Following their dismissal of head coach Monty Williams on Saturday, the Suns are putting together a list of candidates for the vacancy that includes Mike Budenholzer, Nick Nurse, and Kevin Young, league sources tell Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports (Twitter links). According to Haynes, that list of candidates will continue to grow.
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It’s unclear whether Phoenix has lined up interviews yet with Budenholzer, Nurse, or Young, but the team won’t need to seek permission to speak to any of them. Budenholzer and Nurse were recently let go by their teams, while Young is the associate head coach on the Suns’ own staff, having served as Williams’ top assistant.
Budenholzer has a career regular season record 484-317 (.604) as a head coach, with a 56-48 (.538) mark in the playoffs. He coached the Hawks from 2013-18 and the Bucks from 2018-23, winning a title in Milwaukee in 2021 and earning Coach of the Year honors in both 2015 and 2019.
Nurse, who is coming off a five-year stint as head coach of the Raptors, won a championship in 2019 and was named Coach of the Year in 2020. He had a 227-163 (.582) regular season record and a 25-16 (.610) postseason mark in Toronto.
Young coached multiple G League teams and was an assistant coach with the Sixers before joining the Suns in 2020.
Marc Stein reported on Saturday that the Suns will also look into the possibility of trying to lure Tyronn Lue away to the Clippers, but it’s unclear if Phoenix will have any success on that front, Stein writes in his latest Substack story.
Lue remains under contract with Los Angeles and reportedly has the support of team owner Steve Ballmer, according to Stein. As such, it seems unlikely that the Clippers would let him leave for a division rival without receiving some form of compensation. For what it’s worth though, there has been chatter in league circles about the Suns’ interest in Lue for several days, tweets Andrew Greif of The Los Angeles Times.
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Why does Ishiba hate POCs?
Lmao what
Fired a black guy who was coach of the year and let the team to the finals. Why?
Because he was not a coach capable of winning a championship, and after an embarrassing exit last year he did it again.
Is Jokic secretly a POC too? “Serbian Beige?” He doesn’t get along with him either.
Nash should be the coach.
Nurse #1
Budenholzer and Nurse are terrible choices. The former just was bounced from Milwaukee with a humiliating defeat, a number 1 seed, and the later, the sort of coach like Williams who seeks to play his favorites. Lue would cost picks, which we don’t have. We need a coach like that knows x and 0’s and also how to use players in matchup situations. A Paul Westfall or Steve Kerr type of coach. Mark Jackson would be my pick, if available.
Jackson can’t get along with people and he’s a bigot.
How does Monty Williams have such a great win loss record and several playoff appearances if he “doesn’t know how to use players”??
He probably meant, the playoffs – which is a far different thing altogether from the regular season.
There are some coaches who thrive during the playoffs, since they can execute and tinker with their plans, since there’s at least 4 games to play against the same team.
Spo, Pops, even younger Carlisle, etc just thrive during the post season.
Monty was a decent coach – I’d say last game last season was more aberration, Luka and anyone else from the MAVS was shooting lights-out …… this season, getting KD meant a sparse bench plus no CP3 – bad news for a complete and balanced team like the NUGGETS.
Monty will get a new job soon – at the very least, he’d make as a lead assistant coach.
Nurse was a great coach
Kerr back to Phoenix???
I hope the washington wiz organization is reading this… if you want to seriously be a contender… change coach unseld and select from some of this experienced fired coaches… or it’s going to be a cycle of the same outcome every year.
Besides the coach, a line-up featuring Beal, Kuzma and Porzingis doesn’t scare any team, except those lottery-bound ones.