Sun's player, Sun's owner. Sure. Joining us right now on the Burns and Gambo show after their win last night against the Memphis Grizzlies, for which he was courtside, by the way, the Suns owner, the Mercury owner, Mat Ishbia, joins us here on the Burns and Gambo Show. Mat, welcome back to the program. Happy New Year to you and to yours, and we appreciate the time, man. How we doing today?
I'm doing great. Glad to talk to you guys. Appreciate the time as well.
You know, before we talk about the team, I want to mention something to you that you probably don't even know about. I've got a lot of Suns fans that follow me for news all over the world. And about four or five months ago, I had a guy reach out to me from Austria. And he's a big Suns fan. He follows our show and he listens to the show and he's been a Suns fan since 2004. He watches every single Suns game from Austria since 2004. And he said he was going to come to the Valley and see the Suns for the first time. And so I reached out to your staff, Josh and Mikey Weissberg, and just let him know that this guy was coming. And I just want to give the organization so much credit. This guy said him and his fiance had the best weekend of their entire life. You guys treated this fan like he was a king. He got to meet some players. He got to go on the court and watch warm-ups. He just had the best time ever. And I just want to give credit to you guys because I never met the guy. I met him on Friday. I went to the game on... I never met the guy, but he had reached out to me and so I reached out to your staff saying, 'Hey, this guy's coming all the way from Austria to watch you guys play.' You guys treated him like royalty and that meant a lot to that kid. It meant a lot to him.
I love hearing it. Yeah. And you know, we want to make the fan experience amazing. So they come from Austria, they come from downtown Phoenix, we want to do something special. And I love hearing that story because we always want to go above and beyond. I love having our fans. We have fans across the world, the Phoenix Suns, which is pretty special and an honor. And so, thank you for sharing that. That's great to hear. I'm glad. And we're going to keep doing those types of things.
Yeah. Credit to Mikey and Josh Bartles and everybody for the job that they did to make his weekend here in America special. You promised the fans they would have a team that worked their asses off and made the fans proud. You've delivered on what you've said. When did you realize that promise was going to come to fruition? When did you realize that you had that type of team?
Yeah. Well, thank you. It's important because I love Phoenix and we got to do the right thing. And I think that's the first step is creating a culture and identity. And so I actually knew it back in the summer when we started, when we said, 'Hey, listen, we got to tear this thing down and do it the right way with an identity.' And I knew that every decision from who we hired, from the GM to the coach to the assistant coaches, to which players we decided to keep and not keep, to which players we added and subtracted, like all that mattered. And so did I know it would be as good this quickly? Maybe not. But I didn't think the results might come as quickly, but I definitely believed in the concept and idea and the results have been great. The city seems happy. The players are loving it and everything's going great right now. But we're only 37 games in. We got to keep stacking it, keep building. But I feel really good about the direction we're going now.
So if I heard you right, even you are a little bit surprised by how quickly the success has come. Would that be fair to say, Mat?
Yeah. Well, if you consider the success 22 and 15 without Jalen Green all year, that's different than what I would have expected. Now, not because I don't believe in the team, but because it takes time for a new team to gel. We have a lot of young players. A lot of guys are stepping up and some guys are doing more than we expected and that's fantastic, and some guys are doing exactly what we expected and that's fantastic. But the key has been we set the identity and the players are bought in. The coach is fantastic. The GM is fantastic. You know, the CEO is fantastic. Everyone's bought in and we're all living it together. I know everyone joked about us saying we're aligned, but that's what we are. We're all aligned on what we're trying to accomplish and I think the fans are seeing it.
Mat Ishbia is our guest here on the Burns and Gambo show. You said something there that kind of caught my attention and it's something we've been talking about for a few weeks now. What is it about your front office and your coaching staff that has allowed the discovery of some of these players and their development over the course of this season? Talking about the Jordan Goodwins of the world, the Bouyes of the world, even a guy like Oso Ighodaro. What is it about your front office's ability to find these players and your coaching staff's ability to get the most out of these players, Mat?
Yeah. Well, we have a belief system around player development and around getting players better. Just because who you think they are doesn't mean who they're going to be. And some players get better, some people regress. And the work that they put in this summer, from the minute we hired them, a lot of the guys, Oso, Ryan, Collin, a lot of these guys were there all summer working, not going off all over the world. They were there working and building that and developing that. And that's not just in the offseason, it's during the season. And so getting better every day. The assistant coaches are aligned. They all have different focus with each player. Each player has goals, focuses, and that's what we're working towards. And it doesn't always work perfectly, but we're on a path and a trajectory that we all feel good about.
Boogie Cousins tweeted out — that was NBA Central tweeted out — 'Boogie Cousins thinks the Lakers should trade Austin Reaves for Dillon Brooks.' You responded, 'Don't bother calling. The Suns aren't interested. Dillon's not going anywhere.' You know, the last couple of years there were tons of rumors and a lot of people believed them. The belief now is that you guys have a good team, that you're going to see what happens when Jalen comes back and you're going to maybe make a small move at the deadline, but that you actually like this. They're having fun. They have a lot of chemistry together. So tell me about you going out there and just killing some of these rumors early.
Yeah, you know, I don't see that much of that. I'm not on there too often, but when I saw that and there was so much excitement around it, there's zero chance that's happening. Zero chance we have any interest in trading Dillon Brooks. I just talked about identity and culture and leadership and grit and toughness. I mean, I'm defining the Suns, but it defines Dillon Brooks. Everything that we love about what the Phoenix Suns are doing right now, Dillon Brooks represents that. And by the way, so does Jordan Goodwin. I'll go through all the guys. Devin Booker, I go through the guys, but Dillon Brooks we traded for for a reason. And so to know these guys online saying we're going to trade this — like I know they're trying to get clicks and all that stuff, but sometimes I see it and I just figure let me just shut this nonsense down real quick, and that's what I did.
