Former Head Coach Rips Suns After Offseason Moves

The Phoenix Suns have been a hot topic during the offseason after the Kevin Durant trade to the Houston Rockets.

Trading Durant to the Rockets was the proverbial white flag that saw the Suns accept the Durant era as a failure since the team failed to win the championship while he was in Phoenix.

Former NBA head coach Sam Mitchell, who works as an analyst for NBA TV, believes the Suns have been mismanaged since Mat Ishbia became the team's governor.

"You start giving out money," Mitchell said on SiriusXM NBA radio h/t Shane Garry Acedera of The Basketball Network.

"For what? What did we achieve? What did we do? You're giving me this money cos I'm the best player on our team, and you think it's gonna make me happy. It's a sugar high. What about winning? This team, to me, has been mismanaged."

The Suns thought that the solution to the problems plaguing the team were adding more top-tier contracts into the mix. They already forfeited all of their future draft capital to the Brooklyn Nets in the Durant trade back in 2023, so they completely went for broke.

It's a decision they could regret in the years to come.

"You keep giving money, and the rest of these guys around the league are saying, 'How my team gon' tell me 'no'. They didn't make the play-in. They didn't make the playoffs," Mitchell said.

"You own a team with Devin Durant, Bradley Beal. You didn't even make the play-in. That's like telling the guy you hire as a CEO and they have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. And you turn around and give him a raise."

The Suns are down, but it will be interesting to see how they respond in hopes of getting back to the top of the Western Conference in the years to come.