1. '04-05 Steve Nash
2. '92-93 Charles Barkley
3. '89-90 Kevin Johnson
4. '69-70 Connie Hawkins
5. '05-06 Shawn Marion
Alright so, I'm in a moment where I can elaborate a bit more, and it's fun for it to happen with the Suns, who I've really come to appreciate as a franchise through the many decades of Jerry Colangelo's run. There's a throughline of Colangelo putting together exciting teams generation after generation - and shout out to the Westphal to Nance generations who didn't quite make my list.
The first two choices were simple for me. I do believe the two Suns' MVPs had the finest seasons ever in a Suns uniform, and yes I do believe Nash had the more impressive of the two seasons.
This surely doesn't come across as a surprise to folks who know me as someone with perhaps a Nash bias, but I'm going to share my history here a little bit.
Going into the '04-05 season I'd been a casual, as the kids call it nowadays. I'd been following sports from a very young age - I could and would read the sports page of the newspaper each day years before I was taught to read in school. There was much I couldn't decipher, but I was obsessed and particularly drawn to numbers and tables, and I would puzzle over what a particular thing meant until I got it. Nevertheless, despite loving to play basketball in particular as a kid, from a RealGM perspective, I remained quite naive about the game until Nash's '04-05 season.
I remember going into that season being a bit disappointed that the Suns didn't just hand Leandro Barbosa the reins as I was excited to see what he could do, and my favorite player at that time was Allen Iverson.
I remember being floored at how good the Suns were out of the gate when the season actually began and, among other things, gaining new respect for Nash.
But importantly, what drove me to look at things much more closely was not a love for Nash's game, but a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance after Nash got named Player of the Month and began getting talked about as an MVP candidate. My thought was "C'mon, be real, there's no way that THAT dude could be the MVP of the entire league." My feeling was that Amar'e Stoudemire was the real MVP of the team and that people were confusing Nash's arrival's impact with the natural progression of the Suns young core.
So I started digging into things. Started paying more attention. Watched the season unfold. Gradually I went through a series of "Ok I guess Nash deserves X, but people are overrating him when they say Y." where my Ys became Xs and then late in the season, on the board I'd found that I liked to lurk best out of everything on the basketball internet, there was an MVP discussion thread where someone was knocking Nash for all the reasons I'd been knocking him, and hence I felt compelled to share what had changed my mind. And thus I stopped lurking and started writing.
Something I will say is that I had Duncan over Nash for MVP that year until Duncan's injury in spite of all this pro-Nash talk. I also remember that I thought at the time that it wasn't necessarily clear that Nash deserved the MVP more than Shaq, but was clear was that Nash was having MVP caliber impact, and that people were overrating Shaq's impact to some degree in part because there seemed to be this assumption that Dwyane Wade's production was due to Shaq.
This then set my new trajectory in basketball analysis, and as fortune would have it, the SSOL Suns would have a similar, if delayed, impact on the entirety of the NBA.
None of that's a specific argument for Nash, but I don't really think he needs it. I will post a pet stat of mine though.
I have a spreadsheet where I list out the guy with the best on-court ORtg (as well as DRtg) who played at least half the season's minutes, going back as far as we have data. One way Nash stands out by this is that he led the league in ORtg for 7 straight years and we really see anyone else like that on either offense or defense (granted we only have back through '96-97). But this is a thread about season peaks, so without further ago:
In '04-05, Steve Nash had an on-court ORtg of 120.0 on a roster on a roster who the previous year had had an 101.4 ORtg. This was a 6.1 point jump over the league leader from the previous year (Nash teammate Dirk Nowitzki), and prior to this season, the only team to post player numbers higher than this was the Curry-Durant Warriors. Not even Luka Doncic last year, leading what was then the greatest ORtg team in history, was surpassing what Nash had done 15 years prior.
I consider Nash's number there to be Ruthian is in its outlier-ness, and that's not a term I use lightly. (Babe Ruth, if not clear.)
ftr: The leader this year was Kawhi Leonard at 123.2, and a total of 12 players broke the 120 threshold with the legendary Enes Kanter placing 3rd on the list. To say I'm still trying to make sense of this season's play is an understatement.
Onward with the list:
Chuck's '92-93 season was legendary. I do think his actual impact got overrated a bit because he had some great talent around him, but man did I love watching him play. One of the reasons I've been excited for Zion is that he's the first guy to come along since Chuck who actually seems to belong to a similar mold as Chuck. Vastly more rare than the Jordans of the world - Jordan's the best of the bunch, but there are lesser versions of Jordan everywhere, body types like Chuck's - so wide, yet so explosive - really feel like unicorns.
Placing KJ is tricky because his health issues make it tough to even know which year to focus on. I want to give a shout out to '94-95 KJ for that playoff run, but I went with a healthy season where he also had an iconic playoff series upsetting the Showtime Lakers just when Magic seemed his most unstoppable.
I actually think KJ has an argument over Nash, both for here, and for Suns GOAT, but what I have to say is that I don't see KJ in the same league as Nash as a floor general.
I put Connie Hawkins in in the 4th spot. Also tough to assign a spot to and I do think he's got a case over KJ here, though in the end I just have more confidence in what KJ displayed in the NBA compared to Hawk. There is a well-roundedness to Hawk's game though that is tough for me to put aside, and I particularly feel it in the comparison with the next guy on my list.
I've got feelings about Shawn Marion. On the one hand you could say that his game is more well-rounded that, say, teammate Amar'e Stoudemire, and as someone choosing Marion between the two I'm kinda fine putting my preference in these terms. On the other hand, Marion is clearly someone who can't just matrix his way to impact. To impact like a star, he needs to paired with another star with a particular skillset who is far less dependent on him. You might say Marion's more of a planet than a star, and since the original meaning of the word "planet" is "wanderer", this seems quite appropriate.
Nevertheless, able to focus on the right set of responsibilities, Marion was really something else.
