The Phoenix Suns have something the Lakers never did: Josh Jackson
By Adam Maynes
When DeAndre Ayton said that he wanted to play for the Phoenix Suns so he could form Shaq/Kobe 2.0 with he and Devin Booker, he neglected to mention a piece L.A. never had.
DeAndre Ayton excited the whole of the Valley of the Suns in a big way prior to the NBA Draft Lottery when he said that he would like to play for the Phoenix Suns and form a Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant-type duo with he and Devin Booker. Suns fans are all too aware of how dominant that Lakers combo was and would love to be able to return the favor for the next decade or more.
While early career statistical comparisons between Devin Booker and Kobe Bryant are fair, it is hard to gauge how far those will go as Kobe would eventually become one of the league’s greatest scorers and most competitive players in it’s history. Devin Booker has scored more points than Kobe at this point in each of those careers, but it would be unfair to expect him to keep up that kind of statistical side-by-side forever as Kobe would eventually become a ball-hog 30+ points per game scorer.
Phoenix Suns
An Ayton to Shaq comparison is also impossible to make at the moment since Ayton has yet to play a second of Summer League ball let alone a regular season game. So while it is nice to think that such a comp is possible, we’d be fooling ourselves if we believed it was logical at the moment.
But let’s say that those two really can put together a frontcourt/backcourt duo that on some level is comparable to the former Lakers superstars. Let’s say too that they have the head coach to piece together the offensive and defensive schemes that can make deep runs in the playoffs and remain competitive for years to come.
If this is possible, then the 2018-19 Suns already have something that those Lakers teams didn’t have: someone to compare to Clyde Drexler.
Last season Eddie Johnson regularly compared Josh Jackson to Clyde Drexler, noting two particular aspects of Josh’s game: his scoring ability and explosiveness to the basket. One may not have seen that coming after the poor first half of the season that Jackson and the Suns suffered through, but once the calendar pages flipped to 2018 and Jackson turned seemed to suddenly begin to understand how to play the NBA game better, that comparison – again, at least early on in his career – became legitimate.
Make the playoffs? Sure. I believe that in 2019 that is a legitimate possibility for the Phoenix Suns. Win a championship though? No way.
But what many people might forget is that Shaq and Kobe didn’t win their first title until they both had played together for four seasons. Shaq was in the eighth season of his career, and Phil Jackson was in his first as their head coach. But it took more than just a duo of stars and a hall of fame head coach, it also took a number of other players as well, most specifically Glen Rice.
Prior to joining the Lakers in 1998, Rice had been a scoring dynamo. Skills-wise on the downside of career when he came to the Lakers, he was still a scorer that needed to be reckoned with, averaging 16.3 points and 4.0 rebounds in his two seasons, and was the third star on the franchise’s 1998-99 67-15 regular season and 15-8 championship run.
But Rice’s time in L.A. lasted only two seasons with the one title, and while the Lakers did go on to win two more titles without him, they never found a third star that could consistently take the pressure off of the other two. They had plenty of role players who crushed opponent’s and their fan’s dreams, but as Shaq and Kobe began to have a falling out, there was no third star to continue to prop them up. They won three straight titles, but then fell apart, incapable of keeping their run going any longer.
NBA fans and historians alike will forever believe that that franchise should have won a lot more than three championships. They had the league’s second coming of Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain on the same team, and yet even when they acquired Karl Malone and Gary Payton in the twilight of each of their careers, it was not nearly enough.
Now imagine if that team had had Clyde Drexler. And I’m not talking about the Clyde Drexler that retired the season before the Lakers’ short dynasty began. But the Clyde Drexler who was a scoring machine in the late 1980s through the early 1990s. What if somehow, those three players could have met in some universal nexus, at the peak of each of their primes, and played together on the same team.
Three championship trophies would have been the shadows for three others, if not more.
Now let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I have already stated that comparisons of the three hall of famers to the three young Suns is patently unfair. And I am certainly not going to sit here and imply that the Phoenix Suns with Devin Booker, Josh Jackson, and DeAndre Ayton are going to be the core group of six, let alone three, let alone one championship in the NBA.
I sure hope they get at least one, but who knows.
What I will say though is this: if DeAndre Ayton’s comparison of he and Devin Booker is in any way true, and if Eddie Johnson’s comparison of Josh Jackson to Clyde Drexler has any merit, then the Phoenix Suns really do have a trio of young studs that the rest of the league will hate to contend with. It’ll take a few years before they finally start to reach their primes at the same time, but when they do, there is the very real chance that they reach a level similar to the late 90’s and early 2000’s Lakers, only hopefully with less of the infighting, and more of the Josh Jackson/Clyde Drexler third star help.
Next: The Phoenix Suns will have the first pick in the NBA Draft
The Phoenix Suns landing the 2018 first overall pick and presumably drafting DeAndre Ayton has given the Valley of the Suns lots to be excited for and plenty of reason to be optimistic about the ceiling that this trio might share.
One thing is for certain in the Shaq/Kobe and Ayton/Booker comparisons: the Los Angeles Lakers never had Clyde Drexler.
But the Phoenix Suns do have Josh Jackson.