Dillon Brooks got paid. The Phoenix Suns signed the polarizing wing to a three-year, $73 million veteran extension on August 5, and NBA Twitter reacted exactly the way you would expect NBA Twitter to react.
The overwhelming reaction was disbelief. Not because Brooks is a bad basketball player, though the numbers case for that money is debatable. The disbelief was rooted in the fact that Brooks has become one of the most polarizing personalities in the league, and Phoenix just committed real money to keeping him around for the long haul.
Brooks came over to the Suns in a trade last summer and had a productive first year in the desert. He averaged 14.2 points, 3.2 rebounds, and 1.6 steals per game. His defense on wings remained top-tier. His three-point shooting held up at 36 percent. He was, by most reasonable measures, a useful rotation player who could start on a lot of teams.
The $24 million per year is where the fan reaction goes sideways. That is starter money for a role player, and Brooks’ role on any actual contender would be as the third or fourth wing option. Phoenix is paying him like a top-of-rotation piece because he actually is a top-of-rotation piece on the current Suns roster, which is itself a comment on the state of the roster around Kevin Durant and Devin Booker.
The other layer here is Brooks himself. He is one of the most famous heels in the league. He talked openly about LeBron James being past it. He got into it with the Warriors, the Timberwolves, and half a dozen other teams. He plays with a chip on his shoulder that some people love and other people find insufferable.
Phoenix knew all of that when they signed him. They wanted the edge. Devin Booker is a great scorer but not exactly a vocal enforcer. Kevin Durant leads by example rather than by talking trash. Brooks brings the on-court friction that a modern playoff team needs, and the Suns front office decided that was worth the awkwardness.
The fans are the ones who have to sit with the deal. And a lot of them are not happy. The reactions online ranged from “this is why we can’t win” to more measured concerns about tying up cap space in a player whose game does not obviously scale to a Finals run.
The counterargument is that the Suns had few better options. Trading him would have required attaching draft assets to move the contract. Letting him walk in free agency next summer would have created another hole on the wing. Extending him now, while his market value was still climbing, gave Phoenix cost certainty even if the number looks steep.
Whether this ages well depends on what the Suns look like in three years. If Booker and Durant are still competing and Brooks is still hitting corner threes and locking up wings, the deal will look fine. If Phoenix falls into a rebuild, this contract becomes very difficult to move.
For now, Brooks stays, the fans complain, and the Suns move on.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
