alamo50
03-29-2006, 04:29 PM
Figuratively Speaking
By Josh Greene, Suns.com
Posted: March 24, 2005
Arizona-based comic book artist and toy manufacturer Todd McFarlane is also a diehard sports fan. That interest, not to mention a keen eye for detail, has helped his company McFarlane Toys become the fifth-largest toy manufacturer in the industry. In addition to releasing a wide range of entertainment figures depicting music greats like Elvis Presley and KISS to movie characters from "Jaws" and "Napoleon Dynamite," his popular McFarlane Sports Picks line features the biggest and brightest names in all four major sports – scaled down to six-inch renditions. McFarlane introduced his first line of basketball figures in 2002 and is still going strong, thanks in part to the popularity of constantly rotating NBA subjects like LeBron James, Shaquille O'Neal, Yao Ming and Suns Amaré Stoudemire and Shawn Marion. His new 10th NBA series which just hit retail shelves features a brand-new Steve Nash sculpt in his Suns uniform. So between the various past and present figures of the reigning NBA MVP, STAT and The Matrix out in the marketplace, probably the biggest problem faced by Suns collectors is finding enough space at home to display all of them.
http://www.nba.com/media/suns/mcfarlane_220.jpg
Spawn creator Todd McFarlane and his popular McFarlane Sports Picks have struck a real chord with sports figure collectors ever since their debut in 2001.
(Courtesy McFarlane Toys)
Suns.com talked with McFarlane about his new Nash figure, the production process and, of course, what he thinks about the defending Pacific Division champs.
Suns.com: Nash, Stoudemire and Marion… Doing figures of three guys from one team must mean you have faith in the talent of this team.
Todd McFarlane: It’s sort of a tip of the hat as to how well the Suns are doing, because although I do live in Phoenix, I have this duty to actually make players that I think will sell on the national level. It’s not just a local boy trying to do local guys. I’ve got three studs out of five that are All-Stars that I can put out and get some guy in Virginia and Florida to buy. So it just goes to show the talent level of each one of those guys that would make a national mark on them. So I like it when the local guys do well, because then I get to have my cake and eat it too.
Suns.com: Your recent Nash and Stoudemire figures mark the second time you’ve featured these guys.
McFarlane: The guys that are good, the demand is there and you go, “Okay, do I put out another Steve Nash or do I put out whoever is the leading scorer of Charlotte?” You know, I’d rather have a Steve Nash hanging on the shelf nationally than the leading scorer of Charlotte at any given time. So you keep going back to the guys that will sell. They’re not regional players, they are national players. The NBA is the hardest sport to do because it’s the hardest to come up with in terms of a true national showing. To come up with a national guy that the casual person would know… basketball names can be very limited. And for the Suns to have three guys who the casual fan can tell you are some of the best players going, that’s something.
Suns.com: Your first Nash figure came out in 2003, but that was from his days in Dallas. Let’s talk about your new Suns Nash figure that just hit store shelves (pictured).
http://www.nba.com/media/suns/nash_mcfarlane.jpg
McFarlane: The new one is him dribbling. He’s the assist king. You put him in poses which make sense to people. We’ve done the passing one; we’ve done the dribbling one. The next will probably be a shooting one, so we’ll sort of get the trifecta of him. If he keeps playing at the level he’s playing, I can easily come back with a third figure of him.
Suns.com: From the initial decision to do a figure till the final product lands on retail shelves, how long does the entire process take?
McFarlane: About nine months. The thing that is most difficult in those nine months is a lot of things can happen. Performances go down; performances go up. A guy you never pick can be the guy who ends up being MVP, and you don’t have them on your list. You’ve got injuries, but the worse one is the trade. You go, “Oh no, he’s in the wrong uniform and a boatload of him is coming in.” We try to stay on top of the contracts as much as possible and I’m sort of a quasi-general manager. I can’t make a guy that’s hot who may be on the verge of his option year and could be traded at the trade deadline. I’ve either got to get that figure out well before or give myself enough breathing distance after. We actually made guys who’re on the bubble and wait until after the trade deadline. Either he didn’t get traded and signed an extension, or we now know he’s going to be on that team for next year so we can now go ahead with him. There are times that we have players sitting at the factory just waiting for the right uniform.
