Phoenix Suns

The Phoenix Suns are the NBA’s most expensive cautionary tale about the difference between accumulating talent and building a team. Three Finals appearances in 1976, 1993, and 2021 — zero championships from any of them — and the current iteration, featuring Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal, has somehow managed to make three superstars look like strangers sharing a taxi. Founded in 1968, the Suns play at Footprint Center, an 18,422-seat arena modernised by new ownership that has spent lavishly without yet receiving a return on investment.

The 36-46 finish in 2024-25 was not merely disappointing — it was damning. Coaching changes mid-season are the universal sign of organisational panic, and injuries provided a convenient excuse for a roster that had deeper structural problems than any medical staff could fix. Durant averaged 26.6 points in his 62 appearances, because Kevin Durant scoring efficiently is as reliable as gravity, but individual brilliance without collective coherence produces exactly the kind of record Phoenix posted.

The Suns possess two of the purest scorers in basketball history in Durant and Booker, and yet possessing elite talent has never been this franchise’s problem. Converting that talent into championships has been the issue since the coin flip that gave them the right to draft in 1968. New ownership’s chequebook is open. The question is whether money can buy what has eluded the Suns for fifty-seven years: the right combination of talent, health, and timing to actually win a title.

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The Suns enter 2025-26 with the same championship-or-bust rhetoric that has accompanied this franchise for years, and the “bust” part has been doing all the heavy lifting. Durant and Booker guarantee the Suns will be on your television — their star power secures marquee billing on Australian ESPN broadcasts regardless of the standings — but being watchable and being championship-calibre are different things entirely. Phoenix needs health, chemistry, and the kind of luck that has systematically avoided this franchise since its inception. Fifty-seven years without a title is not a drought. It is a geological era. Something needs to change, and the Suns are running out of time to figure out what.

VS — Chief sports columnist, australiafootball.com