Fit is vital in the NBA. A player — even a very good player — can bounce around the league, making multiple stops before landing in the place where their game is fully unlocked. Dillon Brooks was a productive NBA player with the Grizzlies and a very good starter the past two years for the Rockets. But in year nine, at 30 years old, Brooks is having the best year of his career and helping usher in a new era of Suns basketball in the process.
Brooks' impact, both on the court and off, has been so crucial to this team makes sense that the Suns are shutting down any Brooks trade chatter before it even starts.
"Don't bother calling… Suns aren't interested. Dillon's not going anywhere," Suns owner Mat Ishbia posted on Twitter / X earlier this week in response to a hypothetical trade involving Brooks for Los Angeles Lakers guard Austin Reaves.
Sure, maybe it's just easy good PR for an owner to dismiss a trade that would never happen in real life (Reaves is going to sign a massive contract with the Lakers this summer) but it's still encouraging to see Ishbia talk so highly of a player — and have most Suns fans agree with his declaration. Brooks has brought an intensity to the Suns franchise that has been sorely lacking for as long as I can remember.
Dillon Brooks and the Suns are a match made in basketball heaven
For the past few years, the Suns have been a talented team without a lot of competitive juice. Dillon Brooks has had more competitive juice than his former teams wanted. It makes sense that team and player found each other like this, and the marriage has been even more harmonious than the most optimistic Suns fan would have predicted.
Brooks himself talked about how he appreciated Ishbia's clarity in his future with the team, saying in a recent media session:
“I appreciate it. Keeps everything where it's supposed to be in terms of basketball. I don’t even see all that type of stuff. My boy sent it to me, but I know the whole time I ain’t going nowhere.”
Dillon Brooks may not be a superstar in the NBA, but he plays a monumental role in making his teams better. Sometimes that's by irritating opponents, but it's always with effort, and this year with the Suns, it's with 21 points per game, too. Brooks was the afterthought of the Kevin Durant trade, and has morphed himself into perhaps the best trade acquisition this team has made in over a decade.