Hate the Owner, not the game – know your history
Did Danny Manning win anything with the L.A. Clippers?
How about Mitch Richmond in Golden State?
I know for a fact that Jason Kidd didn’t win in Dallas.
Are you telling me that somehow I missed Kevin Garnett winning a title in Minnesota?
What about DeMarcus Cousins in Sacramento?
Sometimes great players are drafted into franchises who’s owner knows more about counting dollars than wins and who fails to piece together the organization and roster necessary to win at a consistent rate.
Phoenix Suns
Devin Booker may not be widely considered great at the moment, yet I have never known a 21-year-old who averaged 26 points per game who was not at least eventually called great.
What if somehow Manning had been drafted by the Indiana Pacers in 1988. Don’t you think that a career paired up with Reggie Miller would have produced better results?
How about Mitch Richmond in Phoenix in that same draft? (The Suns ultimately took Tim Perry, Dan Majerle, and Andrew Lang in the first and second rounds). Isn’t it fair to say that Richmond with Kevin Johnson, Jeff Hornacek, Tom Chambers, and potentially Charles Barkley come 1992, would have ultimately led to better team results than what was accomplished in Golden State?
I could easily go on, and sometimes great players are taken by poor franchises run by awful owners,; a situation that right now Devin Booker is embroiled in.
Hopefully Sarver has learned how to stay the hell away and that his separation from the franchise’s day-to-day events on every level is actually beneficial to the game played on the court.
If so, then maybe Booker can actually be a part of a winning franchise even with a sub-par owner, in which case he can potentially rise above the fray of those other stars who were great but could not ultimately find consistent success with awful franchises.
That said, let’s say he cannot: does anyone blame any of the aforementioned stars for their poor franchise’s overall performances?
Absolutely not.
And 22-year-old Devin Booker should not be blamed either.
This is information that current haters with NBA knowledge should easily recognize and keep in mind when seeing him put up un-Godly stats on an otherwise terribly pieced together team.
Devin Booker haters are wrong. They know it as well as you and I. Fortunately for him, it certainly appears that the Phoenix Suns will be better beginning this season and that hate will slowly fade away as wins become more of the norm.
For now though, Book will just have to continue to eat their hate for breakfast (I know fans are looking at you, Bill Simmons), and come 2019-20, improve that much more, hopefully carrying the Suns to where they want to go.