‘Millennial Culture’ Isn’t the Phoenix Suns Problem

The Phoenix Suns are a bad basketball organization right now, and they are looking for a scapegoat.

The Phoenux Suns are bad right now. Like 13-25 bad. The bottom third of the league in offensive and defensive rating bad.

The owner blaming abstract ideas bad.

The Arizona Republic’s Dan Bickley quoted the Suns owner Robert Sarver as he searched for a scapegoat. He found one, and it is either Markieff Morris, millennial culture, or social media. I’m not 100 percent sure.

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"“I’m not sure it’s just the NBA,” Sarver said. “My whole view of the millennial culture is that they have a tough time dealing with setbacks, and Markieff Morris is the perfect example. He had a setback with his brother in the offseason and he can’t seem to recover from it.“I’m not sure if it’s the technology or the instant gratification of being online. But the other thing is, I’m not a fan of social media. I tell my kids it’s like Fantasy Land. The only thing people put online are good things that happen to them, or things they make up. And it creates unrealistic expectations. We’ve had a number of setbacks this year that have taken their toll on us, and we haven’t been resilient. Therefore, it’s up to our entire organization to step up their game.”"

I’m sure Jason Whitlock bought a Suns jersey as soon as he saw this, as he’s fighting on the Internet as a self-appointed gatekeeper of culture and journalism. For men like him and Sarver, it is easier to go into the grab bag of buzzwords to blame millennials for situation’s problems.

Just throw out the words “safe space,” “social media” and “political correctness” in a mad-lib rant about “kids today” and you’ll have a crowd gathering to pat themselves on the back as some sort of truth tellers. It isn’t a generational thing. I generally don’t believe in that idea that an entire generation can be thrown in one bag.

I don’t think the older generation is better or worse than the current one or the one before.That’s oversimplifying the problem and something all generations are guilty of when talking about both the past and present. The Suns’ problem is the individuals running the organization and the players on the team have created and fed into a culture that isn’t winning basketball games.

That isn’t to say there aren’t issues unique to a newer generation, but to treat things like selfishness, pride and any other host of character flaws as unique to that generation is a premise built on two critical fallacies.

The Suns’ problem is the individuals running the organization and the players on the team have created and fed into a culture that isn’t winning basketball games. That isn’t to say there aren’t unique issues to a newer generation, but to treat things like selfishness, pride, and any other host of character flaws as unique to that generation is a premise built on two critical fallacies.

The first being that the loudest voices are the majority. Whitlock (and, in this case, Sarver) loves to blame Twitter and social any host of issues. It is easy to pick out a loud voice or two and treat them as some sort of majority.

Sure, some on Twitter were asking to boycott LeBron James recently, but the reaction I saw on my timeline, and I follow plenty of people invested in Black Lives Matters, was one of confusion. Some of BLM’s leaders actually defended LeBron, so it wasn’t as if the request of boycotting LeBron was even a part of that bigger movement, or something gaining traction.

It was a loud voice or two, not a multitude voices, asking for some sort of boycott of LeBron. It certainly didn’t appear to be some sort of Twitter mob forming, at least of any size. But hey, just blame millennial culture and a small, but loud, minority and you have got a scapegoat for much broader issues.

In this case, it is really easy to point at Markieff Morris and make him the poster child of “millennial culture” and the Phoenix Suns’ problems because he’s being obnoxious and is an obvious target.

Instead of Sarver really going out there and calling Morris selfish or some other descriptor that might look bad to next year’s free agents, he looks for a vague term that really has no meaning but gets interpreted a certain way by ears wanting to hear it.

Blaming millennial culture is easy because it deflects away from any real conversation about Morris, and Sarver isn’t really being as honest as he might want to be. He doesn’t want to be the an owner going on the record to call out a player for being childish or selfish, as those words carry more weight, and could be more damaging to future free agent negotiations.

It would be easy for another team to quote Sarver and say “This is exactly what he said about one of his players, do you really want to work for him?” For better or worse, public relations is a carefully managed game, and even if Sarver is 100 percent right about the selfishness of Morris, couching it in the frame of “millennial culture” allows him to be non-specific if needed.

This is political correctness, if you will.

The second and more relevant one to the Suns is that millennials created the current culture or that it is entirely different from the one before. The majority of  people who hop on a bandwagon of blaming the next generation often ignore the same things everyone before has done.

They look down at the younger generation and act as if this is the first time selfishness, greed or anything else has existed. The idea of selfishness is as old as time, and sometimes it is for good reasons, sometimes not. In this case, let’s take to prime examples of success from the NFL.