Suns.com: That must mean you love your new NBA Legends series. You don’t have to worry about guys like Julius Erving, Larry Bird and Willis Reed going anywhere.
McFarlane: All the Hall of Fame guys have made their mark and everybody knows what team they’re on. Most played the vast majority of their entire career with only one team. Bill Russell will always be a Celtic, but sometimes it’s just a matter whether you are going to make Wilt Chamberlain a 76er or a Laker since he’s made his mark on both of them.
Suns.com: Have you thought about doing a Charles Barkley one from his Suns years?
McFarlane: Oh, yeah. Barkley is one of those guys that we can eventually get the rights to do. The current players are under contract with the league and the union so we have to get the okay for the likeness and the logos. But when you get those contracts, you’ve got the whole pool of players to choose from. When you get into the retired guys, those are one-on-one deals. As far as Barkley, he’s high up on the list. He’d work perfectly. I would do half in a Philadelphia 76ers uniform and half in a Phoenix one. It would be a complete work.
Suns.com: Your sports figures are the most detailed of its kind in the marketplace. That realism has really caught on with appreciative fans.
McFarlane: If you are going to do it, do it right. People give me a lot of credit for doing things in my career, but there is nothing preventing anybody from manipulating clay into the right shape that’s actually realistic. So if they chose not to do it up to this point, it’s sort of good for me. It makes my stuff look better. People go, “Oh my gosh, Todd, it’s amazing. They actually look like what they are supposed to.” And you go, “Whoa, why am I getting credit for making something look like it supposed to?” Luckily, some of the other companies decided not to pay too much detail and maybe their CEOs aren’t artists or sports fanatics. So, good. I was able to step in there. For me, I collected baseball and football cards when I was a kid and whenever I saw figures, I‘d say, “Why don’t they look like my cards? Why don’t they look like my magazines that I collect? Why doesn’t it look like what I’m seeing on TV?” What’s stopping anybody? As a kid, you think there must be a reason. And as you get older, you know what the reason is. They are cutting corners and cheating it. That’s it. There’s nothing stopping them from making a guy look exactly the same way the way that I do. It’s just that they decided not to because it costs too much.
Suns.com: The new Nash figure has the reigning NBA MVP driving the lane. December’s Stoudemire release has him going up for the dunk. And the same goes for the Marion figure from earlier last year (pictured). Talk about the decision process of choosing a player’s individual poses.
http://www.nba.com/media/suns/trix_mcfarlane.jpg
McFarlane: If we haven’t done a certain guy before, we just go, “What do we think is the stereotype of the guy?” Some people might think he’s a shooter, a passer, a dribbler, whatever it is. Maybe he does a lot of power dunks or is a good rebounder, a good blocker… We try to break them up into those various categories. And then we look at who else is in the line with them, and then what happened the line before. If all of a sudden we pick a bunch of shooters, we don’t want them all to be in shooting poses. At some point, shooting is a little like baseball with that “hitting at the moment of release” where everybody is sort of in the same spot. How do we get variety? Sometimes we bend the rules. “Let’s start with that one and we can back off if we do him again in a future line.” If we are going to do Ben Wallace, then Ben Wallace is a rebounder. If I’m going to do Dennis Rodman, I’m going to do him as a rebounder because that’s what he was. Maybe his legs are kicking out as he is pulling the ball in because he’s not going to let anybody get it away from him. Obviously, you’re going to do something similar with an Amaré or retired guys like Michael Jordan. Those are the guys we think of as shooters. We’re going to put them in some cool shooting pose. "How can you alternate it?" So sometimes they’re doing the between the legs, behind the back, a one-handed slam, a two-handed slam; They’re doing a reverse lay-up. Now we’re going to start twisting their bodies so they don’t all look the same.
