PHOENIX - MAY 18: Steve Nash #13 of the Phoenix Suns passes the ball back out for an assist against the Dallas Mavericks in Game five of the Western Conference Semifinals during the 2005 NBA Playoffs at America West Arena on May 18, 2005 in Phoenix, Arizona. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Stephen Dunn/Getty Images) | Getty Images
We have reached the final stop on this ride, the point where the road narrows and we finally reveal the last two tiers and the three players who sit above all else on the Phoenix Suns All-Time Pyramid. What started as a random idea, a Salad and Go cold brew in one hand as the calendar flipped, has slowly turned into something much bigger than I ever anticipated.
16,000+ words later, here we are.
This was always about more than rankings or arguments or filling space on the internet. The goal was simple, even if the execution was not. To build something that could live beyond the moment. Something we can reference years from now, something others might stumble upon long after we are gone. Through it, readers can understand who the best players in Suns history were. And why.
This pyramid is a snapshot of memory, effort, impact, and identity. It is imperfect by design, shaped by perspective, emotion, and lived experience. But it is honest. And now, with everything laid out and the foundation set, it is time to finish the thing and place the final names where they belong.
Somewhere along the way, a realization set in and stayed with me. This franchise may not have climbed all the way to the mountaintop and grabbed a championship banner, but that does not mean it lacks history, weight, or meaning. Far from it.
If your entire sports worldview begins and ends with championships, I genuinely feel bad for you. Not in a condescending way, but in a “missed out” way. Because you are skipping the best parts. You are ignoring the process, the moments, the nights that stayed with you long after the final buzzer. You are reducing something expansive into a single checkbox and calling it analysis.
Basketball is memory. It always has been. As you move through these names and the eras they lived in, nostalgia creeps in whether you invite it or not. That is the beauty of sports. In real time, you feel frustration, joy, anger, pride, and exhaustion. Only later do you really understand what you were watching, how it fit together, and why it mattered.
Those Seven Seconds or Less teams still carry disappointment because they never finished the job, and that reality does matter when you start stacking players and weighing legacies. Barkley and Booker have made the Finals, but like every season in the history of the organization, it ended with disappointment. But it does not erase the magic of what those seasons felt like, or how alive they made this fan base.
That is the spiritual side of sports, and that has been the most rewarding part of this whole exercise. Digging through player histories. Replaying moments in my head. Mining stats. Building graphics. Staring at old photos soaked in purple and orange. That shared color palette, those shared memories, that is the connective tissue. That is what binds us.
Reducing all of that to whether a championship happened is easy. Too easy. It lacks imagination. It lacks depth.
These final two tiers have depth. They invite debate. They demand context. And honestly, there is no wrong answer here. You could place any one of these final three players at the top of the pyramid and make a compelling case. I landed where I landed, and I am comfortable with it, but I also respect the arguments that go another direction.
So, before I explain why I made the final call the way I did, let’s talk about the last three players who occupy the top two tiers of the Phoenix Suns All-Time Pyramid.
I know the second that graphic hit your screen, you felt something. Maybe it was agreement. Maybe you nodded along. Maybe you muttered, “Voita, you’re an idiot, how could you possibly do that?” And honestly, that reaction is the whole point. That push and pull is what makes this such a good conversation in the first place.
So I am asking you for one thing before you sprint to the comment section with the keys smoking. Read the article. Give me the space to explain why I landed where I did, and why certain names went where they went. How I weighed what matters to me in a project like this. I am fully aware that I might not be right. But you know what? I might not be wrong either…
Tier 2: Organizational Royalty
Charles Barkley. The Round Mound of Rebound. If you are looking for the cleanest definition of a supernova in Phoenix Suns history, this is it. No player arrived in the Valley already in his prime with this level of gravity, personality, and immediate takeover energy the way Sir Charles did. This was not a slow burn. This was ignition.
He arrived after the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, riding global stardom into a brand new arena, a new uniform, and a new coach. The timing felt almost cinematic. Loud, eccentric, confrontational, brilliant, Barkley did not blend into Phoenix. He bent it around himself. That 1992–93 run remains one of the most electric seasons not only in Suns history, but in the storytelling fabric of the NBA itself, a moment where basketball felt bigger, louder, and impossibly alive.
I think it is fair to say that the 1992-93 season by Charles Barkley stands as the single greatest season by any player in Phoenix Suns history. Sure, Steve Nash came to Phoenix in his prime and won MVPs. Yes, that team went 62-20. Charles Barkley did that too, and then he carried the Suns all the way to the NBA Finals, doing it with a force of personality that rattled arenas and pulled the entire league into Phoenix’s orbit. Nash floated. Barkley detonated.
