The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy

by Bill Simmons

What if the Suns didn’t screw up a potential Nash dynasty with some of the cheapest and most perplexing moves ever made? I wanted to avoid playing the “What if the front office did this instead of this?” game because it’s so subjective, but Phoenix’s wretched game plan from 2004 to 2008 had to be commemorated in some way. Here’s a detailed look. During the same summer they signed Nash, Phoenix traded the seventh pick in the ’04 Draft (and a chance to take either Luol Deng or Andre Iguodala) to Chicago for $3 million and a 2006 number one. One week later, they signed Quentin Richardson to a six-year, $42.6 million deal, even though they could have drafted Deng or Iguodala and paid either of them one-third what Richardson was getting. They kept Richardson for one year before swapping Q and their twenty-first pick (Nate Robinson) in the ’05 draft to the Knicks for Kurt Thomas. Two summers later, they dumped Thomas on Seattle along with two number ones just to shed him off their cap for tax purposes. As astounding as this sounds, Bryan Colangelo’s decision to sign Richardson instead of just drafting Deng or Iguodala—which was dumb at the time, by the way—ended up costing them four first-round picks!