It was a Tuesday night game, the 79th contest of an excruciating lost season for the Phoenix Suns. Any excitement in the air was conjured by Stephen Curry, the star player on the opposition Golden State Warriors. Curry racked up 19 points by halftime, and his team led by 26 going into the break.
In the end, the Suns lost their seventh straight by 38 points – their worst loss in a season full of sad L’s.
On the drive home, I thought back across the thousand or so Suns games I’ve watched or attended over the past 30 years, going back to the Charles Barkley era and the “seven seconds or less” teams of Steve Nash, Amare Stoudemire, and Shawn Marion.
Never have I seen a Suns team give less effort – or care less – than this 2025 squad very clearly going through the motions.
Six days later, the team terminated head coach Mike Budenholzer, issuing a terse statement that’s impossible to dispute.
“Competing at the highest level remains our goal, and we failed to meet expectations this season,” the franchise explained. “Our fans deserve better. Change is needed.”
Like I said, there’s no room to disagree there. However, after three decades in the desert rooting for Valley teams, it’s hard to imagine that we may one day get better, or that whatever changes occur will be positive and achieve the desired result.
Because here’s the honest truth, which is as tough to write as it is to read: We live in the most miserable sports metropolis in America, bar none.
And, thanks to some AI-enabled historical research, I have the statistics to back that statement up. Consider:
Currently, 16 metropolitan areas in the country have franchises in at least three of the four major professional sports.
If we track back to the year 2000 and total up the combined winning percentage of these cities’ teams in pro basketball, football, baseball and hockey, Boston ranks first, with the Celtics, Bruins, Red Sox, and New England Patriots winning more than 60 percent of their games and a combined 13 major championships.
Los Angeles is second with a .534 winning percentage and 11 major titles. San Francisco and the Bay Area ranks third, with teams winning 51.5 percent of their games and eight championships.
Phoenix? We’re dead last in winning percentage at .471, with the Arizona Diamondbacks’ 2001 World Series win as our only championship – ever, going back even before 1881, when the Earp boys and Doc Holliday took home top honors at the OK Corral in Tombstone.
Sure, the Dbacks made it to the Series in 2023, and they look decent so far this season. But let’s be real: They’re in fourth place in the National league West as I write this, and the Dodgers’ payroll – at $321 million – is higher than the Gross National Product of the Marshall Islands.
As for the Arizona Cardinals, owner Michael Bidwill was recently inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame. That says something about our state’s standards for sports excellence.
The Cardinals have won 142 games against 156 losses and three ties since Bidwill became team president in 2007.
If that’s good enough to get you a Hall plaque, well, hey, there’s still hope for former Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo. By not losing a single game this season – after fleeing the state to Utah and deactivating the franchise – the Yotes currently stand as the Arizona team causing us the least amount of misery.
As every Arizona sports fan learns over the years, the absence of losses does not equal victory. But it sure beats getting crushed by the Warriors on a painful, listless Tuesday night in April.