It is time the Phoenix Suns trade for Mike Conley

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Mike Conley Phoenix Suns (Photo by Ned Dishman/NBAE via Getty Images) /

The Phoenix Suns are in need of a more help than they can get in one trade, but while I have long been against a trade for Mike Conley, here are three reasons why a trade wouldn’t be bad – anymore.

The Phoenix Suns have long needed a point guard, a star, and a veteran leader to help take pressure off of Devin Booker. Fans clamor constantly for something special to miraculously occur, yet nothing to date has materialized.

It has long too been speculated that point guard Mike Conley, currently of the Memphis Grizzlies, should be an option – an option that I have personally and consistently knocked down based on both age and salary.

But then the Phoenix Suns entered their fourth consecutive year of being an absolute mess, and while fans can sit around and accept losses with the hope that the next draft pick will be the key to the turnaround, the players are the ones actually living those losses and some are beginning to take it very personally.

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Take T.J. Warren, Josh Jackson, and Devin Booker, for instance.

They are not only three of the Suns’ four best players, but they are also – at the moment – considered the core of the franchise moving forward.

Worst of all, each of the three have also been ejected at least once over the past month, Devin Booker’s physically unprovoked shove of Gorgui Dieng of the Minnesota Timberwolves being the most egregious – for a number of reasons.

The problem that the young Suns have faced has been two-fold: one, only T.J. Warren played more than a single season in college; and two: none of them have played with a true veteran star, a player with both age and maturity on his side (ala Tyson Chandler), but also served as the centerpiece of a franchise, and done so both successfully and maturely.

While players like Chandler and Jamal Crawford are good examples of how to practice well, neither of them (nor anyone else this franchise has employed since Steve Nash) have been both the star of a franchise and the centerpiece, and thus cannot both impart true and necessary wisdom in that manner, nor take their stardom to Phoenix which would allow him to deflect a lot of the weight and pressure that Booker, Warren, and Jackson all undoubtedly feel, but are not equipped to handle at this time.

Although he has never been an all-star, adding Mike Conley at least gives Phoenix a player that has both the experience in age but also experience in star power and centerpiece leadership that might actually take the pressure that Booker (in particular) so desperately needs while he grows in both game, and maturity.

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