This past week, I released a series of articles about the Phoenix Suns, their players, their history, and where the best of the best ultimately land on something I call the Phoenix Suns All-Time Pyramid. It started back in January as a simple thought exercise. It was a way to organize eras, careers, and memories. And then it quietly grew into something much bigger than I ever anticipated.
I did not fully realize how deep I was until I finished writing Tier 5, or at least the first rough draft of it. I looked up, checked the word count, and realized I had already poured nearly 10,000 words into the project. And I still had four tiers left to go. That was the moment it clicked that this was no longer a series of columns I could casually wrap up in a week or two.
At that point, I made a decision. If I was going to see this thing through, if I was going to do it the right way. I was going to turn it into something more permanent. Something tangible. A personal goal I had kicked down the road more times than I care to admit was now achievable with a project like this.
I was going to write a book.
After all, the material was already there. If I kept the pace I was on, I was going to clear 20,000 words without even trying. It is not a novel, not even close, but it is something I would actually want sitting on my bookshelf. An ode to the greatest players in Phoenix Suns history, organized in a way that feels human, conversational, and honest. Not sterile or encyclopedic.
That became the goal. Not only to roll out each tier as its own piece on Bright Side during All-Star week. Why? Because it is a stretch of the calendar that is usually slow, noisy, and clogged with tanking discourse and debates about how terrible the dunk contest has become. But then? Give it a second life. To turn it into a book. Something physical. Something with my name on the cover.
So that is what I have done.
We all carry around little goals and checkpoints as we move through life. Some loud, some quiet, some we admit out loud, and others we keep tucked away. Two of mine have always lived in the writing lane. I have always wanted to write a book. To be able to pull it up online, to hold it in my hands, to flip through pages and know it exists because I sat down and made it exist. And I have also always wanted to write a movie script.
So if nothing else, I could finally check one of those boxes.
That script has been floating around in my head for sixteen years now. The bones are there. I chip away at it from time to time, a scene here, a line of dialogue there, but fictional storytelling is a different beast. Originality feels slippery, and I have a bad habit of getting in my own way, questioning whether the story is worth telling before I ever really tell it. Still, the framework exists, and maybe one day it gets finished.
For now, though, this was the thing. The Suns. The history. The pyramid. And the satisfaction of turning a wandering idea into something real.
For this, I am telling the story of the Phoenix Suns, something we all know and love. They are something that already lives in our bones as fans, which gave me the freedom to put my own twist on it, organize it in a way that made sense to me, and finally set it down with some confidence. And that is ultimately what I did. It feels good to reach the end of something like this, especially knowing I was putting the work in anyway, pouring the hours, the words, and the energy into it. Whether it lived only as a series of articles or not, it felt natural to take the extra step and give it a spine and a cover. Might as well put it in hardcover form, right?
So now it exists. It is done. And it is available [for sale on Amazon.](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GP91873P?tag=sbnation-20)
If it is something you would like to add to your collection, I genuinely appreciate that. And if you have already read every word of it here on Bright Side and do not feel the need to buy something you have already consumed, I understand that too. No hard feelings at all. That said, I did make some tweaks along the way, cleaned things up, added a little context here and there, and adjusted the flow to better fit the book format, which was a fun process in its own right.
Publishing it was an experience that felt oddly surreal and refreshingly simple at the same time. Everything is so user-friendly now. I uploaded the manuscript, played around with the cover design, clicked through a few screens, and suddenly it was real. Amazon takes a healthy chunk of the profits, which is the reality of the modern game, but that part never mattered much to me anyway. I am not in this for the dimes and the nickels. I am in it for the satisfaction of having a book with my name on the front, of accomplishing something I had been circling for years, and of doing it through a project that was genuinely fun from start to finish.
And honestly, that part has been the best of all.
While I have truly enjoyed seeing the conversations unfold in the comments as we worked through this thought exercise, what has stood out most is how personal it became for so many of you. The majority of you leaned into the journey, pulled from your own memories, and elevated the players you saw with your own eyes or the ones who left an imprint on you when you were a younger Suns fan. That is the good stuff. That is what makes this fun. That is what makes it meaningful. That is what makes it explicitly purple and orange.
So genuinely, thank you to everyone who has read what I have put out so far. Thank you for engaging with it, pushing back on it, agreeing with it, disagreeing with it, and sharing your own versions of Sun’s history along the way. And thank you to Bright Side for being the conduit that allows me to put these thoughts into the world in the first place.
You might not always agree with what I write, and that is more than okay. Hell, there were moments during this process where I did not even agree with myself. That became especially clear while working through the book. I went into this convinced that Devin Booker would ultimately land as the Face of the Franchise. And then, somewhere along the way, I had to stop, laugh, and be honest with myself. I landed on Steve Nash because, at the time, not doing so felt irresponsible. That does not diminish Booker’s place. His story is still being written. It simply acknowledges the weight of what Nash did and what he meant.
If you have a few extra cents and want to pick up the book, I appreciate that more than you know. If you do not, that is completely fine too. The fact that you read along, participated in the discussion, and contributed to this shared history matters far more to me than any sale ever could.