Exits: Sun gods, ranked
After a lurching postseason, Phoenix could use some divine lessons in urgency.
Here’s Helios, labouring, face set in exasperation, the four horses at the end of his tethers dragging his chariot across the sky with more than enough kick that he could, ostensibly, ditch the eye-rolling huffiness for the pleasure in this. In being the one who gets to tow, easily, the sun out for another day. A good lesson in best face forward, because Apollo would eventually steal his job.
What happened here?
Down in this city sprouting from the desert, diminutive to the mountains permanently edged in the pulsing mirage of heat, tallest buildings clumped and sprouting at solemn and strange angles like so many saguaros out where what’s not been further flattened and paved over is allowed to climb, craggy, into the canyons. Up where the mule deer, javelinas, the coatimundi and coyotes snuffle and growl, snap and clash. Ironwood, mesquite, prickly pear, rock daisies chained in protest around their furry crowns when they go tearing through the hardy, thick tufts of it clumped in the crooks of the mesas.
But basketball is no natural order. Proof of that is in how the Suns, seemingly in the stretch of weeks, turned away from their own ingrained habits — diligence, quietude, functionality, being really good at basketball — and went, not even feral, but flat. Feral would have been welcome. Feral would have been Chris Paul smirking that familiar taunting grin, edging in and out, light steps around the paint no one pegged as prowling, as probing, until too late. Deandre Ayton, green lit to heave his body downhill, to lift to the rim sure as sunrise. Devin Booker, fluid and coy, no easy buckets, sure — except for his. Mikhal Bridges and his light touch, even when he’s coming from behind to tip the ball away in a chasedown or lift to a mid-air lob and dunk, dainty as a finger roll.
What the Suns lost was, still is, duplicitous. To their fans, certainly, but more fundamentally to their better nature. Like a hare changing course, bolting clear of the cottonwoods and springing straight into the mouth of what wants it for dinner. What, not who, was this team? To get out ahead and crumple under pressures they were immune to for 82 games.
Was that it? Covid? The virus the league tried its best to tuck under the rug all season, some symbolic interpretation of a serpentine tail sticking out and swishing finally catching Phoenix at the ankles, taking them down. While it isn’t fair, or right, to doubt that explanation, something further never came. What’s worse, we’ve set this all up in a way that nothing has to.
Huītzilōpōchtli, tiny and furious, smallest of four siblings and roughly translated to “left-handed hummingbird”. Vengeful, jealous, critical to pay tribute to because of how he is made to forever be chasing his siblings, the moon and the stars, and if he were to grow weary, to tire, his brothers and sisters would destroy their mother, and thus the world. A shitty racket.
Ra, falcon-headed guy I’m sure you’re familiar with. Tasked with taking the sun for never-ending roundtrips on his two solar barques — one for the daytime sky, the other for the underworld at night — relentlessly pursued by Apophis, a gigantic serpent who tried, every day, to eat the boats. Ra who, by no fault of his own, nearly bankrupted Egypt in its Fifth Dynasty because the pharaohs couldn’t stop spending all their money on sun temples.
It became clear, in Game 7, what the Suns had been missing all season. What I had not seen when I wrote they made for bad cowboys, what the team was never forced to see in a season where they finished a definitive first in the West, what was absent because when a group is that dominant there’s an ease that comes to settle in a dreamy haze, like a light heat stroke, across everything they do.
Urgency.
That pivotal, do-or-die game was close for all of seven minutes. Phoenix, at home, ostensibly aware they’d let themselves be backed into this position, came out cautious while the Mavs took a lesson from Luka Doncic and came out detrimentally as themselves. That is, smirking, scoffing, scolding, sharp. The Suns don’t have answers for that kind of basketball. Theirs is reliant on ethics, a certain level of stoicism, on the rules, in their literal translation, being applied throughout the contest. The Mavs are, we tend to forget, pretty rude.
The tangle for Phoenix was two-fold: a growing understanding that the pace had been stolen and set, and that it was something they’d never had to consider all season.
