Basketball Armageddon may be coming for the Suns

The Phoenix Suns are unraveling in real time.

I can hear Steven Tyler wailing in my ear. “I don’t wanna close my eyes, I don’t wanna fall asleep, ’cause I’d miss you, baby, and I don’t wanna miss a thinggggggg!”

Why is my brain dragging me back to the 1998 blockbuster movie Armageddon? Because here in Phoenix, it feels like we’re standing on the edge of just that. Basketball Armageddon. In the movie, an asteroid named Dolly was barreling toward Earth, with fiery fragments slamming into Manhattan first. (Because, let’s be honest, in disaster flicks, only the NYC really matters. King Kong didn’t visit Memphis, Godzilla was pouncing around Des Moines, and asteroids hitting Salt Lake City don’t have the same pizzazz) But those early impacts were just the warning shots before potential total annihilation.

That’s exactly where the Phoenix Suns are right now.

The season is dead. No miracle comeback, no redemption arc. Just the wreckage of what was supposed to be a superteam, now burning on impact. And like those asteroid fragments, the destruction is already hitting home. The egos are flaring. The blame game is in full swing. The fan base, boiling with frustration, is looking for a villain. And inside the Suns organization, the same thing is happening. Snarky postgame jabs, side-eye comments, and whispers from NBA insiders that paint a picture of a franchise spiraling out of control.

The first chunk of asteroid to crash into Planet Orange came courtesy of Jusuf Nurkic, who, before being shipped off to Charlotte, casually dropped a nuclear-level truth bomb: he and head coach Mike Budenholzer hadn’t spoken in two months. Two whole months of silence between the team’s only real big man and the guy calling the shots.

The one player who brought size, rebounding, and anything resembling interior defense wasn’t just traded, he was discarded. No effort to mend fences, no attempt to salvage the relationship. Feel free to blame everyone involved, because that’s a failure across the board.

Then came the Kevin Durant debacle.

A guy who, by all accounts, wasn’t looking to be moved suddenly found himself on the trade block at the deadline. At first, it was easy to dismiss as due diligence. Front offices take calls all the time, keep conversations open, and maintain relationships. You don’t just ghost other GMs, not if you plan on doing business in the future.

But this? This went beyond that. The Suns nearly traded Kevin Durant without even consulting him. And when word got out, the fallout was immediate. KD had no interest in returning to Golden State, and he made it clear why. But that didn’t change the fact that this was yet another case of the Suns front office playing fast and loose, operating with all the grace of a blackjack player doubling down on a bad hand.

Trust, once broken, is hard to repair. And the cracks in the foundation were now impossible to ignore.

And now? Devin Booker is visibly fed up. His postgame comments after Thursday’s loss to the Pelicans made that crystal clear. The Suns don’t talk. They don’t communicate. They don’t act like a team.

This kind of thing is the “story of the season thus far,” Booker said. “It could be fixed with just a little bit more talking, I’d say. Things get tough, we get quiet as a team, and, from my experience and what I’ve seen, that’s not the way to get through it.”

And then came the bigger impact, the kind that doesn’t just rattle the landscape but shifts the tectonic plates of the franchise itself. Devin Booker, the face of the team, was reportedly told to “tone it down” by his own head coach.

If Chris Haynes’ report is accurate, this is a catastrophic misstep by Mike Budenholzer. Leadership isn’t something you suppress. It’s something you foster. You don’t tell your franchise player to quiet down; you empower him to be your voice on the court. A coach should want their best player to be an extension of their message, not a rival to it. Instead, Budenholzer is pushing against the one thing this team desperately needs: accountability.

This isn’t just a crack in the armor. This is a warning sign that the Suns aren’t just failing on the court, they’re unraveling from within. And if this asteroid keeps picking up speed, total impact might be inevitable.

And now, we sit. We watch. We wait. The remainder of the season will play out, but the real question is whether it even matters. More importantly, we look to the sky and see the asteroid hurtling toward us.

Total impact is on the table. The potential exists to blow this thing up entirely. For doomsday to arrive. For the asteroid to smash into Planet Orange and leave behind nothing but dust and memories. No Kevin Durant. No Devin Booker. Some might call that a solution, but I’m not convinced.

Recency bias is a hell of a drug. It’s made us forget where we were a decade ago. The long nights, the lost seasons, the desperation of irrelevance. Make no mistake, this season has been uniquely maddening. But even through the frustration, the dysfunction, the sheer absurdity of it all, there’s still something here. There’s still talent that, in the right hands and fostered correctly, could be salvaged.

But the problem? We don’t know who’s holding the controls. We don’t know if there’s a crew capable of flying toward this asteroid and defusing the situation. And that’s the scariest part. I wonder if Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck can save us?

So we do what Suns fans do best. We wait. We throw on some Aerosmith, let Steven Tyler wail into the void, and try — desperately — to not miss a thing.

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