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Suns coach on the team after Marbury being traded away

The trade is Stephon Marbury, Penny Hardaway, Cezary Trybanski from Phoenix to New York for for Antonio McDyess, Howard Eisley, Charlie Ward, Maciej Lampe, the rights to Milos Vujanic, two future first-round draft picks and cash. See questions and answers with the Suns president.

SUNS HEAD COACH MIKE D’ANTONI: We’re going to miss Steph. I personally loved working with him and he was great. He did everything he could to try and turn this year around, but it didn’t happen. This is a business and that’s the bottom line. Are we probably going to take a little step backwards? Yeah, in the beginning. But with the cap room that we now have and with the draft picks we are going to have, along with the core of young players that will get a lot of playing time, we’re excited about it. I think that in the long run this is the way to get to a higher level of play. It the short term a little pain, but in the long term we hope there’s a big gain.

Question: What is the possibility of getting a big free agent this summer with the available cap space?

D’Antoni: That’s Bryan’s job. But yeah, I think (we can get a big name). Phoenix is a great place to play. But that’s his job and he’ll worry about that. I’m worried about developing the talent that we do have. We get Amaré back next week and we’ll have Zarko back probably this weekend. Then we have Antonio (McDyess) and Howard (Eisley) coming, along with whoever else was in the trade that we’ll get and we’ll see how it goes.

This year didn’t go very well. Obviously we had some problems, even when Amaré was not hurt. Sometimes the stars and moons are aligned right for a great deal, but this was not an easy deal to pull off. You can’t do it all the time, but it happened to line up right and I’m sure that the organization thought that in the long run this would be a step towards rebuilding something that we thought maybe wasn’t the answer to begin with. It’s hard for me to comment, though, and you need to talk to Bryan more about this. As coaches, we feel that there is still a lot of young talent to be developed and there are a lot of things that we can still do to be a better team in the future.

Question: How do you expect the rest of your guys to react?

D’Antoni: I think the players in our locker room will be ready to go. There’s one thing they will say to the media, but they will have their game face on, ready to go. There is a lot of opportunity for a lot of players to play. So they better be ready. I’ll be very surprised if we don’t come out and play very spirited and very hard. Whether we win or lose, who knows? But I think we’ll play hard and try to start to establish an identity of a team that wants to defend hard, run hard and get up and down the floor.

Question: Do you expect McDyess to come in and play a big role?

D’Antoni: I don’t know. He’s obviously gone though a lot of trials and tribulations this last couple years, but I do know Antonio will give us everything he’s got. It will be up to us to nurture him and get him back as healthy as we can. He had 14 points and 11 rebounds (Sunday) night, and I don’t see that from a whole lot of our big guys. So is he going to help us? God, I hope so. I’m planning on him helping. Is he the old Antonio McDyess? I don’t know that.

Question: What are your thoughts on the other two guys you picked up?

D’Antoni: Howard Eisley is going to be our starting point guard. We want to play Leandro (Barbosa) a lot and work with him, but Howard is going to have a big role with us. We like him and I love him. Hopefully he can get back to how he was playing in Utah. He’s going to be with us for a while and we’re looking forward to that.

Lampe (Maciej) is 18 years old. We’ll see what we can do. I don’t know him that well, but we liked him this summer. We liked him last year in the draft and were trying to figure out a way to get him. We liked his potential, but for this year I don’t know. It could be next year or the year after, but he’s 7-feet and he can shoot, and handle the ball.

Question: Did you know this trade was coming?

D’Antoni: Not really. It kind of came up really quick. There’s always talk about this and that, and what ifs and buts, but they kept it pretty tight to the vest on this one and didn’t let it out. Obviously, they told our staff once it was down the road a little bit to see how we’d react. Well, we were going to react like we were supposed to – they were doing the right thing for the organization and we’re going to try to make it work.