I’m saving it. Hopefully, it happens sometime.”

Related Reading

Slater: Dissecting Ayton’s game-winning lob and the play that inspired it
Amick: Ayton didn’t know the rule on the ‘Valley Oop’ and more takeaways

(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)