Do you remember the little old lady Greta Rogers, who stood in front of the Phoenix City council to complain about the disgraced former Phoenix Suns owner and his approach to building teams? 

If you don’t, how about I refresh your memory.

“Mr. Sarver has done nothing to improve this team in the 14 years he’s owned it,” Rogers said to the City Council as they discussed paying for renovations to the Suns’ arena. “He’s never funded or bought – paid for – two or three key players, which makes any professional sports team successful or on the road to success. He’s so tight he squeaks when he walks.”

We should all be Greta, unwilling to accept teams and owners that won’t spend the money to try to win. Owners that are obsessed with trying to lose on purpose and attempt to get cheap players that can maybe help them win in the future, but most likely will lead them to some sort of continued mediocrity if they’re not careful. 

That’s why the Phoenix Suns are all in right now and it’s the right place to be. 

Suns Need to Pair Book and KD With Butler

Did the first iteration of Mat Ishbia’s experiment work? 

Hell no, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t in the future and you have to give up completely. 

He’s made the Phoenix Suns a destination for NBA stars again since arriving in the Valley. 

You don’t throw that aside in hopes of draft picks making you sort of interesting over the next five to 10 years. You look at that and you use that to your advantage. You leverage that and you find a way to retool rather than rebuild. 

You have Devin Booker and Kevin Durant. The question is, would you rather have Bradley Beal or Jimmy Butler for the next two to three years? 

The answer is simple. 

You’d rather have Butler. If you have a way to trade Beal before the deadline and you can get a guy of his caliber, who may not be perfect but could come in and help fix your defensive intensity and potentially your culture issues that have been in question, you do it. 

Because you won’t be saddled with Beal, and you’ll have a fresh start with a guy like Butler, who has dragged the corpse of Miami Heat teams to the NBA finals. 

Did he win? No, but look at the roster around him, and then look at what he’d have here in Phoenix with him as well. 

History Shows Why the Suns Have To Retool

Why do the Suns have to focus on retooling? Because rebuilds lose you franchise superstars. See Steve Nash or Booker in the future if you go down this path. 

You lose a generation of fans. See 2011 through 2019, where Suns fans didn’t come from that generation in most cases, because they were terrible. 

Approaches like that are how you kill a proud franchise and ruin it as a destination for future stars. 

We saw it. 

We lived through it, and if it wasn’t for Chris Paul, seeing the importance of Booker and what he could become, we’d probably still be there. 

Blowing it up should never be on the table for this franchise and Ishbia as long as he’s willing to spend. 

Let me tell you why. 

Dragon Bender. 

Josh Jackson. 

Alex Len. 

DeAndre Ayton.

Marquese Chriss.

Markief Morris.

Kendall Marshall.

We’ve been there. We’ve done that. We own too many of the T-shirts and we have the emotional scars to prove it. 

Divided Phoenix Suns Fanbase

The same fan base that spent a decade and a half complaining about not having an owner willing to spend and not having the ability to attract free agents to the Valley now has two factions. 

One that wants to win at all costs and do whatever it takes to retool around Booker and Durant, that does whatever it takes to bring Larry O’Brien to the home.

Then there’s the other side, the group that wants to be hopium dealers, the ones trying to give you the fix of the sweet, sweet ping pong balls that may or may not fall your way. Oh, and even if they do, you may wind up with a generational bust on your hands and no winning. 

That’s not the path to go down. 

We all need to be a little bit more like Greta and a little bit less worried about what’s gonna happen in 2031. 

Give me an ownership group and a team that’s willing to do whatever it takes to win any day over an ownership group that wants to tank and hope that the basketball gods smile on you in the draft lottery.

Give me an ownership group that will go after Butler, and if that doesn’t work, will try to figure out a way creatively to get the next group of players in here to try to win at the same cost. 

Do it for Greta, because the last thing we ever want in Phoenix again with any of our sports teams is an owner who “is so tight he squeaks when he walks.”