The only thing more agonizing than knowing how something in life would’ve turned out differently if not for a traumatic event is not knowing how it would’ve turned out. Few incidents in Arizona sports history sum that conundrum up better than the infamous Robert Horry hip check on Steve Nash.
In the waning minutes of Game 4 of the 2007 Western Conference semifinals, the Phoenix Suns were closing out a huge road victory over the San Antonio Spurs that would tie the series at 2-2 and send it back to Phoenix for a pivotal Game 5. The Suns had restored home-court advantage, and momentum was on their side.
But before the Suns could finish securing their victory, the Robert Horry hip check happened. Nash went flying into the scorer’s table, tempers flared, and even though they weren’t trying to join the scrap, Amar’e Stoudemire and Boris Diaw made the grave mistake of leaving the Suns bench.
The result? A one-game suspension for both Stoudemire and Diaw in a do-or-die Game 5. The Spurs took advantage of those pivotal absences with a Game 5 win, rode that momentum into Game 6 back in San Antonio, won the series at home, and breezed their way to another championship from there.
The Robert Horry hip check is a moment that will never be forgotten by this tortured fanbase, and it was also the benchmark lesson for teams around the league to never leave the bench during an altercation in the David Stern era.
The lore of the Robert Horry hip check
Ironically enough, it was another Suns team — Charles Barkley’s Suns! — that may have laid the groundwork for this travesty.
Back in the early 90s, fighting in the NBA was rampant. Almost every night, there was some sort of altercation popping up on SportsCenter, and it got to the point the league felt the need to institute new rules to stem the tide. The breaking point came in 1993, when a brawl between the Suns and New York Knicks prompted the NBA to establish harsher punishments for fighting.
With the game growing in popularity, the league wanted to curb a rising trend of violence. Players would no longer just be ejected for throwing a punch, but they’d be suspended for 1-5 games as well. And to discourage benches from clearing and escalating on-court brawls, the league increased the penalty for any player leaving the bench during an altercation from a $500 fine to $2,500.
It took some time for these new rules to actually discourage players from fighting, and another tussle between the Knicks and Chicago Bulls in 1994 finally forced the league to put its foot down, instituting mandatory suspensions and fines for any player leaving the bench during an altercation.
Four years after that Suns-Knicks melee first got the ball rolling, New York was served its comeuppance: In their second-round series against the Miami Heat, a Game 5 scrap with P.J. Brown led to Game 6 suspensions for Patrick Ewing, Allan Houston and Charlie Ward, as well as Game 7 suspensions for John Starks and Larry Johnson. The exchange cost them the series, with New York squandering a 3-1 lead.
Sixteen years after that Suns-Knicks scuffle, the bill came due for Phoenix, at the worst possible time. Despite the fact that Stoudemire was just going to check on his point guard after Nash got laid out, and despite the fact that Diaw didn’t even get close to any Spurs players, they were suspended for Game 5 in one of the more egregious examples of “following the letter of the law.”
For Suns fans, the only letters that mattered were the everlasting “F-U” directed at David Stern, whose unwavering dedication to an outdated rule cost Phoenix an honest shot at winning the series and possibly a championship. Suns president Rick Welts admitted the incident prompted a heated exchange with Stern, someone he considered his mentor, and the two didn’t speak for six months afterward.
It took a lot longer than that for most Suns fans to move on, and for many, the wound never fully healed. The resulting quotes from one of the greatest what-ifs in NBA history didn’t help either. Stu Jackson, the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball operations at the time, said the league didn’t even wrestle with the decision on whether to enforce suspensions that would have such a massive impact on a playoff series at its tipping point.
What if the Robert Horry hip check never happened?
But what would have happened if “Big Shot Bob” had never executed such a blatant cheap shot? What if Nash never went flying into the scorer’s table? And what if Stern hadn’t doubled down on the injustice of it all by dishing out those suspensions?
This is the part where we remind everyone that the Spurs were a damn good team. There’s always the possibility they would’ve gone into Phoenix and beaten a healthy Suns team in Game 5, because that just seems to be Arizona sports fans’ lot in life.
But the Suns were playing as well as anyone at that point in time, and they were a 61-win team. The 1-seeded Dallas Mavericks had been eliminated from the first round by the “We Believe” Golden State Warriors, and the Western Conference was open for the taking. After beating Phoenix in that second-round matchup, the Spurs steamrolled the 4-seeded Utah Jazz in a five-game Western Conference Finals matchup, and then they swept the young Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals.
It’s not farfetched to suggest the winner of that Suns-Spurs series would’ve been the heavy favorite to win each of the next two series.
It’s also not outlandish to suggest this series to decide the eventual NBA champion came down to Game 5. In league history, when a best-of-seven series has been tied 2-2, the winner of Game 5 has gone on to win that series 74 percent of the time. Whoever won Game 5 in Phoenix always had the best chance to win the series, and therefore, eventually win it all.
As Steve Kerr put it: “I think that was probably Phoenix’s best chance to win a title.”
So had the Suns, coming off a massive Game 4 win on the road, gone back home to Phoenix at full-strength, it’s hard to believe they would’ve lost. With a Game 5 victory in hand, they could’ve closed the series out on the road in Game 6, and even if the Spurs forced a Game 7, it would’ve been back in Phoenix. If Phoenix had taken Game 5, history would’ve been on their side.
Instead, those suspensions took the wind out of Phoenix’s sails, much like the Robert Horry hip check took the air out of Nash’s lungs. It changed the complexion of the series, and will forever serve as another example of circumstances beyond the Suns’ control robbing this franchise of a long-awaited championship.
Or, as all-time Suns villain Robert Horry said himself, “I just think sometimes the basketball gods shine down on the teams they want to shine on.”
Maybe one day they’ll decide to take a cue from the actual sun and shine down on the city of Phoenix.
