Would he have stayed?
It was well documented that Kyrie Irving will be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the 2018-19 season, and the question of whether or not he would bolt the Suns leaving them high and dry is an entirely valid and fearful situation.
Yet there is one variable that could have easily have brought the Suns to the position of keeping him in a Phoenix uniform that during the dark times has made Suns fans feel like that would never happen: the Suns would have been winning, and if the right talent was put around both Kyrie and Booker to really make this team a competitive one, they would have been a very good team. Kyrie wanted to be the focus of a franchise (this would have happened in Phoenix) and to win (that likely would have happened presuming that the Suns did whatever they needed to keep Kyrie happy.
While there would be no guarantee that he could have been tempted by offers from other teams around the league, one would have to presume that if the Suns are winning, that he is the focal point, that he is treated well, and that the franchise is doing everything possible to build around him, Kyrie Irving would have been comfortable enough to stay here and finish what he started.
Granted this is all speculation, and no one would have foreseen how freak Kyrie Irving would have made the Gordon Hayward-less Boston Celtics. As I said at the top, hindsight is 20/20. It just feels like there is no reason why the Suns couldn’t have seen tat this was all possible, and that the team would have taken a significant step forward in their development without really gutting the roster with any significant.
Next: Trade Scenarios for Tyson Chandler
Hopefully the slow and steady approach does eventually win the race and the young Suns all develop into players that can truly be difference makers on this roster, they are able to find a point guard (or develop an offense that does not need a true point guard), and they are on the upswing of their development and are only a year away from developing a truly competitive team with mostly the roster they currently have.
But you cannot deny: what we see in Boston could have been (at least to some degree) seen in Phoenix. And there is no denying how great that would have been.