The NBA rivalries that matter: Suns vs. Lakers

For the past few years, the death of rivalries has been an endlessly recycled talking point. The idea is that NBA players are too friendly and it’s diluted the league’s competitive spirit. It’s also absurd. NBA rivalries are as intense as they’ve ever been and this week at The Step Back, we’re celebrating the rivalries that matter today, and the ones that will shape the league’s next decade.

Sports fandom exists in an individual in disagreement with others, a fleeting cycle of interpersonal one-upmanship designed to pit one team and their fanbase against another. Rivalry can be based on geography or philosophy, but one of its primary effects is to distinguish teams’ characteristics and successes.

For a city that started to see explosive population growth in the 1970s and had a team in each of the four major U.S. sports leagues by the late 1990s, Phoenix has an abysmal, albeit long, sports history. The Suns have been around since the 1960s, when Basketball’s Chairman, Jerry Colangelo, brought the team to the Valley of the Sun, and yet they’ve never won a championship. In fact, Phoenix’s only major sports league title came from the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks, who followed up that performance with two decades’ worth of mediocrity.

To say Phoenix is not a sports city is to pretend there’s no thirst for sports greatness. That if one of these teams changed things around and was dominant for a considerable stretch of time, it wouldn’t change the atmosphere of fandom locally. None of that is true. Rather, Phoenix fans have been treated to years of inconsistency and mismanagement, as if the powerful people who run their teams don’t realize they’re even there.

In many ways, Phoenix’s placement in the country is its best tool for generating sports intrigue. Close enough to big media markets in Texas and California, the local teams can create rivalry that takes a bite out of the fervor in nearby sports meccas. Of course, Phoenix is similar to Los Angeles in many ways, from its urban sprawl environment to its demographic makeup, mostly of imports from elsewhere in the country. Yet because of its inability to put together competitive teams, Phoenix has not been able to flip transplants from the midwest and southwest into Arizona sports fans.

The closest they ever got was the Seven Seconds or Less Suns, perhaps the most impactful modern basketball team and perennially underachieving in a way that befits their Arizona heritage. Behind two-time MVP Steve Nash, himself a transplant from Canada by way of Santa Clara University and the Dallas Mavericks, those Suns were annual favorites to make a title run.

They never did. Instead, their run of dominance was defined, notoriously, by signature moments of failure or sheer bad luck.

Three times, the Suns’ freight train of improvisational offense was redirected off a cliff by the San Antonio Spurs. But those series’ could often be chalked up to misfortune — a broken nose here, erroneous enforcement of the “immediate vicinity” rule there. It was instead the Lakers who resoundingly put an end to those Suns’ reign.

In 2010, Phoenix came out of nowhere with a combination of young unknowns and famous veterans to return to the conference finals, sweeping the Spurs in the process. With Nash on his last legs and Amare’ Stoudemire’s Suns tenure finishing up, it looked like fate may have favored Phoenix, for once.

In retrospect, Phoenix sports fans maybe should have known better.

Kobe Bryant, on the cusp of a fifth ring and eligible to claim that season too as his own last shot, led his Lakers to a 4-2 series victory that would propel them to another championship.

Since that point, Phoenix has changed coaches five times and is on its third general manager. The players currently on the roster were teenagers then. Los Angeles ended Seven Seconds or Less, finally getting revenge for their own misery in loss after loss to Nash and the Suns.

The staccato “Beat LA” chant ought to be made the soundtrack to Arizona sports fandom, in the same standardized way people listen to heartbreaking ballads when they’ve been broken up with. It’s been hollered at every Dodgers-DBacks or Suns-Lakers matchup I’ve ever attended. It’s never meant all that much, in light of reality. We chant “Beat LA” not to remember victories past, but to plead for a different future.

So it’s almost historical justice for Valley fans that, when it finally seems as if the Suns are emerging from the rebuild that 2010 Lakers victory brought about, with a roster full of young talent ready to compete for the next several years, the Lakers would answer, resoundingly, with the signing of the best player ever.

Before the LeBron James addition in July, one could have gone up and down each roster like a game on a children’s menu and connected each young Lakers star to one with the Suns. Devin Booker vs. Lonzo Ball. Josh Jackson vs. Brandon Ingram. Now, it’s just the specter of a season sweep staring down at a Suns team that has not made the playoffs in almost a decade. James, on the other hand, took the baton from Bryant in 2011 and has made the Finals every year since.

No, really: The Lakers’ new acquisition, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, has played in the NBA Finals every single summer since the Suns last entered the postseason.

Even before he signed six hours away, the Suns’ roster of youngsters who grew up watching The King understood the tall order of dethroning him. Speaking after a 129-107 loss to Cleveland this March, third-year guard Devin Booker said, “You look at teams like Cleveland, you make one mistake and you’re out of the game. … We just need to be humbled a little bit.”

Booker wasn’t talking about J.R. Smith or Tristan Thompson. After a loss that allowed no margin for error, Booker was staring eye-to-eye with James’ exhausting excellence.

The league’s laggards during a dynasty like that of James or the Golden State Warriors are faced with the zero-sum dichotomy of trudging forward or collapsing once more. The Suns chose to keep trying to get better, adding young talent with the hope of one day going toe-to-toe with the best, no matter how inevitable their dominance might seem. Franchises restarting from the ground up have no room to focus in on one divisional opponent’s moves, but to see historical greatness re-emerge in the NBA city closest to theirs is surely no sign for optimism in Phoenix.

Now, with a budding star in Booker locked up to a prove-it long-term extension and several raw lottery picks filling out the roster, the Suns are staring to the western coastline crossing their fingers. It’s not just the four games each year they’ll have to face James and the Lakers, it’s the dread of knowing the history they’re up against, and the fact they entered into the rebuilding spiral hoping to come out better prepared to overcome the NBA’s great teams and may not have that chance.

The Suns can’t think like this. They have to be positive about what they’ve got, the process that led them to this point, and their ability to keep getting better. Rivalries can’t dominate process, but they often dictate outcome in a crushing way.