With Disney World set to be the bubble site for an NBA return, we thought it would be fun to compare the Phoenix Suns to a Disney animated film.
All the momentum seems to point to Disney World being the bubble site for the NBA’s return to play, so in the spirit of Mickey, we here at Valley of the Suns thought it would be fun to compare the Phoenix Suns franchise to an animated Disney film.
For starters, comparing the Phoenix Suns franchise to a Disney film is tougher than you might think. However, after long consideration, The Princess and the Frog seems most fitting. Stay with me.
Even though many Disney films, especially the earlier ones, have darker aspects to them (if you don’t believe me watch the original ‘Pinocchio’ from 1941, it is essentially an hour and a half of child trafficking, sinister experiments, and terror), the general premise of the classic Disney animated film is “all’s well that ends well” as the main characters get their happy ending.
The Phoenix Suns franchise (as painful as this is to type) has never gotten its fairytale ending, i.e. winning an NBA title.
As it stands, the Suns are one of the two NBA franchises in league history that have a top 10 winning percentage and no NBA titles. The other is the Utah Jazz.
For as consistently good as the Jazz have been (especially when compared to the Suns in the 2010s), there are really only two seasons in their history where they were championship-level good, 1997, and 1998.
They had a healthy roster and a fair chance to dethrone Michael Jordan on the last leg of his NBA domination, and if we are being honest, they might not have really even been championship-caliber then. The same Jazz team that couldn’t get past the 2nd round of the Western Conference playoffs when John Stockton and Karl Malone were in their early 30s because of Hakeem Olajuwon and the Rockets, Charles Barkley and the Suns, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp of the Sonics, and David Robinson of the Spurs, were able to take advantage of a down Western Conference in the late 90s and make their first NBA Finals appearance in their mid to late 30s.
Hakeem was past his peak as was Barkley, Robinson was past his prime, Kemp was in Cleveland and starting to let himself go and Duncan, Shaq and Kobe hadn’t hit their stride yet.
Back to the Phoenix Suns…
The Phoenix Suns have had many heartbreaks and missed opportunities.
In my estimation (as an admittedly slightly biased Suns fan) there are seven seasons in which the Suns were championship-caliber: 1993, 1994, 1995, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2010.
The 2004-05 season is debatable in my opinion. Even though they finished with the best record in the NBA, lost to the eventual champion the San Antonio Spurs in the conference finals and were without Joe Johnson until Game 3 in that series (they were already down 2-0, losing the first two games at home), they were basically dominated by the Spurs.
Considering the fact that Suns are zero-for-seven with turning these seasons into an NBA championship (zero-for-eight if you include the 1976 NBA Finals, they were lucky to be there though) and all of the unfortunate things that happened to them in those seven seasons, it has to be a Disney movie that is centered around a curse.
Here is a quick recap of the heartbreaking event that occurred in each of those seasons:
1993: John Paxson shot
1994: Blown 2-0 lead in western conference semifinals to eventual champion Houston Rockets
1995: Blown 3-1 lead in western conference semifinals to eventual champion Houston Rockets, Mario Elie “Kiss of Death” shot
2005: Joe Johnson injury
2006: Amar’e Stoudemire injury
2007: Nash’s bloody nose, unwarranted suspensions, Tim Donaghy
2010: Metta World Peace’s putback at the buzzer in Game 5
When you consider the fact that the Cubs, Red Sox, and Eagles have won championships in recent years, it seems like the Phoenix Suns and the Buffalo Bills (four straight Super Bowl losses in the 90s) are the most cursed franchises in professional sports.
So, keeping this in mind, the Disney movie comparison options were narrowed down.
The Phoenix Suns’ Disney movie comparison runner up was a close one.
After some research and searching for parallels, I narrowed my Disney animated film search down to two movies: Aladdin and The Princess and the Frog.
Aladdin came out in 1992, right when the Suns acquired Charles Barkley and became serious title contenders. Jordan was kind of like Jafar and Aladdin was Barkley trying to break through to the kingdom or Jasmine’s heart, Jasmine is the NBA title in this scenario.
The idea of Jafar and the Sultan representing the NBA keeping the Suns down, especially with the Suns-Spurs series in 2007, and generally all of the purple tones in the film made me think of the Suns.
The Suns have never had a genie (that is more of a Lakers thing) to grant them wishes though and the film was a huge success and won multiple awards.
It is also one of the films that sparked Disney’s revival and dominance after a rough decade in the 1980s.
That combined with the fact that it is one of the most revered and popular films in Disney history, made it feel like an inauthentic portrayal of the Phoenix Suns franchise.
I decided to go with The Princess and the Frog.
The many parallels between the Phoenix Suns and The Princess and the Frog.
While the movie would work well for the Utah Jazz franchise as well considering it is based in New Orleans where the Jazz franchise originated, it feels right for the Suns.
The title, the setting, and the movie posters make it pretty clear that a major aspect of the film involves a curse and a voodoo master.
The Suns have always been the frog waiting for a kiss from a princess to make them a prince and being the most cursed franchise in the NBA, voodoo just makes sense doesn’t it?
The Sun’s bad luck has lasted for 50 plus years, starting when they lost a coin flip to the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969 for the right to draft the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (he was Lew Alcindor then).
That was two years into their history and they never had a No.1 pick until 2018 when they won the draft lottery and selected who will likely become their first great center: Deandre Ayton. Here is to hoping he is the key to breaking the curse, but he has a long way to go.
The film was also the first film that used traditional 2D Disney animation in decades and is reportedly the last film to be done in that animation. That kind like it feels like the Suns are the last great NBA franchise to not have won an NBA title.
There are even more parallels. The film was groundbreaking as it was the first Disney animated film to feature a black Disney princess (pretty sad it took Disney that long) and despite being very critically acclaimed with a wonderful plot, visuals, music and was culturally significant (like the Suns teams of the mid-90s and 2000s) it won zero Academy Awards and Golden Globes, despite four nominations.
That feels very relatable to the Suns franchise on many fronts.
It also was released in November 2009, around the time when the 2009-10 NBA season, the last season in which the Suns were perilously close to winning an NBA title, began.
It lost to the all-time great Pixar Film, ‘Up!’, which was the last in a series of amazing Pixar films in the 2000s, eerily similar to it being Kobe’s last title run in 2010, the culmination of the paramount decade in his legendary career.
The Princess and the Frog was revolutionary for Disney and black representation in film, much like the seven-seconds-or-less era. The Suns were the first to master the uptempo, team-oriented style of basketball we see in the NBA today.
The Princess and the Frog also helped pave the way for Marvel’s first black-centric superhero film, ‘Black Panther’ which was released in 2018, won tons of awards, and is a global phenomenon.
This is akin to the Golden State Warriors evolving from the Nash-era Suns style of play with Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green (and later Kevin Durant) and receiving a ton of awards, i.e. NBA titles, and praise for it.
So there you go, my best stab at comparing the Phoenix Suns with a Disney animated film. Who has one better?