Where Exorcising Your Demons Happens

Back in those dismal days of the 2006-2007 season, when my beloved Celtics were irrelevant and seemingly without direction, I adopted the Phoenix Suns as a sort of "second favorite" in an attempt to remind myself that the hopelessness of my true favorite's situation was not shared by every team in the league. With the return of Amare Stoudemire from injury, they appeared to be a squad which, if all the right pieces fell into place, could dethrone the Spurs and Mavs in the West, and prove once and for all that a fast-paced brand of basketball could lead a team to a title. Though they got off to a rocky start, they finished with a 61-21 record (second-best in the league to Dallas), and at one point were winners of 33 out of 35 games (with individual winning streaks of 15 and 17 games constituting the bulk of this run); their dispatching of the Lakers in the First Round set them up with a rematch with their rivals, the Spurs, who had defeated the Suns in the Conference Finals two seasons prior. If the Suns were going to win a championship that season, the seemingly most appropriate way in which they could do so would be to vanquish a team whose style of play was completely antithetical to that of "Seven Seconds or Less," and whose philosophy was of an era in which a run-and-gun mentality had been made impossible to act upon.

What followed has been well-documented and analyzed endlessly over the last three years. The Steve Nash nose injury in Game 1 and the Robert Horry-incident in Game 4 gave the Spurs enough of an advantage to finish off Phoenix, and subsequently proceed to win their third championship of the decade; the Suns bounced back with a successful regular season in 2008, though the addition of Shaq and the heartbreaking Game 1 loss to San Antonio in that season's First Round seemingly extinguished the vitality which had been such a large feature of the team in the seasons which that followed Nash's return to the desert in the summer of 2004. Although the Celtics had, by that point, added KG and Ray Allen and were making a run at a title, I still rooted for Phoenix; their trials and tribulations were the stuff of (basketball) tragedy, and were emblamatic of the seemingly inevitable (and, in my eyes, unfortunate) triumph of the "Right Way" philosophy over the more revolutionary (and fun) brand of basketball pushed by the Suns and their imitators.

With the completion of their sweep of the Spurs tonight, the Suns have washed away much of the pain of the last few years, and have subsequently transformed themselves from a historical perspective. Even if they lose to the Lakers in the next round, their decisive defeat of their arch-rivals will forever stand as proof that an up-tempo, fast-breaking team is capable of getting down and dirty, and hanging tough with a team of a supposedly more physical disposition. Two or three years ago Steve Nash's eye injury, or George Hill's four-point play, would have been enough to derail Phoenix; but this specific team is a different animal from past versions of the Suns, and has proven that it can withstand almost anything. Though the benefits of the additions of Grant Hill, Jared Dudley, Goran Dragic, Channing Frye, Robin Lopez, and Louis Admundson may not have been initially apparent, what these players collectively brought to the table may have been what Steve Nash (and, to a lesser extent, Amare Stoudemire) needed all along: teammates who were willing to go to war, and who would be adamant in their refusal to be intimidated by anyone, regardless of history and popular opinion.