Which Suns teams could have won it all

As we get ready for the upcoming season, Suns fans are generally pretty hopeful about the future. I’m not sure if that has more to do with the promising young core, or the fact that they might finally be on the verge of moving on from their lack of recent playoff success.

Looking to the future, however, is the best we have right now. Perhaps this group, including Devin Booker, Josh Jackson, Marquese Chriss, and others, will someday lead Phoenix to the promise land. I am excited, but it’s sometimes hard for me to get my hopes too high. It’s not that the Suns have always been bad. In fact, quite the opposite, we’ve had some really good teams to root for. The problem is that even those teams never won a Championship. It’s almost harder having good teams that can’t get over the hump than just having bad teams.

Because of this, I wanted to investigate how good some of the better Suns teams really were. So I decided to compare them to other great teams that didn’t win a Championship.

Do we romanticize those teams, or were they really that close to bringing home the trophy? Hopefully this list of should-be winners will clarify things a bit. I’ve limited the list to 15 teams over the last 25 years and I’m working in chronological order.