http://grantland.com/features/from-the-ashes/
BY JONATHAN ABRAMS ON JANUARY 30, 2014
A once-proud franchise had fallen on hard times. It was 1988, and the Phoenix Suns had just finished a futile season: 28 wins and 54 losses — 34 games behind the division leader in their fourth straight losing campaign. The future looked bleak. But it couldn’t turn out worse than what the team had just endured.
Phoenix was still recovering not just from on-court failure, but also scandal and tragedy. In April 1987, the biggest drug bust in NBA history implicated three active members of the team — James Edwards, Jay Humphries, and Grant Gondrezick — as well as two former Suns, Garfield Heard and Mike Bratz. Authorities brought the charges after troubled Suns star Walter Davis testified in exchange for immunity. The prosecution’s case would unravel, but by then the inner strife of a divided locker room had been revealed. The team’s core was broken. Four months later, center Nick Vanos, his fiancée, and 154 other people were killed in a plane crash.
Reeling from 12 months of struggle and in search of rebirth, the franchise turned to a familiar face.
Cotton Fitzsimmons first came to the Suns in 1970, immediately guiding the nascent franchise to its first winning season. A basketball lifer who began coaching at a junior college in Missouri before advancing to Kansas State and the NBA, he rejoined the team as director of player personnel one year before again becoming head coach in ’88. Fitzsimmons stood 5-foot-7, nearly a foot shorter than his players. But they respected his ironclad principles and forthright manner. He didn’t mince words about the job ahead of him.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he said at his reintroductory press conference in May 1988. “Now we just have to do it. I’m aware it’s a young team and they have defensive problems. But I think we can play an up-tempo game next season — run off missed free throws and made field goals.”
Fitzsimmons and Jerry Colangelo, the team’s vice-president and general manager, earned the scorn of an avid fan base when they traded away its one chip, popular high-scoring All-Star Larry Nance, to Cleveland for an unproven haul midway through the season. Things were going to get worse, it seemed, before they got better. The deal returned Kevin Johnson, an unproven point guard who had played limited minutes behind Mark Price during his rookie season; center Mark West; forward Tyrone Corbin; and a future first-round draft pick that fell just outside the lottery, 14th overall. The Suns chose Dan Majerle from unheralded Central Michigan with that pick.
