The Bradley Beal farewell showed us who we really are

In a time where we demand accountability from the Suns, Suns fans need to look in the mirror too

I woke up the morning after Bradley Beal was bought out feeling real gratitude. I know that Phoenix Suns fans were waiting for the Big 3 era to officially end with a whimper, and that the stretched out process made it even more frustrating.

When the news came down, it felt like we could finally move on from something that had been over for months, and for some of us, even longer.

We are left with a lot of questions of accountability. More digital has been spilled over the question of who is ultimately responsible for what will surely stand out as one of, if not the greatest, failings for the Phoenix Suns in their long history. The front office, coaching staff, and players have all taken their lumps from the media. Sometimes it is fair, sometimes not.

What I want to talk about though is our accountability as a fan community.

I’ve been a Suns fan since the 80’s and one of our biggest points of pride has always been that we are AWESOME fans. We prided ourselves on not being a fanbase like the Clippers, Lakers, Celtics, and Knicks. We weren’t jaded or privileged. We weren’t delusional and we had that East Coast Bias to keep us humble.

This morning, I woke up to see that Bradley Beal has posted his farewell.

What followed this simple peace sign emoji was an online explosion from Suns fans and NBA players. The reaction is telling.

Immediately, players like Kevin Durant, Trae Young, Bam Adebayo, Tyus Jones, Josh Okogie, and Andre Drummond commented with laughing emojis. Hell, even Damion Lee, the most positive Suns player ever, got in on the fun.

The Suns’ community reaction was…not great.

Within minutes, they were getting into heated back-and-forth diatribes with Kevin Durant, clutching their pearls at how shameful the behavior of Brad Beal and Kevin Durant is as they make their departure from Phoenix.

I hate to break it to you Suns fans. We own this one, and it’s a problem we need to fix.

DISCLAIMER: If you’re a fan who loves the Suns, watches the games, talks shit about the games with your friends online, gets overly emotional with each win and loss, or has a job that requires that you write your opinion about the Suns. This is not for you. Don’t yell at me about how the “fans pay the tickets, and we’re the customer, and we deserve effort from our players.” I know. I agree. If you’ve always kept it within the confines of what happens on the court, the following is not for you.

Bradley Beal owes Suns fans nothing on the way out of Phoenix.

I see a whole host of fans who are angry that Beal didn’t post a respectful, politically correct, bland statement, graciously thanking Suns fans for a wonderful time in the Valley.

This is insane to me.

Every single day, I saw multiple people posting pictures of Beal as Osama Bin Laden, calling him a terrorist. Suns fans harassed his family, called him a bum; a thief; a terrible basketball player. Now we’re clutching our pearls that he’s not saying, “Thanks to the best fans in the NBA. I loved my time in Phoenix”. We aren’t, and he didn’t.

Look in the mirror and ask yourself why former Suns players are standing up for their former teammate. Why are players like Trae Young and Bam Adebayo laughing at us?

The players talk, and word has gotten out that our fanbase is toxic, irrational, and way too comfortable in how we choose to interact with professional athletes. Kevin Durant stepped in and stood on business, and the fans’ ire immediately turned on him. He’s a failure, a mercenary, a team killer.

It came to a head when someone asked how he feels about the fans, and he responded: “I hate them too.”

TOXIC. I’m not going to dive into the responsibility that players have in this situation, because hundreds of articles have been written about that. This is about a pattern in the Suns community that echoes back several seasons.

The disrespect started with disappointment in 2021

Deandre Ayton

Some will say the online hate is because, “Well, this is just because the Big 3 was such a disappointment. They weren’t winners, and they never cared.”

This goes way beyond Bradley Beal and Kevin Durant. This habit of crossing the line of healthy discourse and directly engaging players in a disrespectful way started with Deandre Ayton and has escalated from there.