Suns.com: Who has been your biggest-selling sports figure?
McFarlane: In all honesty, there hasn’t been one that has blown away sales-wise. I say that because a lot of it is performance-driven and some of it’s been team-driven, so just when you think you know who’s going to be the most popular guy, everybody shifts. Initially when we came out with LeBron James, we’d have gone with him. He’s been on the covers of all the newspapers. Everybody was talking about him. Then obviously you do big retired guys like Wayne Gretzky, Joe Montana or somebody like that. People are going to circle their wagons a lot more. You’d be surprised, but all of a sudden Kurt Warner who comes out of no place and all of a sudden leads the Rams to the Super Bowl, all of a sudden his sales skyrocket because everybody thinks he’s the hero. It evens out. Every six months there is a new guy that the media and the fans sort of grab onto and we try to make sure we are right there and not too far behind the curve so we can deliver.
Suns.com: What’s the best celebrity feedback you’ve gotten? Maybe a guy has seen his figure and told you how much he liked it.
McFarlane: I’d say that I’ve heard it from about two dozen mouths. We also get letters from some guys, and they’ll send us an autographed version of it. The ones that warm my heart are usually the ones from guys that have been around the league a bit so they were around when prior companies was making these toys. The guys were sort of embarrassed with those, and maybe that’s not the right word, but they weren’t bringing them home to their family. Now they say, “Wow, that looks like me. I’ve finally got something to bring home to the kids or my parents.” They like it enough that they want a case of them to give out. And you go, “Wow.” If it’s good enough for the athlete to give out, then surely it should be good enough for the fans. For them it’s such a breath of fresh air for the figures to actually look like them. They go, “Thanks, Todd, thanks for actually doing it right. You got it right. Cool. I can give it to my kids.”
Suns.com: In terms of production, is there something that differs when it comes to putting the basketball figures out there rather than other sports?
McFarlane: I like the basketball guys for a couple reasons. One, they are the least covered up. The football and the hockey guys have so much equipment on that you don’t have to be as good in capturing their likeness because a lot of it you can’t even really see. Obviously, with the baseball players they have a helmet, sweatbands and sleeves, and all that other stuff. It’s sort of fun to have to pay a lot more attention to these guys detail-wise because they have tattoos on their legs and things like that. We have to get all that. Some wear jewelry, and we have to match up to what kind of equipment they wear so if Manu Ginobili wears those dark socks that make him look like he’s a snowbird here in Phoenix, then you’ve got to put those on him. You have to get them from head to toe and you see way more of their body in a physical build than any of those other guys in other sports. There’s no cutting corners. With football, I don’t have to worry if they’ve got corn rows because I put the helmet on. I have to get the hairstyles down with basketball guys. Whether a guy shaves their head or has a little stubble, we’ve got to get all that.
Suns.com: We’ve talked figures, now let’s talk about the man. What’s impressive to you about Steve Nash?
McFarlane: I believe that every team has a general and the general doesn’t necessarily have to be your tallest or strongest, but he should be your smartest. It should be the guy that’s under pressure that everybody looks to get this done. In football, a lot of guys look to the quarterback for that reassuring guy. Nash is the quarterback of the Suns and he is smart enough to know when you need his playing style, when he needs to pass off and when to use him as a decoy. So it’s not by accident that I believe the last few years, the top scorers in the NBA had a guy named Nash on their roster. It’s been too many years to be called a coincidence. So who doesn’t want this guy?