Back in 1983, John Elway was drafted by the Baltimore Colts. But he never played for them because he wasn’t a fan of their coach at the time. Since he was also a great baseball player, he publically threatened to join the New York Yankees, even at his draft day press conference. He ended up getting his way and was traded to the Denver Broncos and the rest is history.

That was selfish. It was smart, but it was also selfish. It ended up working our very well for Elway, so we mostly ignore that it even happened. Same could be said for Eli Manning as he very publicly said he didn’t want to play for the San Diego Chargers.

I don’t know for sure if at the time anyone blamed “Baby Boomer” or “Generation X” culture for their choices, but I imagine if those scenarios played out today, “millennial culture” would be considered a possible culprit. Selfishness is nothing new, nor is instant gratification. It has existed then, now, and will forever.

Somehow trying to make it unique to a younger generation is as obnoxious as it is laughable.

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But let’s focus on the smaller picture here, and how for the Phoenix Suns it isn’t so much a matter of millennial culture invading their team as much as it is just a badly organized team at the moment. Morris is part of a culture the Suns built, and they can blame themselves for that.

Much like the younger generation that is raised, Morris didn’t build the team or culture around the Phoenix Suns organization. He became part of it and was allowed to be himself, something the Suns had tolerated for quite some time before throwing in the towel this season.

The Suns appear to be into that instant gratification that Sarver hates. When Phoenix surprised everyone in the 2013-14 season with 48 wins in the rough and tumble West, the organization had two choices: Build on the success over time or try to become a playoff team now.

They decided that, despite the fact the West was possibly the strongest we’d ever seen one conference be in NBA history, that there was no time to wait on success, it had to happen sooner rather than later. They made a series of trades that haven’t made the team any better as they only won 39 games last season and won’t win that many this season.

They traded for guards, of which they already had plenty, causing Goran Dragic to wonder just how loyal the organization would be. In his own bit of selfishness, he asked for a trade and now is with the Miami Heat and wasn’t afraid to call out Sarver and the organization recently in an interview with Yahoo Sports.

"“Me and Bledsoe, we built really great chemistry together, we played well and the whole team did. Everybody expected that we’re going to get some big guys that we thought we needed, but they did another move, they bring in a point guard and it was tough,” Dragic told Yahoo. “I was a little bit frustrated. It was tough, especially for me, because I was playing off the ball all the time, and I was guarding [small forwards]. That was tough for me, but they did what they did.”"

This isn’t a case of a player complaining about the threat of non-loyalty, it actually happened when they moved him out of his natural position to shooting guard. Call it self-ish, or call it self-interest, but Dragic didn’t feel that Sarver and Phoenix were going to be loyal to him and his own interests.

In the interview with Yahoo, he points out how an organization like the San Antonio Spurs builds around a core of players. Dragic thought he was going to be a player to build around, but the Suns decided they needed more guards, and that he needed to move to make room other players to play point guard.

It’s called selfishness if you don’t like it or self-interest if you are defending yourself, but the Phoenix organization has become one where that is the foundation of the team’s culture. Sarver was eager for instant gratification and tried making trades with little regard for the team’s chemistry.

It was in his self-interest for the Suns to become a playoff team sooner rather than later, as they make more money and have more prestige when they do. But ultimately that became a selfish move as it hurt the team and organization in the long run. They’ve created a toxic environment where players don’t feel they have a reason to sacrifice their own self-interests.

The lens of hindsight is 20/20 as well and if these moves worked out, we’d be talking about Sarver and his Suns in a different light. Success also changes how things are viewed.

Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan are extremely selfish individuals by all accounts, but they’re because they and their teams were the best to play the game, we ignore the character flaw and even idolize it as a positive attribute. The 2004 Red Sox took shots of whiskey before games in the ALCS, something we talk about in that groups mythology because they won it all.

The Red Sox team that had a historically catastrophic collapse in 2011 that had beer in the clubhouse was demonized because it failed. No, selfishness is never good, but Jordan and Kobe were such damn good basketball players that it didn’t matter. Markieff Morris isn’t that. He’s a slightly above-average NBA player so when he is acting selfish, we call it for what it is.

If he had multiple NBA Finals victories, we’d take his selfishness seriously. That’s the only difference, he isn’t good enough to be that selfish.

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But so is Sarver, and that’s the problem with the Phoenix Suns culture. Too many people are focusing on their own self-interests, and there isn’t enough self-sacrifice from the bottom to the top to create wins. Maybe trading Morris will help change that, but it won’t fix everything as Morris is only one of the team’s problems.

Phoenix has a lot to fix, and as a leader, Sarver can help create that change. He’s built this mess, but he can also clean it up.