The mystery of the Phoenix Suns' improbable, unearned success
In an NBA season that has already seen several ascending young players sidelined by drug suspensions, a finals team all but wiped off the map by injuries, and the entire lower half of the Eastern Conference crumble and fall away, perhaps the single most disturbing development has been the sudden rise of the Phoenix Suns, the perennial Western Conference doormat that for the first time in years resembles a competent basketball operation. It’s worse even than that: the Suns appear to have skipped past competence and arrived, quite unwelcome, at playoff contention. Awful.
This is a franchise that, following a pattern of brutal, self-defeating mismanagement, has not made the postseason in any of the last nine seasons. It’s possible, in the loaded West, to be a well-run organization and still not make the playoffs, just as it is possible, in the sorry East, to be a poorly run organization and capture the fourth seed. The Suns, under smarming owner and incorrigible meddler Robert Sarver, are as far from well-run as an NBA franchise can get without literally being the Knicks; that they play in the West has mostly provided a rhetorical shield against the kind of contempt rightly heaped upon Knicks owner James Dolan. That, plus the fact that Suns fans long ago abandoned the delusional optimism that animates die-hard Knicks fans. Better to go wandering in the scorching desert than invest hope in Sarver’s ridiculous operation.
The failures and self-injuries and burned bridges that brought the Suns to this moment of improbable, unearned relevance are almost too numerous to count. In a tidy example of Sarver’s knack for getting things exactly wrong, his team’s last good season – a 48-win campaign that ended just shy of a playoff berth in 2014 – came virtually by accident, under a rookie general manager hired expressly to execute a roster teardown. When the team reversed its mandate following that fortuitous brush with relevance, GM Ryan McDonough’s efforts to nurture and sustain that success instead systematically and fatally eroded team chemistry, until he’d accomplished through incompetence what he’d recently been too incompetent to accomplish intentionally. Under Sarver, McDonough went from hired for the job of triggering a rebuilding project, to up against the wall for triggering a rebuilding project.
Better NBA teams have long reaped the benefit of Sarver’s talent for alienating and demoralizing his own players. Goran Dragic, the best player on that 48-win team, had some of the best years of his career in Miami after forcing his way out of Phoenix, and is now a rotation staple on a Heat team positioned near the top of the Eastern
Conference. Eric Bledsoe is Giannis Antetokounmpo’s running-mate on a world-beater in Milwaukee after Bledsoe, too, publicly forced a trade from the Suns. Isaiah Thomas – the third player in a deeply flawed three-pointguard Suns tandem with Dragic and Bledsoe – became an MVP candidate after he was dealt from the Suns to the Celtics, in a trade McDonough publicly acknowledged was “a mistake.” Markieff Morris demanded and was granted a trade after he accused the Suns of trading away his twin brother in order to clear salary cap space to facilitate their courtship of LaMarcus Aldridge, whose job, had he taken the bait, would have been to usurp Markieff’s position in the starting lineup.
Instability has likewise made a revolving door of the head coaching job in Phoenix. Entering this season, the Suns had gone through four head coaches in four seasons, all had either lost their jobs or entered their jobs mid-season, and none had won more than 24 total games. Igor Kokoškov, the NBA’s first foreign-born and raised full-time head coach and a respected league lifer, was reportedly let go so that the Suns could court current head coach Monty Williams, who at the time of his hiring had an uninspiring 173–221 record.
Sarver’s penchant for knee-jerk decision-making and frequent, dramatic shifting of organizational priorities manifests throughout the team’s basketball business. One year after overmatched head coach Earl Watson’s sudden and overdue firing, and just nine days prior to the start of the regular season, Sarver unexpectedly fired McDonough, and then waited five months – long enough to cause “raised eyebrows” in an NBA league office that generally makes a point of staying out of franchises’ day-to-day operations – to even begin the hiring process for his full-time replacement. That slow and half-assed search ultimately landed on current general manager James Jones, who’d retired as an NBA player just a year prior to assuming interim GM duties following McDonough’s departure, and who reportedly considers scouting players ahead of the draft to be outside of the purview of
someone in his position. It’s not hard to imagine how the Suns landed on a neophyte, considering the constant tumult within the organization. Better candidates have better things to do than thrash around in the maelstrom of Sarver’s ever-changing vision.
Through it all, Sarver has seemed unable to comprehend or unwilling to face his culpability. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported last season, at the end of a miserable 17-game losing streak, that the NBA considered it “a concern” that Sarver has apparently failed to learn any of the obvious lessons in the trail of chaos and destruction caused by his meddlesome, mercurial management style. Where a basketball fan with even minimal cognition – a snail wearing a tiny LeBron James jersey, say – would make the connection between erratic leadership and poor performance, in 2016 Sarver instead pinned his team’s persistent awfulness on the sensitivity of “millennial culture”. The defining example of the wisdom of his regime is the time he tried to motivate McDonough by filling his office with goats, which proceeded to befoul McDonough’s office by pooping everywhere.
The closest he’s come to acknowledging the decade’s worth of basketball he’s flushed down the toilet was when he grabbed a mic during a preseason game in 2014 and complained to the crowd that the visiting Spurs weren’t taking the game seriously enough, which led to San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich suggesting that Sarver belonged in a chicken suit. The only relationship Sarver has left with Suns fans necessarily involves this sort of transparent pandering: whatever was left of their exhausted goodwill was utterly crushed when he collaborated with craven civic leaders to squeeze $175m in public funding for stadium renovations, in a shady deal that closed earlier this year despite overwhelming taxpayer opposition.
All of this flailing and buffoonery makes it very hard to accept that the Suns are playing very good basketball to open the 2019–20 regular season. Even the specific moves that improved this team are infuriatingly short-sighted. They traded away TJ Warren, a useful player currently playing rotation minutes on an overachieving Pacers team, for cash. They traded down in the 2019 draft, dropping five spots, in exchange for Dario Šarić. They solved their persistent point guard problems by lavishing an expensive contract on Ricky Rubio, who will be 30 by the start of next season. Center Aron Baynes, who has filled in admirably for a suspended DeAndre Ayton, will be an unrestricted free agent after this season. For people who crave a world where success flows in any comprehensible way from competence and perseverance, the possibility that the Suns could rise from self-imposed irrelevance based entirely on blindfire luck is deeply upsetting. The cosmos can no longer be counted upon to deliver fair outcomes, but if the long arc of the basketball universe still bends at all toward justice, the Suns will soon sink back into the muck from whence they sprung, and stay there.