Suns.com: Amaré Stoudemire’s back in the Suns’ lineup after missing a good chunk of the season. What impresses you about him as a player?
http://www.nba.com/media/suns/stat_mcfarlane.jpg
McFarlane: I like two things. He is talented as all get out. He’s young. Finding young, talented guys that are fast, they are the true superstars. You need to have a minimum of two stars on your team if you’re going to make any kind of run. You saw it with Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. Allen Iverson hasn’t been able to do it because he hasn’t been able to get help. It’s the Batman/Robin sort of syndrome. You need a minimum of two. So Nash needs to have a go-to guy. Amaré was going to be that guy, but unfortunately with the injury that didn’t happen.
Suns.com: And with that absence, that sort of opened the door for Marion to really step up this season.
McFarlane: With Marion, he’s that guy that sometimes lives in the shadow of the other two superstars but they know his presence gives them so much more breathing space. Oh my gosh, there’s three of them on the court at all times and there are only five guys on the court. Wow! At least when it was Jordan and Pippen, you could go double team that No. 23 guy. You can’t do that with the Suns here. They’ve got three weapons out there at any given time. You’ve got a guy that can score and you throw your rebounder out there, you’re going to win a lot of games. So that’s it. When Amaré got injured, that was where we saw the true skill level of Marion. This team can’t be, “Oh, STAT’s gone. We’ll wait for him to come back.” That’s not a true team. That’s not even a championship caliber team. The championship caliber teams have lost their stars for portions of seasons and still won the championships. We’re talking about a Suns team that’s 20 games over .500. And then you add a guy like Amaré back into the mix after the trade deadline, there’s nobody in the NBA that has that kind of skill. This is a team. The biggest question is since there is so much chemistry going on, how do you assimilate the stud back in? If this is the true team that we all think it is, it will all work out.
Suns.com: Being a local guy, is it safe to assume you’re also a Suns fan?
McFarlane: I’m a transplant, but I’m a believer in rooting for the local team. You can have a second favorite team if you come from Chicago, but being here in this town, you root for the home team. So the Suns are absolutely number one.
To find out more about McFarlane Sports Picks or the many other figure lines for sale, log on to Spawn.com or stop by his retail store in Tempe, AZ.
Link (http://www.nba.com/suns/news/mcfarlane_060324.html)
By Josh Greene, Suns.com
Posted: March 24, 2005
Arizona-based comic book artist and toy manufacturer Todd McFarlane is also a diehard sports fan. That interest, not to mention a keen eye for detail, has helped his company McFarlane Toys become the fifth-largest toy manufacturer in the industry. In addition to releasing a wide range of entertainment figures depicting music greats like Elvis Presley and KISS to movie characters from "Jaws" and "Napoleon Dynamite," his popular McFarlane Sports Picks line features the biggest and brightest names in all four major sports – scaled down to six-inch renditions. McFarlane introduced his first line of basketball figures in 2002 and is still going strong, thanks in part to the popularity of constantly rotating NBA subjects like LeBron James, Shaquille O'Neal, Yao Ming and Suns Amaré Stoudemire and Shawn Marion. His new 10th NBA series which just hit retail shelves features a brand-new Steve Nash sculpt in his Suns uniform. So between the various past and present figures of the reigning NBA MVP, STAT and The Matrix out in the marketplace, probably the biggest problem faced by Suns collectors is finding enough space at home to display all of them.
http://www.nba.com/media/suns/mcfarlane_220.jpg
Spawn creator Todd McFarlane and his popular McFarlane Sports Picks have struck a real chord with sports figure collectors ever since their debut in 2001.
(Courtesy McFarlane Toys)
Suns.com talked with McFarlane about his new Nash figure, the production process and, of course, what he thinks about the defending Pacific Division champs.
Suns.com: Nash, Stoudemire and Marion… Doing figures of three guys from one team must mean you have faith in the talent of this team.
Todd McFarlane: It’s sort of a tip of the hat as to how well the Suns are doing, because although I do live in Phoenix, I have this duty to actually make players that I think will sell on the national level. It’s not just a local boy trying to do local guys. I’ve got three studs out of five that are All-Stars that I can put out and get some guy in Virginia and Florida to buy. So it just goes to show the talent level of each one of those guys that would make a national mark on them. So I like it when the local guys do well, because then I get to have my cake and eat it too.
