Dear Bobby,
This isn’t a personal attack. You’ve donated generously philanthropically making the community we all share a better place and we all appreciate that.
This is a professional reckoning. And describing your ownership as “professional” will be the nicest thing I say the rest of the article.
Others won’t tell you this, but I will.
Bobby Sarvs, you’ve destroyed the Suns.
Not Lon Babby. Or Ryan McDonough. Or Lance Blanks. Or Earl Watson. Or Terry Porter. Or Joe Johnson. Or Robert Horry. Or David Stern. Or Josh Childress. Or Dragan Bender. Or Goran Dragic. Or Eric Bledsoe. Or Brandon Knight. Or Jay Triano. Or Markieff Morris. Or Jeff Hornacek. Or Marcus Morris. Or Steve Kerr. Or Shaquille O’Neal.
Just you.
The Suns will miss the playoffs for the ninth straight season.
The Suns won a single game against a bad Heat team and it was like the franchise’s version of the moon landing..
The team recently set the franchise record for consecutive losses at 17, a year after establishing the record at 15 consecutive losses.
This isn’t some strategic long term plan meant for the Suns to game the NBA’s lottery system.
This isn’t James Jones doing his best Sam Hinkie impression and realizing that short of luring Pat Riley to the desert, the only way to build a sustainable winner in the NBA is through the draft.
This isn’t even the growing pains of a young team figuring out what it takes to beat other professionals night in and night out.
All of those make some level of sense and indicate a basic form of organizational leadership.
This is gross incompetence.
This is an unintended, unplanned but all too predictable consequence of your leadership.
Your leadership as owner has allowed a toxic failure to seep deep into the team’s DNA.
You’ve turned what was once the crown jewel of the Phoenix sports landscape into a salted field of competitive failure.
There is no infrastructure in place to nurture young, developing players.
There is no culture in tact to allow talented players to realize their fullest potential.
There is only losing.
Your insistence to be directly involved in major basketball decisions has paralyzed this once proud organization.
You could sell and net an astonishing profit.
But you won’t. Your professional vanity won’t allow it.
And with the majority of local media unwilling to hold you, and you alone, accountable for this mess, you don’t have much to worry about.
Keep taking vacations with your preferred media sources and you won’t have to worry about a thing. Keep granting interviews to only those same media members and you’ll never have to answer tough questions.
But the fans know. The team knows, The league knows. I know.
But, as you know, there’s not much we can do about it.
We can start by imploring you to recuse yourself from all major basketball decisions, contractually guaranteeing some proven team builder that you will not meddle.
We could beg you to take the money and run by selling the team.
But neither of those things are likely to happen.
So for now, we’ll just tell the truth.
Someone has to do it.
#pipeitup