The Phoenix Suns Tickets : The Suns Were The First Major Professional Sports Franchise In Arizona

The Phoenix Suns are a professional basketball team based in Phoenix

, Arizona. They are members of the Pacific Division of the Western Conference in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the only team in their division not to be based in California. Their home arena since 1992 has been the US Airways Center, which was formerly known as America West Arena, in downtown Phoenix. The Arena is often referred to as the "Purple Palace" due to its purple seats.

The Suns have been a generally successful team since they began play as an expansion team in 1968, owning the NBA's fourth-best all-time winning percentage, winning 56 percent of its games, as of the end of the 2009/2010 season. In forty-two years of play, they have posted nineteen fifty-win seasons, making nine trips to the Western Conference Finals, and advanced to the NBA Finals in 1976 and 1993.Despite four decades of success, the Suns have never won an NBA Championship.

The Suns were one of two franchises to join the NBA at the start of the 1968/69 season, alongside the Milwaukee Bucks. They were the first major professional sports franchise in the state of Arizona, and would be the only one for twenty years until the Cardinals of the National Football League relocated from St. Louis in 1988. The team played its first 24 seasons at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, located northwest of downtown Phoenix. The franchise was formed by an ownership group led by local businessmen Karl Eller, Don Pitt, Don Diamond, and Richard Bloch, and also part of the group was entertainer Andy Williams.

There were many critics, including then-NBA commissioner J. Walter Kennedy, who said that Phoenix was "too hot", "too small", and "too far away" to be considered a successful NBA market[2]. This was despite the fact that the Phoenix metropolitan area was (and still is) rapidly growing and the Suns would have built-in geographical foes in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

After continual prodding by Bloch, the NBA Board of Governors finally decided that on January 22, 1968, Phoenix and Milwaukee were granted franchises in their respective cities. They paid an entry fee of $2 million to enter the league. The Suns nickname was among 28,000 entries that were formally chosen in a "Name the Team" contest sponsored by the Arizona Republic; the winner was awarded $1,000 and season tickets to the inaugural season.

Suns was preferred to Scorpions, Rattlers, Thunderbirds, Wranglers, Mavericks, Mustangs and Cougars. Stan Fabe, who owned a commercial printing plant in Tucson, designed the team's first iconic logo for a mere $200; this was after the team paid $5,000 to a local artist to design the team's logo, but to disappointing results.

Jerry Colangelo, a then-player scout, came over from the Chicago Bulls (a franchise formed two years earlier) as the Suns' first general manager at the age of 28, along with Johnny "Red" Kerr as head coach. Unlike the first-year success that Colangelo and Kerr had in Chicago, in which the Bulls finished with a first-year expansion record of 33 wins and a playoff berth (plus a Coach of the Year award for Kerr), Phoenix finished its first year at 16/66, and finished 25 games out of the final playoff spot.

The Suns' last-place finish that season led to a coin flip for the number-one overall pick for the 1969 NBA Draft with the expansion-mate Bucks. Milwaukee won the flip, and the rights to draft UCLA center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor), while Phoenix settled on drafting center Neal Walk from the University of Florida.

While the Bucks went on to win the NBA Finals in 1971 and reaching the Finals again in 1974 (losing to the Boston Celtics), the Suns would not go to the Finals themselves until 1976. The 1969/70 season posted better results for the Suns, finishing 39/43, but losing to the eventual Western Conference champion Los Angeles Lakers in the first round of the playoffs. The next two seasons (1970/71 and 1971/72), the Suns finished with 48 and 49-win seasons, however they did not qualify for the playoffs in either year, and would not reach the playoffs again until 1976.

Since their debut, the Suns home uniforms are always white with purple and orange trim. On the road their uniforms are purple with white and orange trim, with accents of black during the 1990s and gray on the current versions. They also had a black alternate uniform during the mid-1990s.

During the 2010 NBA Playoffs, the Suns announced they would wear uniforms with the words "Los Suns" to honor their Latino fans on Cinco de Mayo for Game 2 of the Western Conference Semifinals against the San Antonio Spurs. Sports reporter Dave Zirin called the "Los Suns" action an "un-precidented political statement by a sports team." The move was also widely reported to be a protest of an Arizona illegal-immigration law enacted in April. The said uniform has been used during NBA Noche Latina events every March since the 2007-08 NBA season. That jersey had gained controversy towards fans since the Cinco de Mayo game.

by: Amanda Harrison

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