Suns.com: Your recent Nash and Stoudemire figures mark the second time you’ve featured these guys.
McFarlane: The guys that are good, the demand is there and you go, “Okay, do I put out another Steve Nash or do I put out whoever is the leading scorer of Charlotte?” You know, I’d rather have a Steve Nash hanging on the shelf nationally than the leading scorer of Charlotte at any given time. So you keep going back to the guys that will sell. They’re not regional players, they are national players. The NBA is the hardest sport to do because it’s the hardest to come up with in terms of a true national showing. To come up with a national guy that the casual person would know… basketball names can be very limited. And for the Suns to have three guys who the casual fan can tell you are some of the best players going, that’s something.
Suns.com: Your first Nash figure came out in 2003, but that was from his days in Dallas. Let’s talk about your new Suns Nash figure that just hit store shelves (pictured).
http://www.nba.com/media/suns/nash_mcfarlane.jpg
McFarlane: The new one is him dribbling. He’s the assist king. You put him in poses which make sense to people. We’ve done the passing one; we’ve done the dribbling one. The next will probably be a shooting one, so we’ll sort of get the trifecta of him. If he keeps playing at the level he’s playing, I can easily come back with a third figure of him.
Suns.com: From the initial decision to do a figure till the final product lands on retail shelves, how long does the entire process take?
McFarlane: About nine months. The thing that is most difficult in those nine months is a lot of things can happen. Performances go down; performances go up. A guy you never pick can be the guy who ends up being MVP, and you don’t have them on your list. You’ve got injuries, but the worse one is the trade. You go, “Oh no, he’s in the wrong uniform and a boatload of him is coming in.” We try to stay on top of the contracts as much as possible and I’m sort of a quasi-general manager. I can’t make a guy that’s hot who may be on the verge of his option year and could be traded at the trade deadline. I’ve either got to get that figure out well before or give myself enough breathing distance after. We actually made guys who’re on the bubble and wait until after the trade deadline. Either he didn’t get traded and signed an extension, or we now know he’s going to be on that team for next year so we can now go ahead with him. There are times that we have players sitting at the factory just waiting for the right uniform.
Suns.com: That must mean you love your new NBA Legends series. You don’t have to worry about guys like Julius Erving, Larry Bird and Willis Reed going anywhere.
McFarlane: All the Hall of Fame guys have made their mark and everybody knows what team they’re on. Most played the vast majority of their entire career with only one team. Bill Russell will always be a Celtic, but sometimes it’s just a matter whether you are going to make Wilt Chamberlain a 76er or a Laker since he’s made his mark on both of them.
Suns.com: Have you thought about doing a Charles Barkley one from his Suns years?
McFarlane: Oh, yeah. Barkley is one of those guys that we can eventually get the rights to do. The current players are under contract with the league and the union so we have to get the okay for the likeness and the logos. But when you get those contracts, you’ve got the whole pool of players to choose from. When you get into the retired guys, those are one-on-one deals. As far as Barkley, he’s high up on the list. He’d work perfectly. I would do half in a Philadelphia 76ers uniform and half in a Phoenix one. It would be a complete work.
Suns.com: Your sports figures are the most detailed of its kind in the marketplace. That realism has really caught on with appreciative fans.
McFarlane: If you are going to do it, do it right. People give me a lot of credit for doing things in my career, but there is nothing preventing anybody from manipulating clay into the right shape that’s actually realistic. So if they chose not to do it up to this point, it’s sort of good for me. It makes my stuff look better. People go, “Oh my gosh, Todd, it’s amazing. They actually look like what they are supposed to.” And you go, “Whoa, why am I getting credit for making something look like it supposed to?” Luckily, some of the other companies decided not to pay too much detail and maybe their CEOs aren’t artists or sports fanatics. So, good. I was able to step in there. For me, I collected baseball and football cards when I was a kid and whenever I saw figures, I‘d say, “Why don’t they look like my cards? Why don’t they look like my magazines that I collect? Why doesn’t it look like what I’m seeing on TV?” What’s stopping anybody? As a kid, you think there must be a reason. And as you get older, you know what the reason is. They are cutting corners and cheating it. That’s it. There’s nothing stopping them from making a guy look exactly the same way the way that I do. It’s just that they decided not to because it costs too much.
