Thursday night, 5,000 fans at Mortgage Matchup Center were gifted free T-shirts upon arrival.
When the game started, the Suns player depicted on those T-shirts absolutely undressed the best team in the Eastern Conference.
Dillon Brooks went off for a career-high 40 points in the shorthanded Suns’ 114-96 win over the Detroit Pistons.
Brooks came out blazing, scoring Phoenix’s first seven points of the game, then continued to cook with a deep array of shots that would have made any playground legend jealous.
Threes, driving layups, tough turnarounds. As the kids say, the Villain was “in his bag.”
A few years ago, baseball writer Jeff Passan dropped the line “Tommy Pham is a vibe” on our show. Pham had been acquired by the Arizona Diamondbacks in the second half of the season and provided grit, leadership and tough love to a team that eventually won the National League pennant.
The question is, if Pham is a vibe, what term can we use to accurately pinpoint what Dillon Brooks has done for the Phoenix Suns? A wave? A tone-setter?
Brooks came to Phoenix as one of the most widely disliked players in the NBA outside the cities that he had called home — Memphis and Houston. Fast forward about eight months and 48 games, and Brooks has even the most jaded Suns fans forgetting that the league’s sixth-leading all-time scorer was traded away last summer.
Brooks was a main architect in the Suns’ best win of the season, mixing timely scoring with rugged defense and his own brand of getting under the opponents’ skin.
With 34 regular-season games left, the Suns look like a team that nobody is going to want to deal with in the postseason, and Brooks looks exactly like an NBA All-Star.
If his name is not mentioned when the league’s All-Star reserves are announced on Sunday, it’ll be a massive show of disrespect to the man who has helped steer the Suns out of hell.