That first year, Barkley averaged 25.6 points per game and 12.2 rebounds, won the MVP, made the All-Star team, and earned First Team All-NBA honors. He checked every possible box a superstar season can check. In a moment when Michael Jordan was operating at the absolute peak of his powers, there was a real and serious conversation happening about whether Charles Barkley was the best player in the world.
That debate ultimately met reality in the NBA Finals, where Jordan averaged 41.0 points and 6.3 assists over six games and slammed the door shut, but for that stretch of time, it was not outrageous to ask the question. That alone tells you how high Barkley’s level was.
What followed was a meteoric rise for the Suns as a franchise. Phoenix was no longer a quiet basketball outpost or a historical footnote. After 24 years of existence and a lone Finals appearance in 1976, the city and the team finally commanded national attention. Charles Barkley did not only elevate the Suns on the court, he altered how the league viewed Phoenix altogether, and that impact is impossible to separate from the history of the organization.
Statistically, the Barkley run in Phoenix is as loud as it gets. Over 280 games across four seasons, he was an All-Star every year and made four All-NBA teams. While only one of those landed on the First Team in 1992-93, the consistency still matters.
When you scan the Suns’ record book, his name jumps off the page. He is number one all-time in player efficiency rating, number one in defensive rebounds per game at 8.4, and he owns the single-season mark as well, pulling down 9.1 defensive boards per night in that 1992-93 season. He sits second in rebounds per game at 11.5, trailing only Paul Silas, and despite spending only four seasons in Phoenix, he still ranks fourth in triple-doubles and seventh in total rebounds. That is how concentrated his impact was.
Meteoric is the right word.
When you talk about the greatest players to ever wear purple and orange, Charles Barkley is always part of the conversation. Personally, I think Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Durant belong on that broader list too, which might be another pyramid project I just talked myself into. Still, if you place Barkley at the very top of your Suns pyramid, I am not here to tell you that you are wrong. The case is real, and it is powerful.
Where the discussion gets more layered is in the length and the ending of his time in Phoenix. The first two seasons live warmly in memory, full of energy, relevance, and belief. The final stretch was rockier, emotionally and structurally, and that tension is part of the story whether we like it or not. As Zach Bryan says in his song
All Good Things Must Pass, “Nostalgia has a way of lookin’ better in your head.” (Did you honestly think I would write and this entire series without one Zach Bryan philosophical reference?! C’mon…you know me better than that…)
Even so, the weight of what he did here is undeniable. Four seasons. One MVP. One Finals run. A franchise lifted into the national spotlight. That is Tier 2 territory without question, a peak so high and so impactful that it still casts a shadow decades later
I’ve done a lot of soul searching over this thought exercise, and at some point, I had to be honest with myself and allow the list to breathe. Devin Booker was at the top when I started. That felt right in the moment. But the deeper I went, the more I realized his story is still being written, and as much as I believe in where it is headed, there are still rungs left on the ladder for him to climb.
That is not a knock. It is an acknowledgment of motion.
Booker is still adding chapters in real time. Every night reshapes the graphic. Every season stretches the ceiling. He has been here for 11 years now, drafted 13th overall out of Kentucky in 2015, and none of us truly saw this coming. We hoped for a Klay Thompson-type outcome. What we got was a franchise cornerstone, a player whose arc is still bending upward, and because of that, the top spot has to wait.
The numbers will keep shifting because he is still active, still stacking nights, still moving the goalposts. Even so, the shape of the résumé is already clear.
Devin Booker is the leading scorer in the history of the franchise. He sits third all-time in scoring average at 24.5 points per game. Five of the top ten scoring seasons in Suns history belong to him, and his 2023–24 season finished second all-time, ten points shy of Tom Chambers’ long-standing mark. In the postseason, he is second all-time in franchise history at 28.0 points per game across 47 games, which says plenty about how his game scales when the lights get brighter.
He is first all-time in three-point attempts and makes, second in free throw attempts and free throws made, third in minutes played, and third in overall free throw percentage. He owns a spot inside the top five single-season free-throw percentages at 91.9% in 2019–20, ranks fifth in defensive rebounds, and ninth in total rebounds in Suns history.
Taken together, it tells a very clean story. Devin Booker is the greatest scorer this franchise has ever had, not for a moment or a season, but across the full arc of a career. Efficient, repeatable, and relentless, with one of the purest jump shots the league has seen, and a nightly consistency that has defined an era of Suns basketball.
One of the real challenges Booker faces is the era he plays in. We have never had more access, more data, more angles, and more opportunities to dissect every possession a player has. You can go back and pick apart anyone on this pyramid if you want, but with Booker, it feels louder, sharper, more immediate.
We are all plugged in now, walking around with a tiny computer in our pocket, capable of amplifying every frustration, every missed rotation, every off-shooting night, and firing it straight into the void. I do it too. We all do. And through all of that noise, Devin Booker keeps showing up, night after night, carrying this organization with a level of consistency that is easy to overlook precisely because it has become normal.
