Josh Childress is out on the court for the Suns, he’s trying.
He’s struggling, really only taking shots right at the rim (2.7 per game) and ignoring jumpers or threes (0.6 per game) unless he has to take them. It’s a far cry from the Childress who was a solid outside shooter in Atlanta before he went to Greece, where he also shot well from the outside.
A broken finger will do that. Childress broke the fingertip on his right (shooting) hand on a dunk in the preseason. Now he is trying to play through it with a splint on his finger, as he explained to Paul Coro at the Arizona Republic.“I’m trying to not think about it and just play,” Childress said. “There will be a play where I go up for a rebound or I try to go for a steal, and I start thinking about it again. It’s probably going to bother me until it’s healed….”
“Coach (Alvin Gentry) says I’m helping, but I don’t feel like I am,” Childress said. “I expect more of myself.”Maybe not helping, but not hurting the team is a better way to put that. But that will change in a month when the splint came off. Childress was a sixth man of the year candidate before he left for Europe and you can expect that again. Once his finger is right.