The squeaks of players’ shoes faded out by the roar of the stadium full of fans. The feeling of relief when a fans favorite team comes back as it would switch straight back to dismay when fans watch their favorite player miss a shot. One word, Basketball, these feelings are felt by viewers all over the world. Here in Arizona these feelings are no different for fans of the Phoenix Suns.
Fans of Phoenix Suns have recently been disappointed with how their performance has been. So far, as of writing this, the Phoenix Suns season win-loss record is
21 wins and 18 losses according to espn.com . While not being the worst record it is still disappointing for fans of the team as compared to their record in 2021 being 51 wins and 21 losses. While also losing at the very end in 2021 they still performed really well. Though this is the case many fans feel they have gotten worse over time.
There are many fans of the Suns at Thunderbird, some even among our staff who have been fans for a long time.” When asked how long she has been a fan, Thunderbird Councilor Brandee Bergen said, ”I was born and raised as a Suns fan”,” there were eras where they did bad and I was still and always will be a Suns fan”
Looking back like we did earlier on the Phoenix Suns record compared to past years there are a multitude of reasons we believe could contribute to the Phoenix Suns not performing as well this year .
One of those many reasons is the fact the Suns have a very different team than they did in 2021. With the Suns having never won a championship when they got so close in 2021 to then switch most of their players was very upsetting and disappointing to fans.
When asked about this Brandee commented, ”I don’t know why they changed so much to get Durant. The only player left from 2021 is Devin Booker, we had to get rid of so much for Durant when I feel like we should have kept building up that team because now we have to adapt to this new team and how they play”
This is a feeling felt among a lot of fans of the Phoenix Suns. We believe this to be the main reason for their subpar performance.
We also wanted to see the other side of how the Durant trade has affected the suns Oscar(insert last name) commented that he believes this Suns team will do better this year and that when the Durant trade happened he wasn’t super upset and felt he doesn’t know if they could still do that with that team or if they were lucky and is indifferent to it but says, ”they need to work together and play at least 6 to 7 games in a row together so they all can coordinate what works and what doesn’t
Overall the Phoenix Suns will do better over that is the main takeaway so far from research. In an article from Kevin Hicks on Inside The Suns.com,”All of this can be remedied – at least temporarily – by leaning into the basics of the game.“ During this article the writer discusses how he believes leaning into the core mechanics and communicating more can help the team. We believe this also to be the case as this was communicated through the interviews conducted as well.
All of this information leads us to believe that the Phoenix Suns will improve. We just need to let them heat up for a bit. Currently though we should still support even if they aren’t doing as well as we would prefer currently.
