Who doesn’t love a good movie? When the offseason drags on, I find myself haunting theaters like clockwork. Five weekends in a row now, I’ve gone to see whatever’s playing on the big screen. It’s always been a summer ritual for me. And if you live in Arizona, you know the drill. There are really only two escapes from the desert heat: you either join a bowling league or you go to the movies. Both come with AC, both come with food, and both give you a place to kill the endless hours of the offseason.
Now, I know we’re all looking forward, doing our best to bury the memory of last season. Time softens everything, but eventually we’ll all arrive at our fully formed conclusions about what that 36–46 campaign really was. About a team with the highest payroll in NBA history. About a team with championship expectations. About a team that couldn’t even claw its way into the Play-In.
So I did what I usually do. I married my obsessions. Movies and Suns basketball. And I asked myself: what film best captures the 2024–25 Phoenix Suns? What story mirrors their rise, their chaos, their collapse? These are the things I mull over on my back patio with a Bulleit rye old-fashioned in hand, vacation on my mind, and the desert night creeping in.
The list? I landed on three. Three movies that explain exactly who and what the Phoenix Suns were last season.
Groundhog Day
For those of us watching this team, last season played out like déjà vu on an endless reel. The same script on repeat.
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The flashes of promise were there. Don’t forget, the Suns started 8–1. For a fleeting moment, it looked like the grand plan had worked, that maybe the confetti was finally waiting at the end of the road. But those flashes dissolved quickly into stagnant offense, defensive lapses, and gut-punch endings. Every tweak, every lineup shuffle, every desperate adjustment still left the Suns trapped in the same loop, spiraling back to the same failures.
It was Groundhog Day, but without the charm. While Bill Murray was out there chiseling ice sculptures, mastering Chopin on the piano, and winning the heart of Rita Hanson, the Suns were chucking threes, waving opponents to the rim like matadors, and losing games before the ball had even finished its opening bounce.
The Titanic
How many times did we mutter the phrase “shuffling chairs on the deck of the Titanic” last season? It became the default response to any supposed fix, any adjustment, any shred of hope. Because deep down, we knew that there was no saving this team from itself. Beal to the bench? Nick Richards as a starting center? Cody Martin minutes? Yeah, all of it was shuffling.
The Suns entered the season like a luxury liner, polished and gleaming, stacked with star power and weighed down by championship expectations. Everyone bought a ticket for the voyage. But the cracks were already in the hull. The build was fragile, the design inflexible, and the navigation disastrous. The ending was inevitable.
Fans watched as the so-called “unsinkable” roster slipped beneath the surface, each loss another icy wave pouring in. And by the time it was over, there was no room left on the door for Kevin Durant or Bradley Beal.
I love a good Christopher Nolan movie. Truly. I can waste an entire afternoon arguing with friends about which three belong at the top of his résumé. For me? The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Inception.
So how were the Suns like Inception? Confusion stacked on confusion, layer upon layer.
Was this finally the year the roster would click? Was the three-star experiment ever real, or was it smoke in a dream machine? Did the top stop spinning at the end, or was this all a carefully constructed illusion, sold to us as championship destiny but collapsing under its own weight? Every level of the season felt like descending deeper into unreality, where the walls bent, the floor shifted, and no clear exit existed.
That’s the Suns for you: a season caught somewhere between dream and nightmare, the edges blurred, the ending unresolved.
Now that I think about it, two of these flicks have Leonardo DiCaprio in them. Huh.
I know there are movie buffs out there. I know there are analytical minds who love drawing these parallels. So tell me what movie do you think best captures the Phoenix Suns’ season from a year ago?
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