The first time, I really noticed this was when DA made the ill fated decision to talk about his video game habits. All of the gripes about Ayton were legitimate, but shortly after that, you saw more and more people tagging DA in posts that were just ripping him to shreds. DA didn’t really engage, but there were many instances where you could tell it was getting to him. By the end it was bleak, as evidenced by his interview with Duane Rankin where he said the following:

“I can feel the whole world hating me in a way. I’m the guy a lot of people point at and I see it and feel it, but mainly what I’ve been working on five to six days a week since we’ve lost is just motivating myself to change the narrative of what people think about me. ”

“No matter you put it, I feel like I have no fans out there and I can feel it because the whole world is saying it. My goal is over the summer is to change the narrative. Just unlock whatever it is and just completely just focus on me and change the whole thing.”

Landry Shamet

During that same time, our other source of ire was Landry Shamet.

We booed, we posted hate. We reshared the poster by Gordon over and over, clowning him when he was the only one who got back on defense and put his body on the line trying to draw that charge.

Then he had his huge Game 4 in the playoffs, and there’s an entire article on Twitter apologies from Suns fans about how wrong they were:

It came out that during his time in Phoenix, Landry was reconnecting with his estranged father and siblings, a reminder that basketball players are humans, and that millions of dollars don’t insulate you from real-life issues we all struggle with at times.

By the time he was traded for Bradley Beal (with much jubilation, I might add), he had this to say as a farewell about “all the hate”. It was nicer, but the breadcrumbs of how Suns treated him were there.

The heat began to build with Chris Paul after his injury against the Nuggets in the playoffs, but thankfully, it was the last game he played in a Suns uniform, so we never got to the levels of toxicity we did with others, as he was traded before he burned through our goodwill from orchestrating our epic turnaround.

The Big 3 Era: Stans, fans, got out of hand

Jusuf Nurkic

Next up on the list of Suns fans online targets was Jusuf Nurkic.

He was the first Suns player who seemed to enjoy engaging with Suns fans online, and it was fun for a little while as he surprised many of us in that first season with Vogel doing great work on the defensive end.

However, as soon as the struggles started, we began to see direct messages, pictures of Nurk as a terrorist (he’s Muslim, mind you), blaming Ramadan for his struggles, and all manner of delightful things. You can argue Nurk was sensitive as he got more blocks on X than he ever did in the games, but by the end, he was clearly tired of the switch-up.

Asked about the online hate he said:

“That’s not real fans. You go out there in Phoenix everywhere, you see the real fans. The internet ain’t real world, man. People are going to hate regardless. … It’s fun, as long as it’s not personal, it’s fun.”

It started to get personal, and it’s another instance of Suns fans getting comfortable crossing the line.

Tyus Jones

In some ways it felt like Tyus Jones never stood a chance.

In a town that probably touts the best all-time point guard lineup in the NBA, bringing in an undersized career backup to be the starting PG who would “fix” what went wrong the prior year had all the hallmarks of future disappointment.

As soon as the struggles began, the drumbeat of “get this bum off my team” began. It was telling that after a frustrating year where he and Beal were both yanked about, he was one of the first players to comment on Beal’s farewell.

Kevin Durant

Oh boy. Is there a more entertaining follow on X than Kevin Durant?

Parsing out the fan relationship with Kevin Durant is tricky because he often got looped into the insane debates between the Booker and KD camps. I know there are those who found themselves blocked by KD after standing up for Book in the comments by pointing out areas where KD was responsible for the Suns’ poor play.

Where it seemed like things really got contentious was after a win in January, where KD had time and got into it with fans.

After all the trade deadline fallout, and it became clear that KD would be moving on, Suns fans doubled down on how KD “broke” the Suns.

By the time he was traded and the news broke, KD looked overjoyed to be leaving Phoenix, and when asked about heartbroken Suns fans (I count myself as one), he had this to say:

When asked about the heartbroken Suns fans, Durant muttered, “I doubt that” before adding, “They wanted me to go. They got what they wanted and I got what I wanted so we can move on. Good luck to them moving forward – I’ll always remember my time there but we’re on to something else.”

When he posted his farewell to the Suns, he didn’t mention the fans at all, which felt deliberate and came with a bit of a lecture to keep it all in perspective:

Bradley Beal

No matter how you feel about the Bradley Beal experience, one thing is undeniable. Suns fans treated him and his family like absolute shit.