Suns.com: The new Nash figure has the reigning NBA MVP driving the lane. December’s Stoudemire release has him going up for the dunk. And the same goes for the Marion figure from earlier last year (pictured). Talk about the decision process of choosing a player’s individual poses.
http://www.nba.com/media/suns/trix_mcfarlane.jpg
McFarlane: If we haven’t done a certain guy before, we just go, “What do we think is the stereotype of the guy?” Some people might think he’s a shooter, a passer, a dribbler, whatever it is. Maybe he does a lot of power dunks or is a good rebounder, a good blocker… We try to break them up into those various categories. And then we look at who else is in the line with them, and then what happened the line before. If all of a sudden we pick a bunch of shooters, we don’t want them all to be in shooting poses. At some point, shooting is a little like baseball with that “hitting at the moment of release” where everybody is sort of in the same spot. How do we get variety? Sometimes we bend the rules. “Let’s start with that one and we can back off if we do him again in a future line.” If we are going to do Ben Wallace, then Ben Wallace is a rebounder. If I’m going to do Dennis Rodman, I’m going to do him as a rebounder because that’s what he was. Maybe his legs are kicking out as he is pulling the ball in because he’s not going to let anybody get it away from him. Obviously, you’re going to do something similar with an Amaré or retired guys like Michael Jordan. Those are the guys we think of as shooters. We’re going to put them in some cool shooting pose. "How can you alternate it?" So sometimes they’re doing the between the legs, behind the back, a one-handed slam, a two-handed slam; They’re doing a reverse lay-up. Now we’re going to start twisting their bodies so they don’t all look the same.
Suns.com: Who has been your biggest-selling sports figure?
McFarlane: In all honesty, there hasn’t been one that has blown away sales-wise. I say that because a lot of it is performance-driven and some of it’s been team-driven, so just when you think you know who’s going to be the most popular guy, everybody shifts. Initially when we came out with LeBron James, we’d have gone with him. He’s been on the covers of all the newspapers. Everybody was talking about him. Then obviously you do big retired guys like Wayne Gretzky, Joe Montana or somebody like that. People are going to circle their wagons a lot more. You’d be surprised, but all of a sudden Kurt Warner who comes out of no place and all of a sudden leads the Rams to the Super Bowl, all of a sudden his sales skyrocket because everybody thinks he’s the hero. It evens out. Every six months there is a new guy that the media and the fans sort of grab onto and we try to make sure we are right there and not too far behind the curve so we can deliver.
Suns.com: What’s the best celebrity feedback you’ve gotten? Maybe a guy has seen his figure and told you how much he liked it.
McFarlane: I’d say that I’ve heard it from about two dozen mouths. We also get letters from some guys, and they’ll send us an autographed version of it. The ones that warm my heart are usually the ones from guys that have been around the league a bit so they were around when prior companies was making these toys. The guys were sort of embarrassed with those, and maybe that’s not the right word, but they weren’t bringing them home to their family. Now they say, “Wow, that looks like me. I’ve finally got something to bring home to the kids or my parents.” They like it enough that they want a case of them to give out. And you go, “Wow.” If it’s good enough for the athlete to give out, then surely it should be good enough for the fans. For them it’s such a breath of fresh air for the figures to actually look like them. They go, “Thanks, Todd, thanks for actually doing it right. You got it right. Cool. I can give it to my kids.”
Suns.com: In terms of production, is there something that differs when it comes to putting the basketball figures out there rather than other sports?
