A Requiem for the Phoenix Suns, the NBA's Most Beautiful Failure

At last week's trade deadline, the Phoenix Suns sent their best player, Goran Dragic, to the Miami Heat. The deal came days after Dragic, citing a lack of trust, announced that he would be unwilling to re-sign with the Suns this offseason. It also happened minutes before the Suns sent another of their trio of high-level point guards, Isaiah Thomas, to Boston. In the context of the broader NBA landscape, Dragic's arrival in Miami means more than his departure from Phoenix; he left a team whose ambitions topped out at a first-round playoff exit for one that, if Chris Bosh returns to form from his blood clot scare, could pester the Eastern Conference's higher-ups in Aprils to come.

This is all nice enough for those who would like to see a stronger middle class in the East, but it is also a low-key tragedy for the Suns. The Dragic trade, and the Thomas one that followed, signal the end of what has been one of the more pleasant stories in basketball over the past couple seasons. Two years ago, the Suns finished last in the Western Conference and faced the common predicament of the NBA's flotsam-grade franchises: whether to try for incremental improvement or disassemble their roster and hoard high draft picks in hopes of a surge years down the line. In a league that increasingly tends towards the latter, Phoenix opted for the former; they have spent the past season and a half advancing an alternative to the tank-and-hope tactics that direct contemporary rebuilding. It has been tremendous fun to watch on the court, and admirable in the abstract. What happens next may decide whether or not it was worthwhile.

Prior to the trades, this year's Suns were a similarly fun bunch. Dragic, Bledsoe, and the newly acquired Thomas made for an awkward fit—Dragic listed this as a reason for his wanting out—but they sometimes scintillated, whipping the ball around the perimeter until one of them exploded some closing-out sap's knee ligaments with a quick drive. Markieff Morris went from an ace sixth man to a reliable and honed post scorer, his twin brother Marcus made more minor improvements across the board, and second-year big man Alex Len started to show a feel for the rough stuff required of an NBA center. What the Suns built, when they decided to try building something, was a double-time offensive fever dream. Following that last-place season, the team traded for Eric Bledsoe, pairing him with Dragic, and they hired Jeff Hornaceck to install a déjà vu-inducing pace-and-space system. Even though Bledsoe missed much of his first year in Phoenix with a knee injury, the team evolved into a tribe of ascendant talents and plucky castoffs, with Gerald Green tomahawks and Markieff Morris turnarounds and Channing Frye threes all orbiting Dragic's southpaw guile. They beat most every prognosticator's predictions, putting together the biggest turnaround campaign in the league and missing the playoffs by only one game.

What really refreshed about these Suns, though, was the plainness of their objective. The NBA splits itself largely into two camps. There are likely playoff teams that balance gunning for a high seed by resting stars and monitoring minutes for the postseason, and there are the obvious lottery teams that rightly privilege developing young players over adding to a meager pile of regular-season wins. The Suns belonged to neither. They wanted to make the playoffs, even though they lacked the sort of talent that guarantees a playoff appearance. They needed to play full-bore every game in order to compete for a postseason spot, and so they did.

From this combination of comparatively anonymous players and steep stakes came some of the most compelling regular-season basketball of the past few years. There was a special joy in watching the Suns take on the league's elite, forcing top teams to decide how much of Phoenix's energy they could afford to match. The stretch that was most representative of that team's value to the league, in fact, involved not a win but a pair of consecutive losses in early January.

In the first of these losses, they visited the Spurs and used a third-quarter sprint, highlighted by a particularly perception-rattling Thomas-interception-and-lob-to-Green sequence, to carry a lead into the fourth quarter before San Antonio rallied for a five-point win. In the second, they played the counterpart to the methodical Grizzlies, taking them to two overtimes before falling to Memphis's incessant backdowns. In each game, the Suns made a title contender do quite a bit more than they would have liked to just to eke out a win over an also-ran in the middle of the season.

The games each had a charge foreign to most dead-of-winter matchups, owed entirely to Phoenix's vandal spirit. This was what the Suns did, to the nightly delight of the League Pass surfer: they flouted the custom of midseason malaise. In a league of strategy—of financial sector probabilities and projections—they had an ethos.

Without Dragic, the Suns will be less capable of pushing the league's aristocrats, and they will likely fall out of the playoff picture; five straight losses have dropped them behind the Thunder and the Pelicans in the race for the eighth spot. We'll soon learn whether the team will forge ahead with its on-the-fly construction or opt for a more conventional teardown. If anything, their experiment in just going for it may have the opposite of the preferred effect, emboldening those who argue that trying to win, for the teams in the NBA's bottom half, is irresponsible.

But for now, good young players, a good coach, and a store of good will remains. Stacked as it is, the Western Conference has its share of old and otherwise tenuous teams; if they stick with it in the coming seasons, the Suns will still have a chance to prove the worth of their approach. If it doesn't work out, and if the high point ends up being a couple seasons of wild, enthralling basketball, that low zenith will have been an achievement all the same. Sixers fans can tell you that there are worse things.