It started in the first season, casting blame on him over injuries and his contract, when we all knew going in that those were legitimate concerns in acquiring Bradley Beal. Any post where he was tagged, fans would crash in, calling him a thief, washed, or just that he was made of glass. By insinuating he was doing it on purpose, Beal even acknowledged the frustration both he and the fans felt. Not good enough.

Last season, the point of no return came when a fan at the arena crossed the line by heckling Beal’s family.

The fan was removed, and Beal’s wife posted this:

Gerald Bourget captured Beal’s thoughts on the matter later on:

“All I see is my wife and my son crying on the front row and my wife turned around and yelling at somebody,” Beal said. “That’s never good. Family comes before any of this basketball s**t. So I just wanted to make sure that she was good, and once the security was taking care of it, I’m like, ‘We’re good.’”

It’s bad enough to go after a player’s family members, but fans continued to harass his wife online.

We all know that Beal is a family-first guy, and his attitude towards Suns fans changed forever at that point. From then on, it seemed like he made it his mission to troll Suns fans any chance he could. His attitude in interviews became more snarky. His comment about being smiling and happy with his no-trade clause made fans apoplectic. It all felt fair, if not unfortunate.

In the end, the entire timeline was posts of Beal dressed as Osama Bin Laden, calling him selfish. Ultimately, it amounted to Suns fans throwing a temper tantrum because they had no control and Beal “held all the cards”, which he made sure to remind us of. It was toxic, unnecessary, and the behavior of the type of fanbase we’ve always tried not to be.

Where do we go from here?

So, when we take stock, what does this mean going forward? If you list them out, we’ve made it very clear to the NBA players that if you don’t meet or exceed our expectations, not only will we complain, but we will go online and harass you, tell you to sacrifice your money, besmirch your whole career, taunt your family, and make you wish you’d never put on a Suns jersey.

Just ask Deandre Ayton, Landry Shamet, Jusuf Nurkic, Tyus Jones, Kevin Durant, and Bradley Beal if they think we have one of the best fan bases in the NBA.

You can already see it creeping into the Summer League Suns.

How long before someone crashes into an 18-year-old Maluach’s DM’s about what a disappointment he is as he figures out how to be an NBA player.

I implore you, that if you really care about the Suns, you need to put your best foot forward as a fan. Devin Booker is going to be trying like hell to court other stars to join him to get back in contention. Mat Ishbia has the money, and that’s an advantage, but players talk. If it’s a tie between two teams and the only real difference is, “Look what the Suns fans did to Bradley Beal’s wife”, what do you think they will pick?

The golden rule applies on the internet just as much, if not more, as it does in real life.

Remember the big picture. You might not @ a player directly, but the way things get aggregated, players see the out-of-pocket things people say. Players handle things in all different ways, but we should conduct ourselves better online as a fan base.

This is a game that we love to watch, but it is a game. Players will always have way more on the line than any of us, and we would do well to remember that fact. We know way less than we think we do about what is going on with our favorite player or team, and that just might be double for the player that we despise.

Robert Horry, the most hated Sun — maybe of all time — was dealing with his daughter’s chronic disease when he was with the Suns, which ended up being fatal. Thank goodness X didn’t exist then. So in the end, when you’re pissed at a player, maybe put your Twitter fingers at rest and take a walk and remember that it doesn’t really matter in the end, no matter how big of a fan we are.

And mark my words; if we continue the way we have been, we WILL lose Devin Booker. He’s the most loyal player we’ve ever had, and took us further than any in our franchise history, but I’ve seen the subtle change in how Suns fans talk about him, and you can bet he sees it too. He has willingly taken the pressure of all our aspirations on his shoulders, and we should be grateful for it, but every human has a breaking point. If we’re not careful, we could find the next ungracious exit could be the one that hurts the most.

So while it’s easy to be mad at Bradley Beal, maybe we should all take a moment to reflect on how we show up as a fan base. Control what we can control, which is the things we do and say, and let go of the things we can’t, and maybe we can find a little bit more of what Bradley Beal offered to us: PEACE.

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