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Final Four, Suns Put Phoenix at Center of Basketball Universe

Barry M. Bloom
·5 min read

PHOENIX — Mat Ishbia has owned the Phoenix Suns for just about 14 months with the expressed intent of making Phoenix the center of the basketball world.

This weekend will showcase the progress thus far.

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The NCAA Men’s Final Four is taking place Saturday at State Farm Stadium in nearby Glendale, Ariz., with Purdue-North Carolina State playing in the first game and Alabama-Connecticut in the second. The winners will play Monday night in the final.

Ishbia’s Suns have a game sandwiched in between the college hoops at downtown Footprint Center Sunday against the New Orleans Pelicans as their run toward the playoffs is in its final five games.

That’s a whole lot of hoops.

“This town is a big-time basketball city,” Suns coach Frank Vogel said.

On Thursday, Ishbia opened the doors to the first phase of his new downtown office and practice facility for the WNBA’s Mercury. The members’ campus—Ishbia declines to call them employees—which cost $100 million to build, is located in the town’s warehouse district behind Chase Field, and features indoor and outdoor basketball courts, outdoor pickleball courts, a fully catered dining room, a workout facility and plenty of open desk space for Suns staffers. The Mercury’s new practice facility is coming in a couple of months.

These are owned by the Player 15 Group, which has been formed to serve as the umbrella company for the Suns, Mercury, arena operations and a new G-League team, which currently doesn’t have a place to play, Ishbia said.

“This is the Mecca of basketball in America, but it’s just a great, great sports town,” Ishbia, who carpetbagged in from Michigan, said. “It’s great to be able to showcase it. It’ll be a great, great time.”

The growth of sports in Phoenix has been exponential with a Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, a World Series and the Men’s Final Four all played here since 2021. The WNBA All-Star Game is at Footprint on July 20, the Women’s Final Four is slated for 2026 in downtown Phoenix, and the NBA All-Star Game will be played in Phoenix in 2027. Most of those events have now been staged in the Phoenix area multiple times.

With the beautiful winter weather and growth of population in Maricopa County to 4.7 million, the events will just keep coming.

But the Suns set the standard with the birth of professional sports in the Valley when they joined the NBA in 1968 for a $2 million expansion fee.

“I love it,” Devin Booker, who was picked 13th overall by the Suns in the 2015 draft and has played with them ever since, said. “The city has been on the rise. It’s one of the most growing cities in the U.S. I’m glad I moved out here. It’s a great place to host all these events.”

Like Ishbia, Booker is also from Michigan and wears his Detroit Tigers baseball cap just to prove it.

Joining the Suns, the NFL’s Cardinals moved here from St. Louis in 1988 and the NHL’s Coyotes relocated from Winnipeg in 1996. The Arizona Diamondbacks followed by expanding into MLB in 1998. And with the movement came a plethora of new stadiums and arenas, not to mention 11 spring training facilities for 15 Cactus League teams, with most of it paid for by public dollars.

“You can feel the passion fans here have for sports,” Vogel said. “But the Suns are here the longest, and there’s a big passion for our team. It’s a big college basketball fanbase here as well. I love that we’re the center of the basketball universe.”

No man is more responsible for all this than Jerry Colangelo, once dubbed “The Godfather” of Phoenix sports. Colangelo owned the Suns, was majority partner of the D-backs and had a hand in building the downtown arena and adjacent ballpark.

“The difference between now and then is that we started from scratch,” Colangelo once said in an interview. “We were building all the time, trying to build history, trying to build a winning franchise.”

He succeeded in baseball, with the D-backs defeating the New Yankees in a thrilling seven-game 2001 World Series, the only pro sports title in Phoenix history. The Suns have fallen short in three shots at the title: to the Boston Celtics in 1976, the Chicago Bulls in 1993, and the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021.

Colangelo bought the Suns from Richard Bloch in 1987 for $44.5 million and sold them to Robert Sarver for $401 million. When Sarver was suspended and sanctioned by the league, he sold it to Ishbia last year for $4 billion. That’s $2 million in 1968 to $4 billion last year, just to emphasize the point.

Phoenix as a city has grown along with the franchise value. It’s not just about the money, Ishbia said. “It’s about culture, it’s about how you treat people.”

Ishbia added that his goal is to keep Suns and Mercury players and “members” happy, to promote an atmosphere of success and to draw free agents to both clubs.

“You’ll see it this summer with the men: Some of our players will want to stay,” Ishbia said. “They start to look at the whole package rather than maxing out their financial value. You just invest in your people. It’s the right thing to do to grow and succeed.”

The arena was opened in 1992 for $89 million in public funds, and the most recent renovations were finished just before the 2020 pandemic at the cost of $230 million, $130 million from Phoenix and $100 million out of Sarver’s pocket, including a $50 million state-of-the art practice facility about 20 minutes away. That’s where the Suns will remain when the Mercury move downtown, Ishbia said.

Plans for a new arena as part of the real estate growth of the Player 15 Group aren’t out of the question for the long term, Ishbia said. There’s plenty of empty space in the warehouse district just south of the arena and the Diamondbacks’ baseball stadium.

“We’re going to continue to invest in the community,” Ishbia said. “Footprint is an amazing facility. No thoughts about that right now, but we’re always thinking about making things better and improving.”

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