‘I was ready to kill him’: Dillon Brooks’ unique mentoring pushes Suns

PHOENIX — While the media is tucked away in a corner of the Phoenix Suns’ practice facility, Dillon Brooks saunters across two empty courts on his way out the door.

He sees to his left that Oso Ighodaro is speaking in the scrum, and he can’t help himself.

Brooks bellows out a nickname toward Ighodaro, and it echoes through the large, otherwise barren room.

“String cheese! String cheese!”

Ighodaro starts laughing and shaking his head at a reference he would later claim he knew nothing about, but in that moment, you could tell his defenses immediately went up. And with that, his personality came out.

The third-year big got a little braggadocious when follow-up questions were asked about what Brooks called him, showing far more jovial energy as opposed to his more stoic and straightforward demeanor during scrums.

“I don’t know!” Ighodaro said with a chuckle about what the nickname meant. “Every morning when I come in here, he has something to say to me.

“He can call me whatever he wants.”

Ighodaro is then told that after he was the target of Brooks’ badgering all season last year, the young player who will serve as Brooks’ mark this year is rookie Koa Peat.

Advice?

“Just to go at him! He thinks he’s big and bad, OK?! We’ll go right back at you!” Ighodaro said with a large grinning smile.

That little flip of a switch right there is what Brooks’ tactics are all about. He wants young players to come out of their shell. Feel more comfortable.

But he’s not going to wait for that to happen naturally.

He’s going to use a sledgehammer to shatter that shell, barge through the opening and scream while asking if anyone is awake inside.

“He was extremely hard on Oso between the lines last year,” Collin Gillespie, the fiery guard dubbed “Villain Jr.” by Brooks, said. “Oso is better because of it, but there were a few times he went a little far, and Oso was not having it.”

It is up for debate if Brooks knows where the line is. We saw it last season in separate ways, whether it was with officiating or shot selection.

In this facet, though, he knows exactly what he’s doing. And in his effort to piss off his teammates to bring more out of them, he is rather effective in achieving that goal, oftentimes focusing on just one small thing he keeps nagging at.

“It’s like a scab,” Gillespie said. “He just keeps picking at it, and then it starts bleeding everywhere. Sometimes he doesn’t do a great job of picking his moments, because it’ll be like, ‘Alright, I’m fed up with hearing this.’ But he means well, and he does it out of the goodness of his heart. He’s trying to really help somebody.”

Gillespie admitted it had been just a week prior that simple court chatter led to Gillespie reacting in a way toward Brooks where he said, “I was ready to kill him.”

Jalen Green knows it well from his earlier days in Houston with Brooks. He just won’t stop. He will keep at it. And not quietly.

“He does it loud,” Devin Booker said. “The whole gym is gonna know, so you have to be willing to match that energy every day. Oso did, so good luck to Koa.”

“When Dillon is in the building, you know Dillon is in the building,” head coach Jordan Ott added.

Green spoke on how it can wear you down, where at a certain point, like Gillespie said, you are over it.

“DB has an interesting way of showing he cares, especially for a rookie. … He did the same thing with me,” Green said. “Me and him have a good relationship now over the time but he has a different way of showing it.”

For Ighodaro, this led to him yelling back at Brooks in the middle of a game, reaching a breaking point Brooks was elated by and that he had wished came far sooner.

The key is this builds up a bond. Everyone knows why Brooks is doing this.

Does that, however, make it easier to deal with? Hell no! It’s a pain in the ass for these youngins, especially on days when they don’t want to put up with it.

But therein lies part of why it works. Green was even hesitant to really go in depth on how mad he would get at Brooks, because that’s his guy.

“Me and DB are like real brothers, so that just happens and then goes away,” he said.

“We know Dillon is coming from a good place,” Ott said. “He’s coming from his own way. He wants to win as badly as anyone else. And then off the court, he’s completely different.”

Ighodaro is really the guy that can speak on it the most.

“That head-to-head, I love it. It gets us better,” Ighodaro said. “And now a year with Dillon, I know how he operates (and) I know how to get under his skin a little bit, so I can get back at him.”

And while an untrained eye not used to these hyper-competitive environments might indeed see it as going too far, Brooks’ purpose behind it is clear beyond making the team better. He’s helping the young pups grow into themselves. While they’re spending so much time yelling at Brooks, they’re not realizing that Brooks is likely getting them to be the most vocal they’ve been all year.

Thus, they are now all the way out of that shell.

Booker is interested to see how this year’s jousts go, knowing how Peat is more of his low-key speed.

“I think it’s perfect,” Booker said of how Brooks goes at everyone. “I think Koa is more like me in a way, more quiet type, so we’ll bring some personality out of him for sure.”

Peat said the mentorship so far has come off the court, with no yelling or screaming on the floor (at him) just yet.

But it’s coming.

“Yeah, he’s a little shy and all but I gotta break that wall,” Brooks said.

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