Alan Williams was once a Phoenix Suns fan favorite for being a home-grown local kid. Zylan Cheatham could be the next player to fill that mold.
The Phoenix Suns are looking for a star in this draft. Whether they draft one or trade their pick for one, they need to enter 2019 with that kind of a significant upgrade somewhere on their roster.
If that kind of a player exists to be had and James Jones is able to acquire him, it will not matter if he came from our own backyard or the Moon, fans will love him just for being that next piece in the hopeful continued growth of the roster building towards playoff and championship contention.
But that’s the easy part of finding love in basketball.
Phoenix Suns
Bring a star and we all ogle at their abilities and emulate them in every athletic step of our lives. Fans will cheer louder when that player does well, forgive them eternally when they fail, and snap selfies with them (whether they realize it or not) every time we see him somewhere in public.
It happened with Charles Barkley (minus the selfie part), and it will happen again if Jones is able to convince Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, or some other superstar to sign with the Suns this summer.
Yet there is another way to attract significant, positive attention to both the team and an individual player: find somebody homegrown.
When Mario Bennett was selected out of Arizona State in 1995, it was the perfect pairing: a local college star who immediately began his career as a starter (following the recovery from offseason surgery), and whom fans cheered with over the top delight when he scored the first two points of his NBA career on a slam dunk to open his first game.
When Phoenix brought in Alan Williams in 2015, as he was both born and raised in the Valley and grew up a huge Suns fans, that fan connection was even stronger than with Super Mario because he was truly one of us.
For all of us natives to the Valley who too dreamed of one day playing for the Suns, we were able to live vicariously through him; and we cheered just a little bit louder whenever he succeeded on the court.
The opportunity to re-connect with the fans again is now with Zylan Cheatham, the perfect package of a local kid having both grown up here and played for Arizona State.
And hey – it doesn’t hurt that he plays power forward, a position the Phoenix Suns are sorely undermanned in.
Raised in Phoenix, he grew up a huge Suns fan, and after two seasons at San Diego State (who can blame him there – who wouldn’t want to live in San Diego), he transferred to Arizona State to play for Bobby Hurley and the Sun Devils.
Zylan yelled “OOOOHHH YEAHH!” as he walked in & “FORKS UP!!” as he walked out. His fam is pumped he’s working out here, and he’s dreamed about it too
— katherine fitzgerald (@kfitz134) June 1, 2019
But as perfect as that heart-warming move plot might be, the opportunity for a bigger story only gets better from there.
Not likely to be a first round pick, Cheatham is also not projected in most 60 picks mocks to even be selected at all.
To be fair, the draft is extremely difficult to project, and rarely to any mock drafts nail picks beyond the first 3-5, let alone anyone in the second round, but usually the majority of the names in a 60 pick draft are accurate, it’s their location that is harder to nail down.
So, while nbadraft.net doesn’t have him be taken at all, he could easily be seen as a high value pick by the Suns at 32 and surprise everyone with his selection there.
Either way, based on college statistics alone, he is a developmental player no matter how he ends up in the NBA – his one season at ASU being the only one of three college seasons that he averaged double-digits in either points (12.1) or rebounds (10.3).
Yet, what better than to see him begin his rise in the hearts of fans than as an undrafted free agent, spliting time in the D-League (the balance heavily leaning in favor of the Northern Arizona Suns), and methodically growing into a legitimate player in the NBA through several years of development.
I recently wrote about someone in a very similar situation in Pascal Siakam – a power forward who the Suns passed on drafting in 2016, and ask this with all legitimate wonder: why can’t Zylan Cheatham be the next Pascal?
Who knows if any of that is truly a possibility, however the chance for the Phoenix Suns to not only make a local kid’s dream come true and potentially see him develop into a good rotation player with the big club might be one that is too good to pass up.
Personally, I try not to project college talent as I have to admit to my overall ignorance on the non-professional sport. But I do love a good story, and another player who’s career I can follow with a more close and wondrous eye as a local boy myself, is something I would eagerly like to write about.