Vinny’s View: Dillon Brooks has steered the Suns out of hell

Thursday night, 5,000 fans at Mortgage Matchup Center were gifted free T-shirts upon arrival.

When the game started, the Suns player depicted on those T-shirts absolutely undressed the best team in the Eastern Conference.

Dillon Brooks went off for a career-high 40 points in the shorthanded Suns’ 114-96 win over the Detroit Pistons.

Brooks came out blazing, scoring Phoenix’s first seven points of the game, then continued to cook with a deep array of shots that would have made any playground legend jealous.

Threes, driving layups, tough turnarounds. As the kids say, the Villain was “in his bag.”

A few years ago, baseball writer Jeff Passan dropped the line “Tommy Pham is a vibe” on our show. Pham had been acquired by the Arizona Diamondbacks in the second half of the season and provided grit, leadership and tough love to a team that eventually won the National League pennant.

The question is, if Pham is a vibe, what term can we use to accurately pinpoint what Dillon Brooks has done for the Phoenix Suns? A wave? A tone-setter?

Brooks came to Phoenix as one of the most widely disliked players in the NBA outside the cities that he had called home — Memphis and Houston. Fast forward about eight months and 48 games, and Brooks has even the most jaded Suns fans forgetting that the league’s sixth-leading all-time scorer was traded away last summer.

Brooks was a main architect in the Suns’ best win of the season, mixing timely scoring with rugged defense and his own brand of getting under the opponents’ skin.

With 34 regular-season games left, the Suns look like a team that nobody is going to want to deal with in the postseason, and Brooks looks exactly like an NBA All-Star.

If his name is not mentioned when the league’s All-Star reserves are announced on Sunday, it’ll be a massive show of disrespect to the man who has helped steer the Suns out of hell.

Related

The Dillon Brooks Experience shows All-Star flair vs. PistonsWestern Conference Power Rankings, Part 1: Dubs, Pels and Grizz bring intrigue at the bottomValley Suns schedule for 2026-27 season releasedBickley: Arizona sports need to find their way out of the yuckTyrese Haliburton says he wanted to be drafted by Suns in 2020Nuggets trade Peyton Watson to Cavaliers in latest Western Conference offseason move