Have we seen it before?
The answer is yes. The NBA has been around for 75 years, so of course, we’re going to find a team that had an epic collapse after a dominating regular season. The most recent example came 15 years ago when the Dallas Mavericks got bounced from the first round by the “We Believe” Warriors. The Mavs won 67 games that year, they reached the Finals the prior year, and they had Dirk Nowitzki, the MVP of the league. They lost to a team that won only 42 games and that barely reached the playoffs. However, the Warriors eliminated the Mavericks in dominating fashion. They won the series by an average margin of nearly 15 points per game. The Mavs lost in six games, and the Warriors blew them out on their home floor by 25 points.
And the league was going to award the MVP to a player after losing like that? After suffering the worse playoff defeat in history?! Not the best way for an MVP to end its season.
We were shocked when it happened to that juggernaut of a team, and we are shocked that the Phoenix Suns lost the way they did on Sunday evening. The Phoenix Suns have a lot of similarities to the 2007 Dallas Mavericks. They also reached the Finals in the previous season, and they lost after holding a 2-0 lead in the series. They came back the next season with a vengeance and they both ended the season with the best record in the league. In fact, there wasn’t a single team in the league that was on the same level as the Suns were. They finished with 8 more victories than the second-best team in the league, and with 11 more victories than the best team in the Eastern Conference. They had all the makings of an all-time great team.
Here’s what they accomplished: It was going the whole month of November without losing a game. They won an NBA best 18 straight games, which is something that only 15 other teams have been able to accomplish since the shot-clock was implemented. Then before the all-star break, they won 11 straight games. It’s ending the season with a franchise-record of 64 wins, which is something that only 21 teams in the history of the league have accomplished. They were winning at an all-time rate because no other team had the kind of depth that the Suns had. They had 6 total players during the regular season that averaged over 10 points per game, including two other players (Jae Crowder and Javale McGee) that averaged just below double-figures. Their advanced metrics weren’t exactly eye-popping, but they did just enough dominating to easily make the top 35 teams in the history of the league. Think for example the kind of the season that the 2008-09 Los Angeles Lakers had. That was the ceiling that I envisioned this team having.
They needed to win a championship if they wanted to be in that company, and they needed to reach the Finals if they wanted to be remembered as one of the greatest teams to not win the title. History was in their grasp. The sun was shining bright on this young and hungry team. *See what I did there? Then the playoffs came around, and this team looked nothing like the team that was racking up wins after wins in the regular season. They ended up losing to a team that revolved around one great player, and they lost at their home court by a margin of 43 points. It had all of us shaking our heads. What happened to this team? How can one explain why this team lost all its mojo so quickly?
Maybe it was the injury of Devin Booker in the first-round series that screwed up their momentum. Maybe it’s the undisclosed quad injury that not so mysteriously just happened to come out about Chris Paul. Maybe that’s why it seemed like Chris Paul looked like a 37-year-old point guard who just recently was compared to a traffic cone that can’t guard anybody. Or maybe the Suns were the beneficiaries of a league that had zero teams that won over 60 games, and that had only one team that won over 55 games. In the words of the head coach of another disappointing Arizona team, Dennis Green, “They are who we thought they were! And we let ’em off the hook!”
There are hundreds of theories that you have surely heard in the past couple of days. It’s logical to presume that it’s most likely a combination of all the things you are hearing. I have one extra theory to throw out there to the never-ending loop of sports takes that are circulating around us like an F-5 tornado. You ready? It’s that your team is only as good as your best player. How original, am I right?
But were we really convinced that Devin Booker was ready to be the best player of a championship-winning team? Were we right to just assume that Chris Paul was going to be able to turn back the clock for the 20th time after playing nearly 1,300 hundred games for his career? Sure he can do it a few times during a playoff run, but was it right for some of us to think a 37-year-old was going to win Finals MVP? Something that’s only happened once in the history of the league? Who do we think he is, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?!
That’s not to say that Devin Booker isn’t one of the top players in the league. He will surely finish somewhere in the top 6 in MVP voting, and he would get my vote to finish on the All-NBA 1st team. But do we think he will finish his career as one of the 75 greatest players to ever lace them up? That’s something that all of the other 21 teams that won over 64 games in the regular season have in common, with the exception of the 2005-06 Detroit Pistons. They all had a top 50 player that was at the height of their powers. That’s why it’s no surprise that all of the teams, with the exception of the 2007 Dallas Mavericks and the 2016 San Antonio Spurs, were able to at least reach the conference finals.
History doesn’t lie. Behind every all-time great team was an all-time great player pushing their team after each round and refusing to let their team lose. And for the majority of the cases, we’re talking players that are somewhere in the top 35 players of all time. Some of them fell short, but they were at least going to go down with a fight. None of them ended their season by losing over 40 points at their home floor. So I ask you this, 10 years from now, are we going to be that surprised that Luka Doncic was able to knock out Devin Booker and the Phoenix Suns in a 7-game series? 10 years from now, where will Luka Doncic rank historically and where will Devin Booker rank? One player is the next Larry Bird and one player is the next Kyrie Irving. After all the smoke clears, maybe this will all make sense and we would be wondering why this was such a shocker.
History is also destined to repeat itself. Let’s look back at the 2007 Dallas Mavericks again as an example. After suffering that humiliating defeat against Golden State, they could never repeat that same success and were a mediocre team for the next three years. It wasn’t until 2011 when the Mavericks totally changed their squad and took advantage of a small window of opportunity to win a title. There’s reason to believe that the Phoenix Suns might go through something similar.
There are question marks concerning Deandre Ayton’s future, and if the Suns would be able to convince him to re-sign with the team this offseason. He is the team’s second-leading scorer and the team’s leading rebounder. Then there are the uncertainties of Chris Paul. He averaged a career-low in points per game this season, and we shouldn’t expect him to have many all-star caliber seasons left in him. Father time is knocking at the door, and it’s only a matter of time before Chris Paul falls off. So will the Suns become just a one-man show on offense? And wasn’t that their situation three years ago before Chris Paul showed up? In all fairness, the Suns did just fine when Chris Paul missed 15 games in the second half of the season, so they weren’t very dependent on him to succeed. But losing Deandre might be enough to bring this team back to earth.
I’m not willing to say just yet that their days of being title contenders are over. One big free-agent signing can change all of that. And we all know that the foundation is there for this team to be great. But you only get one or two chances to make history. And I believe they blew a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enter basketball immortality. Now they will forever be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
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