There is also one detail that cannot be ignored when placing him in Suns history. He is 29 years old. There is still a massive portion of his story left to write in Phoenix. Steve Nash was 30 when he arrived in 2004 and reshaped the franchise. Booker is already deep into his Suns tenure, and while his game is not built the same way, not designed first to supercharge everyone around him, he has grown into a dangerous scorer and a capable playmaker who can bend games in multiple ways.
The fan in me wants him at the top of this pyramid right now. I feel that pull. But the honest version of this exercise says the moment has not arrived yet. He is building one of the greatest careers the franchise has ever seen, and that part is undeniable.
Where he ultimately lands will be decided by the chapters that are still coming, the ones that determine whether his story finishes as great, or transcendent, or something even heavier than that.
Tier 1: Face of the Franchise
Where do you even start with Steve Nash? I suppose the only honest place is the beginning.
Draft night, 1996, the 15th pick out of Santa Clara, a skinny kid from Canada who did not exactly scream future Hall of Fame point guard. At the time, he looked like someone who would survive in the league, maybe carve out a nice career, maybe bounce around a bit. What he eventually became was something far bigger than that.
Steve Nash did not grow into a star quietly. He grew into a force that reshaped the organization, the fan base, and eventually the way basketball itself was played. Trying to define him strictly through numbers almost misses the point, even though the numbers are good. His Suns averages line up closely with Jason Kidd in purple and orange. Both at 14.4 points per game. Kidd actually edges him in assists per game, 9.7 to Nash’s 9.4. On paper, that feels like a wash.
And that is exactly why statistics can lie to you.
Because what Steve Nash did was not about box scores. It was about movement, tempo, spacing, and belief. He turned Phoenix into a basketball laboratory, a place where the game moved faster, smarter, freer. He made shooters better. He made bigs richer. He made role players feel indispensable. Night after night, the ball popped, the floor stretched, and the Suns felt inevitable in a way that no spreadsheet can fully capture.
Steve Nash did not simply play basketball in the Valley. He changed how it was understood. He changed what fans expected. He changed what opponents feared. And in doing so, he left behind something that numbers alone will never be able to explain.
He could have been one of the great scorers of his generation if that had ever been the priority. The skill was there. The efficiency was there. His 43.5% shooting from three is the highest mark from beyond the arc in franchise history. He ranks second all-time in made threes at 1,051 and second in attempts at 2,417, which makes that percentage even louder. And yet, across ten seasons in Phoenix, he averaged only 3.2 attempts per night. The shots were available. He simply chose something else.
That choice tells you everything you need to know about Steve Nash.
He hit his share of unforgettable threes, the kind that live forever in highlight reels and late-night arguments, but scoring was never the point. His obsession was amplification. Make everyone else better. Pull defenders out of position. Turn good players into great ones and role players into weapons. That was the engine. That was the gift. That is why he won two MVPs.
Not because he poured in points, but because he unlocked entire rosters.
In his first MVP season, 2004-05, he averaged 15.5 points per game. That number still surprises people who did not live through it. What matters more is the 11.5 assists per night, the league-leading mark, and what happened around him. A team that had won 29 games the season before he arrived finished 62-20. That does not happen by accident. That happens when one player rewires how basketball is played.
It is difficult to fully articulate what Steve Nash meant to the Suns and to the league at large. People often point to 1992-93 as a turning point for the franchise, and it absolutely was. But what Nash did beginning in 2004 reshaped the entire sport. Pace changed. Spacing changed. Decision-making changed. The league we watch now traces a straight line back to what was happening nightly in Phoenix.
And then there are the numbers, which somehow still feel understated. He sits first all-time in franchise assists, finishing just shy of 7,000. He owns the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and ninth best single-season assist totals in Suns history. He is first all-time in Suns free throw percentage at 90.7%, and he set the single-season franchise record in 2009-10 by hitting 93.8% from the line. He ranks third in win shares and third in total games played.
Steve Nash did not dominate the game by force. He bent it. He guided it. He made everyone around him sharper, faster, and more dangerous. And long after the numbers blur together, that feeling remains.
Nash gave the Suns legitimacy. He gave them relevance. He gave them gravity. He led the league in assists five times during his ten seasons in Phoenix, and the winning followed right along with him. From 2004 through 2012, the Suns went 405-235. That is not a hot stretch. That is sustained excellence. And he was the best guy on the court every night.
In the postseason, he was still Steve Nash, averaging 18.2 points and 9.7 assists on absurd 50/38/90 shooting splits. And yet, the one thing missing still hangs in the air. He never reached the NBA Finals in a Suns uniform. The Spurs and the Mavericks made sure of that.
But yes, he absolutely should sit at the top of the pyramid. Because what he did? It was Nashty.
