NBA Teams That Should Have Won The Championship #1

Before I start my story about why I think the Phoenix Suns should have won the NBA Championship in the 2006-2007 NBA season, I want to state that yes I am a Phoenix Suns fan and have been since I started watching and playing basketball so there may be a bit of bias in this post.

The Phoenix Suns in the 2006-2007 season were one of the best teams in the NBA they finished the season with a 61-21 record which was good enough for second in the western conference due to the Dallas Mavericks finishing the season with a 67-15 record. Steve Nash had another MVP caliber season but due to voter fatigue it would have been much harder for him to win the MVP that season after winning it back to back seasons prior, so the MVP award was given to Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks and rightfully so. I will always defend Steve Nash's two MVP awards because the award is for the most valuable player to their team in the league, not the best player in the league.

In the playoffs, the Phoenix Suns made short work of the Los Angeles Lakers beating them in five games, four games to one. It wasn't really much of a series but outside of Kobe Bryant and Lamar Odom and a very young Andrew Bynum the Lakers didn't have much help on their team to get pass the Suns. While the Dallas Mavericks lost in six games to the "We Believe" Golden State Warriors team who went 42-40 in the regular season finishing as the eighth seed in the Western Conference. So next the Phoenix Suns had to play the San Antonio Spurs, which is where the problems started to happen.

In the Western Conference Semi-finals match up between the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs the series was ugly from the start. In game one Steve Nash collided with Tony Parker and suffered a bloody nose, they couldn't get the bleeding to stop so Steve Nash had to miss about the last minute of the game, if that didn't happen the Phoenix Suns Probably win game one. The San Antonio Spurs were making dirty plays the entire series putting their legs in the Phoenix Suns landing space and trying to injure them especially Bruce Bowen who made a career of using that tactic. In game four Robert Horry checked Steve Nash into the scorers table which caused Boris Diaw and Amar'e Stoudemire to run onto the court to check on their teammate, but at the team the NBA had a rule preventing players from running onto the court and it resulted in Amar'e Stoudemire and Boris Diaw getting suspended for game five and Robert Horry got suspended for games five and six. The suns won that game 104-98 tying the series 2-2 but the Phoenix Suns were going to be without their best scorer and their second best playmaker in game five which I understand they had to enforce the rules but it was a very weird rule to enforce during a playoff series when they were trying to check on their teammate. After the incident with the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pistons a season before this it's understandable. In game five the Suns jumped out to a huge lead and looked like they were going to win it, but some point during the second half things started going the other way and the Spurs ended coming back and winning game 5 making the series 3-2 going back to San Antonio. I will admit the Suns should have won game 5 and that they choked that one away themselves, But the refs were favoring the San Antonio Spurs for most of the series at that point and I'm certain the Phoenix Suns losing game five took a lot of fight out of them because in Game 6 the Suns were being blown out for most of it in a win or go home game. The Suns didn't seem to start really fighting until it was too late for them to end up winning which they looked like they could have made an amazing comeback if the comeback began earlier but by the time they started to it was too late and the San Antonio Spurs won the series 4-2. This series made me hate the Spurs more than I hated the Lakers because this series felt like the refs were favoring the San Antonio Spurs from game one and like the Phoenix Suns were robbed of a NBA championship.

The San Antonio Spurs would then go on to defeat the Utah Jazz in the Western Conference Finals and then facing a young LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. The San Antonio Spurs had absolutely no problem with the Cleveland Cavaliers sweeping them 4-0, the only memorable play from the Cavaliers that series was LeBron James blocking Tim Duncan. A few years later NBA Official Tim Donaghy wrote a book stating that the San Antonio Spurs Vs Phoenix Suns 2006-2007 playoff series was rigged towards the Spurs, and another series that was in the same scenario was the 2001-2002 Western Conference Match up between the Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings which Tim Donaghy was one of the referees for both of those playoff series. Which there was a lot of questionable calls and favoritism towards one team during most of the games in those playoff series, and both series also oddly played out almost the same during the last two games of each series.

While I do believe the Phoenix Suns should have been the 2006-2007 NBA Champions, I don't entirely buy into the who theory that the NBA or NFL is rigged for certain teams to win it. I do believe that every once in awhile you get questionable series or games like the series I talked about in this story, or like the 2018 NFC Championship game between the Rams and the Saints but I think if these sports were rigged then they'd try to get the finals match up that would make them the most money every season, and one recent example I can think of that goes against that theory is the Phoenix Suns and Milwaukee Bucks in the 2021 NBA Finals, neither of those teams are in big sports markets and I'm pretty sure the NBA would have done anything to have the Los Angeles Clippers make the finals instead of the Phoenix Suns that year because it would have meant more money for them if it was rigged.

The Phoenix Suns ended up getting revenge on the San Antonio Spurs three years later where they swept them in the 2009-2010 western conference semi-finals where Goran Dragic had one of his best games at that point in his career. These Phoenix Suns teams paved the way for teams like the Golden State Warriors from 2014-15 until now. So while there might be a bit of bias from me in this story towards the Phoenix Suns the next story I write related to this topic will show that I'm not just being biased in thinking the Phoenix Suns should have been the 2006-2007 NBA Champions.