The Suns were 9th in pace overall. While it’s not everything — the Warriors were 13th, but the Warriors also have the walking metronome of Steph Curry — why was it that Dallas, ranked dead last, came to control the clip so easily? This is after the astronomic jump the Suns made from last season to this, up from 26th. Without any major roster changes from that season to this it’s fair to say possessions and how this team used them were on the minds of Monty Williams and his staff after the team lost it all to the Bucks (subsequently, ranked 2nd).
It’s hard to pinpoint the slipping moment, when Game 7 went from something up for grabs to a demoralizing keep-away, but to me control was lost when a high, not particularly intentional pass by Jae Crowder was tipped lightly out of the air by Dorian Finney-Smith and Dallas went hammering down the floor only to stop, reset, and wait for Doncic, who walked to meet them, then went slipping between Ayton and Bridges for a lifting, almost elegant, layup.
This is supposed to be about the Suns.
I know, but when it takes barely a dozen transitions to be overshadowed, eclipsed, there in the baking cradle of your own home, you start to see what the problem is. You don’t even need to squint.
Amaterasu, goddess of the sun and universe, whose younger brother was such a brat that he tore up her rice fields and shit in her palace. Insult to injury, he one day tore the roof off her weaving hall and threw a heavenly, live horse down into Amaterasu’s giant loom, flaying it alive. Fed up, she took to a cave, plunging heaven and earth into darkness.
Bila, a cannibal, fond of roasting the people she sent slavering red and black dogs out to capture and drag back to her over a fire. Not enough to let her do her roasting in peace, the lizard men Kudnu and Muda chased her off, casting the world into darkness. Realizing their celestial botch job, they captured her with a boomerang, forcing her to loop across the sky, over and over again, forever.
Marici, either riding a charging boar or standing in a flaming chariot pulled by seven horses or seven boars. Multi-limbed, between one to six heads, wears a necklace of skulls or else, in repose, sits on a lotus, or a lotus on the back of seven pigs. Options.
The urgency for this team should have already been piqued. To keep the core group the same, opt for some sunny, smart shoring up in JaVale McGee, Aaron Holiday, Bismack Biyombo, and Jalen Smith, all to buy Paul what he needs the most, which is time.
To know how close the team got last season, a tooth scrape away, and not immediately look to see what it was impossible not to have felt forming underfoot. Tectonic plates of the West shifting, firming up, the path for the Suns to get back to not even the Finals, but out of the first rounds, cutting through New Orleans, then north Texas.
It’s tough to say why they idled, when what the Suns were doing all season looked productive, diligent, effective. A bit like the feeling on a moving sidewalk when you pass smugly all the people who have opted to walk on their own steam through an airport’s concourse, until you step off and your velocity splits from the conveyor, catching you lurchingly off guard. Only the Suns didn’t step off into some terminal foodcourt, able to idle in an airport’s suspended concept of time. Phoenix was suddenly in the postseason. And why did they seem surprised? Empty handed? Gone was the bossiness of the playoffs prior — executed elementally by Paul — and efficiency of their regular season.
This isn’t all on the blowout of Game 7. A Covid outbreak caught the team on the chin but the reticence was there, mingling with the good parts of the Suns staidness (Williams’ patience and composure, Paul’s perfectionism, Booker’s cool finesse), all the while. It lingers now, too, with Paul’s window closing and the team dragging their heels so strangely when it came to re-signing Ayton, a game of chicken with no benefit to either side, only the lingering question of why does this franchise seem to like driving with its eyes closed?
Urgency isn’t panic. It can sour or slide into it, but it’s first the sense of something pressing, quite critical. The one commonality that seems to run between sun gods, no matter the era or realm of their origin, is it was when they strayed, got snagged by coercion or compulsion beyond themselves, that they suffered for it. The world quite often did, too.
This is basketball, myth-making in a vacuum. Still, I wonder what it is the Suns will rise to.
Beaivi, Sami goddess of the sun but also, sanity. They had it right.