The Phoenix Suns have spent their offseason pivoting away from being a team with championship expectations, to one that is once again building around Devin Booker. The key difference this time however is that Booker is now 28-years-old, and it remains to be seen if he has the stomach to wait and see how this version of the roster pans out.
Owner Mat Ishbia was the person who signed off on the change of direction, although few could argue it wasn't the right time to do so. The Suns were firmly in the second apron and had no outs, having failed to make the playoffs last season. Trading Kevin Durant - and more importantly buying out Bradley Beal - were hardly ideal solutions, but they did allow the Suns to reset around Booker.
Michael Pina's scathing opinion of Ishbia is deserved.
Now that we've hit the real dog days of the offseason, Michael Pina and Howard Beck took to The Ringer's NBA Show to both look ahead to 2026, while also criticising some of the owners and teams in the here and now. Unsurprisingly Ishbia's name came up, with Pina going as far as to say that - if he was a fan of the Suns - Ishbia is the last person he would want to own that team.
That unfortunately is justified, even after making the moves that the Suns did this offseason. While they received some credit for accepting the expensive and top-heavy roster they had built was never going to compete, Ishbia undid all of that good work by taking to social media to clap back at the "so called experts" who rightly don't think they're going to be very good this season.
It would have been better to just say nothing, having also been the guy who once proclaimed that 26 of 29 other GMs would gladly swap places and head to The Valley when they had Booker, Durant and Beal together. How did that work out again? Then there was the strange decision to publicly praise the Phoenix Mercury recently.
Ishbia appearing to suggest they do everything the Suns don't to win games. Maybe we read too much into that one, but the timing was awful nonetheless because it came hot on the heels of two minority owners of the franchise suing Ishbia. It should be pointed out that these are the final two holdovers from when Robert Sarver owned the team.
But it is the kind of unwelcome distraction that Ishbia has sadly become known for. In some ways he's the opposite of his star player Booker, who does trash talk on the court but also does his best work in the same place. On the court. When he's not taking to social media or holding press conferences to big up his franchise, he's in the news for all of the wrong reasons. Ishbia cares, but Pina is right.