Phoenix Suns fans should give Robert Sarver one more chance
By Andrew Clark
The Phoenix Suns are having another awful season, but all blame should not be on Robert Sarver as history explains the situation he has been placed in.
Phoenix Suns fans hate Robert Sarver. That’s not a secret, it’s not a subtle movement, it’s a simple statement of fact.
There isn’t a fanbase more disenchanted with their owner this side of New York City.
I’m not here to buck conventional wisdom or to be an apologist, but as fans I think we owe the guy one more chance.
Fans are fickle. It comes with the foam finger. When you fill out your application to become a Suns fan you are required to adopt a selective view of history that entails unwarranted nostalgia and endless pessimism for the future.
I think if we apply a touch of reality it might help you see my point.
Yes, Jerry Colangelo is the godfather of Phoenix basketball.
Yes, he did put together some great and competitive teams as both a general manager and owner. The guy gets what goes into making a good on the court product.
But what he didn’t know how to do was to run a sustainable business.
In 1987 Jerry put together an investment group that bought the team for $44.5 million, of which he owned 20%.
Phoenix Suns
By the time he sold the team in 2004, Colangelo was $200 million in debt. A debt which our friend Robert Sarver agreed to inherit.
To put that amount of financial mismanagement into perspective, it would be akin to Sarver running up a debt of nearly $1.5 billion today.
For those wishing that Colangelo would have held onto the team, he couldn’t. He couldn’t afford to because he didn’t know how.
With that background in mind, Sarver took over the Phoenix Suns franchise that was not only mired in debt, but at the time, also playing sub-par basketball.
In 2001-02 they went 36-46. 2002-03 saw slight improvement to a pedestrian 44-38 before plummeting back to 29-53 in 2003-04
When Sarver took over in 2004, he flew with a contingent of key faces in the franchise to Dallas, signed away (stole, really) Steve Nash, and coupled with the hiring of Mike D’Antoni, the team vaulted to a league-best 62-20.
Imagine for a second that you were Robert Sarver in 2004-05.
He must have felt like a mother-blanking genius.
He took over a franchise drowning in debt and playing sub-part basketball, took a small financial risk on an aging point guard and suddenly you’re the best team in the NBA, the group is a cultural phenomena, and you’re making bank.
In his mind, he probably thought that he was the best owner in sports – and not without some serious justification.
And then it all starts to turn.
Joe Johnson’s situation is a debacle. Everyone thinks so at the time, and even Sarver has since acknowledged he broke up the band unnecessarily.
If you remember though, he was trying to pull himself out of the ruinous hole that Jerry left him. That doesn’t excuse some of the mistakes, but if you understand the debt and the desire not to be in the same “I have to sell before I go broke” boat that Colangelo was in, you might start to understand why Johnson happened or why Rudy Fernandez, Nate Robinson, Serge Ibaka, Kurt Thomas, Shawn Marion, etc. happened.
Yes, it was painful and short-sighted, but it kept the team in the black and the team was hyper-competitive for the first six years of Robert’s reign despite all the drama.
After all that happens, the darkness really sets in.
Lindsay Hunter, Lance Blanks, Earl Watson, you know the drill.
It has been a miserable decade.
The problem is, Sarver drank his own koolaid. He thought he had been smartest guy in the room for the first six years and not without reason.
He was right far more often than he was wrong.
However, when the bottom fell out, it really fell out and it has been a humbling experience for the once highly successful Sarver.
However bleak the past has been, Sarver deserves one most shot to prove that he has learned to be humble from making bad decisions.
As Mark Twain famously said, “good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement.”
Lord knows, Sarver has the experience to use good judgement going forward.
The Phoenix Suns are well-positioned to turn the ship around.
Draft Zion Williamson or Ja Morant and sign a decent free agent or two and life looks a lot different next year than it has for the last decade.
Put in a competent president of basketball operations and/or a general manager who brings back Kelly Oubre, trades T.J. Warren and Josh Jackson for good assets, and life probably looks great for the Suns for the next decade.
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Has Sarver been bad for the team?
It’s easy to say most definitely, but if you look at history through a longer lens, you just might be wiling to give him one more chance to prove that he can produce a sustainable winner on the court and a sustainable franchise off of it.
That’s a condition the franchise has never been in and it is worth rooting for.