This is the first installment of what’s hopefully going to be a weekly column from me. The title works in a couple of different ways. First, it’s a Monty Python reference, and you can never go wrong with those; they teach you such valuable things as how to defend yourself against assailants armed with fresh fruit!

Second, this is a piece on Stacheketball that won’t frequently deal with mustaches. However, this is overwritten by the fact that I have a mustache, so there is still a high degree of mustache correlation here:

Yep, that would be me.

However, the third and final reason behind the title of this column is the most important. I’ve always been a big fan of approaches to sports that incorporate unconventional thinking, such as the “Moneyball” plan of exploiting baseball’s market deficiencies, innovative football ideas like the zone blitz and the Wildcat, and a plan for a hockey team to roll four scoring lines instead of giving ice time to checkers and grinders. The plan here is to look at unconventional elements of basketball, including everything from unique strategies to players who have taken unusual routes to the NBA. We kick things off with a look at the revitalized Phoenix Suns.

A few years back, in the height of the Mike D’Antoni era, the Suns were causing quite the stir. They emphasized what it was to be unconventional; D’Antoni spent much of his time as a player and coach overseas, and brought plenty of new twists he’d learned from those experiences to the NBA. Their key star, Steve Nash, pretty much defied every imaginable stereotype of an NBA superstar; he was white, short, and worst of all, Canadian. He’d played with the unheralded Santa Clara Broncos in college, the only Division I team to offer him a scholarship. He was drafted by the Suns, struggled with them and then started to get his pro career on track with the Dallas Mavericks after being traded to them in 1998. Still, by the time he left Dallas in 2004, many thought his best years were behind him.

In Phoenix, though, all the pieces fell into place. D’Antoni took his run-and-gun offence, aptly described by Jack McCallum in Seven Seconds or Less, and found the perfect players for it, starting with stars like Nash, Shawn Marion and Amar’e Stoudemire, but also including key role players like Boris Diaw and Raja Bell. The quick offence emphasized their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses, particularly Nash’s defence. The team underwent an incredible turnaround in 2004-05, the first full season for D’Antoni and the first year they had Nash, going from 29-53 to 62-20. Nash won the first of his back-to-back MVPs, D’Antoni won Coach of the Year and things looked bright in Arizona.

However, the success wasn’t perfect. Phoenix rolled through the first two rounds of the playoffs, sweeping Memphis and beating Dallas 4-2, but they came up short against the eventual NBA champion San Antonio Spurs in the Western Finals, only winning a single game. A similar story repeated itself the next year, where the Suns went 54-28 and finished second in the West. They beat the Lakers and Clippers in tight back-to-back series, but fell 4-2 to the Mavericks in the conference finals. The next year, the Suns won 60 games again and finished second in the West, but lost a controversial second-round series against the Spurs after Stoudemire and Diaw were suspended for leaving the bench. The Seven Seconds or Less Era seemed to have reached its zenith; the team only finished sixth in the West the next year, and lost to the Spurs again in the first round. The Suns told D’Antoni he was free to speak with other teams after the season, and he wound up signing a deal with the New York Knicks.

The Spurs’ physical brand of halfcourt basketball seemed to be the antithesis of everything the Suns stood for, but it also kept producing results. The Suns seemed to decide that they were better off joining them if they couldn’t beat them, and they hired the defensive-minded Terry Porter as head coach and brought in Shaquille O’Neal. This didn’t work all that well, as Nash and Stoudemire were particularly ill-suited to the slower pace, and Porter was fired in February. Alvin Gentry, a key assistant during the D’Antoni days, took over, and the Suns went to a hybrid system of the two offences. They couldn’t go back to a full run-and-gun thanks to O’Neal’s presence and the need to get him involved, so they combined elements of both styles in what Seth Pollack (Phoenix Stan) from Bright Side of the Sun described as “Seven Seconds Or Shaq.” It worked reasonably well, but Phoenix finished second in their division and still missed the playoffs. Shaq was traded for cash, cap space and spare parts, and things didn’t look all that positive for the Suns. Nash signed a two-year extension in the summer, but most thought it was just the act of an aging star looking to play out the string with the team he was best known with. Their main notable additions were free-agent centre Channing Frye, who’d only averaged 4.2 points per game with Portland in 2008-2009, and rookie forward Earl Clark. Sports Illustrated‘s NBA preview ranked the Suns eigth in the West, and included this assessment from an NBA scout:

“They’re just a really weird team. They have old guys like Steve Nash and Grant Hill; they have a bunch of young guys who have no star potential; and they may lose Amar’e Stoudemire as a free agent this summer. Instead of trying to go old like Boston or young like Portland, it looks like they’ve taken the middle ground—but I would argue that it has left them nowhere.”

So far this season, the Suns have been making the critics eat their words, though. They lead the Western Conference and are tied for the overall NBA lead with an 11-3 mark. Without Shaq, they’ve gone back to the full run-and-gun style, but with an emphasis on defence and rebounding as well. Frye has turned into an impressive starting centre who can drain threes and run the floor, averaging 12.9 points, 5.7 rebounds and 1.4 assists per game. Stoudemire looks healthy and motivated, averaging 19.9 points and 7.4 rebounds per game while shooting 55.6 per cent from the field. Nash is back in terrific form, averaging 17.1 points, 11.6 assists and 2.4 rebounds per game, and so is Hill, who’s putting up 12.0 points, 7.6 rebounds and 2.0 assists per game. Jason Richardson has been solid as well, averaging 16.8 points and five rebounds a game. The Suns are also getting key contributions from bench players like Leandro Barbosa, Louis Amundson and Goran Dragic. It’s not certain if they’ll be able to keep this up all year, but what they’ve shown so far is very impressive, and that’s good for innovation in the NBA. It suggests that the Seven Seconds Or Less era may have been not in fact dead, but rather just resting.