There was one part of this project that ended up being trickier than I expected, even though by the time I reached the end it all settled into place, and that was naming the tiers themselves. The labels are mostly arbitrary, an attempt to give each level a little more personality than Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, and so on, but the final tier carries real weight. “The Face of the Franchise”. That is the one where people tend to pause, reread, and start forming opinions immediately.
When you really think about it, the player at the top of any pyramid, for any team, is exactly that. The face. The name that comes to mind first when the organization is mentioned. The mental shortcut your brain takes before you even realize it is happening. That is why the final two tiers matter so much, because all three of those players qualify depending on who you ask.
If you are a newer fan, or someone who came of age watching this current era, Devin Booker is the answer without hesitation. If you are ten or fifteen years older, your brain probably goes straight to Steve Nash. And if you go back another generation, you are likely landing on Charles Barkley, because of what Suns basketball meant nationally at that moment, the visibility, the swagger, the feeling that Phoenix was suddenly on the map.
That is what makes the question so personal. The answer changes based on memory, age, and lived experience. There is no universal response, and that is part of what makes this exercise worth doing in the first place.
For me, when I step back and look at the totality of the franchise history, Steve Nash is the answer that holds up the longest. Fifty years from now, even if no one is playing basketball anymore and all that remains are stories, clips, and context, what Nash did and how he did it will still resonate.
The journey has ended. The pyramid is built. The conclusions, though, remain open, because there are still chapters waiting to be written, still performances left to deliver, still awards that have not found their owner.
I want to thank everyone who leaned into these conversations with me over the past few weeks. This was ambitious, something I had kicked around in my head more than once, and then finally decided to sit down and do. A free weekend turned into digging through data, combing through box scores, rewatching highlights, designing graphics, and slowly letting the history of this franchise breathe again. It became more than a project. It became an experience, one that sparked a handful of other thought exercises I might circle back to someday.
By the end of it all, I feel like I landed where I was supposed to land, even if it took longer than expected to get there. I still believe Devin Booker should be the face of the franchise because when his career reaches its conclusion, I believe that is exactly what he will be. That conviction never left me.
What changed came late in the process, during the final pass through the pyramid, while writing the closing pieces and assembling the Steve Nash graphic.
Seeing it all laid out again, the weight of what Nash accomplished in Phoenix hit differently. The longevity. The sustained success. The way he carried the organization year after year and reshaped how basketball was played, not only in the Valley but across the league. He matched the tenure Booker already has, and paired it with a level of consistent winning that is incredibly difficult to maintain.
Nash never reached the NBA Finals in Phoenix, but there are real reasons for that, reasons rooted in usage, roster depth, and the physical toll placed on guards asked to carry everything every night. Mike D’Antoni rode him hard. The margins were thin. The league was unforgiving.
It is a reminder of how difficult it is to win a championship as the best player on a team when you are a guard. You absorb contact. You take the hits. We saw it with Kevin Johnson. Paul Westphal never broke through either. Chris Paul and Devin Booker both reached the Finals, only to run into teams powered by dominant size and strength.
That context matters. It always has.
This pyramid is not a verdict carved in stone. It is a snapshot in time, shaped by history, memory, and perspective. And if there is one thing this exercise reinforced, it is how rich this franchise’s story really is, championship or not.
There are lessons tucked into this whole exercise. There are flowers that deserve to be handed out. There is appreciation to be felt and shared.
The Phoenix Suns have never climbed all the way to the top of the mountain, but that does not mean they have failed to give us something meaningful to hold onto. There is beauty in the process. There is beauty in the game itself. There is beauty in the history, in the conversations that history sparks, in the nights spent inside an arena or on a couch, living and dying with every possession.
Looking back through this pyramid forced me to sit with memories, some joyful, some frustrating, all of them personal. Players I grew up watching. Players I learned about later through numbers, stories, and grainy highlights. Friends and family who were part of my Suns’ experience. Some of them are still with us. Some of them are not.
That is part of the responsibility that comes with being a fan, and part of the responsibility I feel as a writer. To carry those stories forward. To keep them alive. To share them openly. To welcome new fans into the fold without acting like gatekeepers or arbiters of truth.
This was always a subjective process. Disagreement is baked into it. You might not see the pyramid the way I do, and that does not make either of us wrong. Sports history lives in memory as much as it lives in data, and memory is personal by nature. The arguments are part of the fun. The debate is the point.
Alright, maybe there is one exception. If you have Deandre Ayton on this pyramid, we might need to talk. That one probably came from a spreadsheet and not from watching the games. A joke. Mostly.
More than anything, I had fun doing this. I hope you had fun reading it. I hope you learned something you did not know before. I hope it led to a conversation, a text thread, a late-night argument, or a shared laugh. Because that is what makes sports matter. It is never only about the action on the floor. It is about the people watching, reacting, remembering, and connecting through it all.
That is what rooting for the purple and orange has always been about.
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