Dear Adam Silver: It is time to seize the Phoenix Suns

It is time for Adam Silver to guide the NBA to force Robert Sarver to sell the Phoenix Suns.

The NBA forcing a team to sell would be a dramatic step for a league that is traditionally very risk averse.

However, stuffy David Stern is gone, and the situation in Phoenix just demands it at this point.

The Phoenix Suns are run by a private ownership group, but they operate at the will of the National Basketball Association. For the league to seize the Suns they’ll need their board of directors to authorize the seizure.

This presents a political problem because the board consists of owners who don’t exactly have an incentive to see the board sprint down a pathway that might ultimately end up with any of them potentially being ousted from their own team.

That said, the owners have to realize that the Suns’ situation is unique. It’s not Donald Sterling bad, but it’s clearly a liability for the league’s brand as a whole.

Phoenix Suns

Imagine you owned another big national brand like Wendy’s or McDonald’s.

If you had a franchise owner who had a store without a qualified general manager, kept firing it’s day-to-day supervisor, whose location had rats running around, and who was serving customers food they didn’t order, as the owner of the brand, you would revoke their license and you’d force them to shut down or sell off.

Why do big brands force franchises to meet those standards?

Because if they don’t then you would have different stores selling different products and the value of your overall brand and business would diminish.

That’s what happening to the NBA with the Suns. The way that the team performs is not an aberration, it’s an operating model.

It’s a level of ineptitude from the top that diminishes the value of the product. No one in their right mind wants to pay to see the Phoenix Suns play.

Hell, they’re barely worth watching on TV.

That’s not only true to Suns fans, but it’s true of the fans of every team they play.

ESPN recently dedicated a fair amount of ink to the how Robert Sarver has driven the organization into the ground. We don’t need to rehash the goat dung or the Grant Hill episode, but if you haven’t read the article you should.

Since publishing that article the Suns have handed the reigns over to a GM who is both unqualified and uninterested in the duties of a GM.

They compounded that problem by hiring Jeff Bower who isn’t exactly the king of the modern NBA management approach.

This leaves the team trapped with a good guy running the organization, but a guy who isn’t going to run an elite organization that keeps surrounding himself with equally unqualified staff who can’t fill in those weaknesses.

In case that wasn’t enough dysfunction, the Suns decided that 22-year-old Devin Booker needs his fifth coach – five years.

Look, this might all work out. The Suns might be able to snag Ja Morant and sign enough pieces to get competitive, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The odds are, this team is going to plummet into the depths of ever further despair.

The NBA needs to realize this isn’t like the Philadelphia situation where a competent operator was intentionally destroying the on the court product as part of a long-term strategy.

This is an entire organization who is destroying the on the court product while trying its best to win. The organization has shown no signs of self-awareness, remorse, or intent to change.

That Is why it is time for Adam Silver to step up and ask the owners to save the league’s image from one of its own.

It is time to sell the Suns.