What it means
The Suns are the Phoenix Suns, the NBA team, and in Scottsdale they are the home team by a kind of civic default. The city has never had a major-league franchise within its limits; its big-league baseball is a spring tenant, its football is in Glendale, its hockey left. The Suns were the Valley’s first professional team, in 1968, and were the only one for twenty years, so three generations of Scottsdale learned to say “we” about a club with a Phoenix address. “Did you watch the Suns?” is the Valley’s small talk from October to whenever the season ends badly.
The word stretches to cover the arena, whatever it is called this year, and increasingly the Phoenix Mercury, the WNBA team that shares the building and the owner and has won three titles to the Suns’ none. The Suns’ Phoenix home is about 20 minutes from Old Town; the dive bars are closer.
Where you’ll meet it
On televisions in every Scottsdale bar in April and May, in purple-and-orange gear on Camelback Mountain’s Echo Canyon trail on game mornings, and, for five years, on the arena’s own name: from 2015 to 2020 it was Talking Stick Resort Arena, after the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s resort at Scottsdale’s eastern edge, which is as close as the team has come to a Scottsdale connection in writing.
Where the word came from
The name was a contest. When the NBA awarded Phoenix an expansion franchise for the 1968-69 season, alongside Milwaukee and for a $2 million fee, the new owners asked fans to name it. Suns beat Scorpions, Rattlers and the rest, and a sunburst in purple and orange became one of the league’s most recognizable logos. The team’s first general manager was a 28-year-old from Chicago named Jerry Colangelo, who would later own the club and bring the Diamondbacks to town; the first coach was Johnny “Red” Kerr.
The franchise’s first home was Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum on McDowell Road at the state fairgrounds, which the fans and then the press called the Madhouse on McDowell. The Suns played there 24 seasons, from 1968 to 1992, and the nickname is still how Valley natives of a certain age refer to the building. The club’s founding myth is a loss: in 1969 Phoenix and Milwaukee flipped a coin for the first pick in the draft, Phoenix called heads, it came up tails, and the Bucks took Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The Suns took Neal Walk and have been telling the story since.
In 1992 the team moved to a new downtown arena built with Colangelo’s ownership group and the City of Phoenix. It opened as America West Arena and has since been US Airways Center, Talking Stick Resort Arena, Phoenix Suns Arena, Footprint Center, PHX Arena and, from 2025, Mortgage Matchup Center, which is why locals say “the arena” and move on. Robert Sarver bought the team in 2004 for about $401 million; after a league investigation, he sold to Mat Ishbia and his brother Justin in February 2023, Mercury included.
What it is not
The Suns are not champions, a fact Valley fans state before anyone else can. Three Finals, 1976 against Boston, 1993 against Chicago, 2021 against Milwaukee, three losses. They are also not the Valley’s only basketball: the Mercury, founded for the WNBA’s first season in 1997, won titles in 2007, 2009 and 2014 and reached the 2025 Finals, and retired Diana Taurasi’s number 3 in 2026. And the Suns are not Sedona red; that is the Diamondbacks. Purple and orange, always.
The fine print
The Scottsdale connection is cultural rather than legal, and worth stating plainly. The Suns have never played, practiced or been headquartered in Scottsdale. What Scottsdale supplies is fans, sponsors and a good share of the players’ home addresses, which is also true of Paradise Valley and the Camelback corridor. The one documented tie is the arena’s 2015 to 2020 name, bought by the Community’s Talking Stick Resort, whose casino district sits across the 101 from north Scottsdale.
The team’s mascot, the Gorilla, deserves a line because Joan Fudala’s survey of Valley mascots puts him beside Scottsdale’s own Artichoke and the Diamondbacks’ bobcat. He arrived in 1980 as a singing-telegram gag and never left, which is the most Phoenix origin story in sports.
Attendance and ownership numbers come from Wikipedia and the team: the $2 million 1968 fee, the $401 million Sarver purchase in 2004, the Ishbia sale in 2023 at a valuation reported around $4 billion. The 2021 Finals run, in a pandemic-shortened season with a limited-capacity arena, is the most recent time Scottsdale’s bars were full for basketball in June. For the Valley’s other borrowed teams and how they are claimed, see the Cardinals and Coyotes and the Valley itself.