McFarlane: I like the basketball guys for a couple reasons. One, they are the least covered up. The football and the hockey guys have so much equipment on that you don’t have to be as good in capturing their likeness because a lot of it you can’t even really see. Obviously, with the baseball players they have a helmet, sweatbands and sleeves, and all that other stuff. It’s sort of fun to have to pay a lot more attention to these guys detail-wise because they have tattoos on their legs and things like that. We have to get all that. Some wear jewelry, and we have to match up to what kind of equipment they wear so if Manu Ginobili wears those dark socks that make him look like he’s a snowbird here in Phoenix, then you’ve got to put those on him. You have to get them from head to toe and you see way more of their body in a physical build than any of those other guys in other sports. There’s no cutting corners. With football, I don’t have to worry if they’ve got corn rows because I put the helmet on. I have to get the hairstyles down with basketball guys. Whether a guy shaves their head or has a little stubble, we’ve got to get all that.
Suns.com: We’ve talked figures, now let’s talk about the man. What’s impressive to you about Steve Nash?
McFarlane: I believe that every team has a general and the general doesn’t necessarily have to be your tallest or strongest, but he should be your smartest. It should be the guy that’s under pressure that everybody looks to get this done. In football, a lot of guys look to the quarterback for that reassuring guy. Nash is the quarterback of the Suns and he is smart enough to know when you need his playing style, when he needs to pass off and when to use him as a decoy. So it’s not by accident that I believe the last few years, the top scorers in the NBA had a guy named Nash on their roster. It’s been too many years to be called a coincidence. So who doesn’t want this guy?
Suns.com: Amaré Stoudemire’s back in the Suns’ lineup after missing a good chunk of the season. What impresses you about him as a player?
http://www.nba.com/media/suns/stat_mcfarlane.jpg
McFarlane: I like two things. He is talented as all get out. He’s young. Finding young, talented guys that are fast, they are the true superstars. You need to have a minimum of two stars on your team if you’re going to make any kind of run. You saw it with Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. Allen Iverson hasn’t been able to do it because he hasn’t been able to get help. It’s the Batman/Robin sort of syndrome. You need a minimum of two. So Nash needs to have a go-to guy. Amaré was going to be that guy, but unfortunately with the injury that didn’t happen.
Suns.com: And with that absence, that sort of opened the door for Marion to really step up this season.
McFarlane: With Marion, he’s that guy that sometimes lives in the shadow of the other two superstars but they know his presence gives them so much more breathing space. Oh my gosh, there’s three of them on the court at all times and there are only five guys on the court. Wow! At least when it was Jordan and Pippen, you could go double team that No. 23 guy. You can’t do that with the Suns here. They’ve got three weapons out there at any given time. You’ve got a guy that can score and you throw your rebounder out there, you’re going to win a lot of games. So that’s it. When Amaré got injured, that was where we saw the true skill level of Marion. This team can’t be, “Oh, STAT’s gone. We’ll wait for him to come back.” That’s not a true team. That’s not even a championship caliber team. The championship caliber teams have lost their stars for portions of seasons and still won the championships. We’re talking about a Suns team that’s 20 games over .500. And then you add a guy like Amaré back into the mix after the trade deadline, there’s nobody in the NBA that has that kind of skill. This is a team. The biggest question is since there is so much chemistry going on, how do you assimilate the stud back in? If this is the true team that we all think it is, it will all work out.
Suns.com: Being a local guy, is it safe to assume you’re also a Suns fan?
McFarlane: I’m a transplant, but I’m a believer in rooting for the local team. You can have a second favorite team if you come from Chicago, but being here in this town, you root for the home team. So the Suns are absolutely number one.
To find out more about McFarlane Sports Picks or the many other figure lines for sale, log on to Spawn.com or stop by his retail store in Tempe, AZ.
Link (http://www.nba.com/suns/news/mcfarlane_060324.html)