ON A SUNNY and mild Friday morning in New York in mid-June, a breakfast buffet was laid out in a sprawling Four Seasons penthouse suite in downtown Manhattan. Bradley Beal and his wife, Kamiah Adams-Beal, were the guests of honor.
This was a high-end recruiting pitch. It was conducted by the Phoenix Suns with the permission of Beal's then team, the Washington Wizards, who had decided to trade the shooting guard. Beal's no-trade clause made it a free agent situation -- he was picking his destination.
James Jones, the Suns president of basketball operations, was inside the plush suite with team CEO Josh Bartelstein and new coach Frank Vogel, all of whom had flown in the day before on a private jet.
But it was Mat Ishbia, the team's new owner as of earlier this year, who led the three-hour session that wasn't just aimed at basketball but how Beal's family would fit into what's being built in Phoenix.
When the meeting ended, Beal was on his way toward being a Sun.
"That plane ride home will be a memory I have for a long time," Bartelstein told ESPN. "We had prep calls, stayed up late the night before working together on the presentation and it all paid off. Mat led and it went really well."
Ishbia has heard the stories and warnings about so-called new owner syndrome, the winding history of freshly minted governors making overaggressive mistakes in their first months. Mikhail Prokhorov, the former Brooklyn Nets owner who pushed for what became an infamous trade for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, is at the top of a list, among other examples.
There is an adage, well-known in the NBA, that team owners might want to limit their involvement in basketball decisions.
But that's not who Ishbia is and it's not who he will be. Less than six months in with several massive and gutsy deals that he piloted already under his belt, Ishbia has let it be known how he is going to run the Suns: aggressively and from the front.
Ishbia, 43, was audacious in building the business empire that allowed him to pay a $4 billion valuation for the Suns. He was audacious in his first day in the role when he negotiated directly with current Nets owner Joe Tsai in a blockbuster deal to land superstar Kevin Durant. He was audacious when he severed ties with his cable partner in an effort to move Suns games to free TV. And he was audacious in going for Beal, trading the last of the Suns' available draft assets and blowing into the newly-created "second apron" of the NBA's collective bargaining agreement that was supposed to deter superteam building.
If the Ishbia-led Suns are going to fail, if he doesn't dodge the new owner trap, it will come with such audacity.
But he isn't planning on failing.
"We are going to win at everything we do," Ishbia told ESPN recently while on a videoconference call from his office at United Wholesale Mortgage outside Detroit. "I don't believe you accomplish anything by being average. That's not who I am."
AFTER THE SUNS lost in the second round of the playoffs in mid-May to the eventual champion Denver Nuggets -- and made the audacious move to fire successful coach Monty Williams and replace him with NBA champion Vogel -- the team's front office members met at its practice facility to strategize their offseason moves.
There were two pathways presented. The Suns could use their assets -- the partially-guaranteed contract of Chris Paul, big man Deandre Ayton and a handful of second-round draft picks -- to attempt to add another star-level player.
Or, they could knock $15 million off the books by waiving Paul and get access to their midlevel exception and search the free agent market to build depth around Durant and co-star Devin Booker. Depth was an issue after the Durant trade and was also a factor in the postseason loss to the Nuggets.
Ishbia listened to each case and issued his preference: both.
"I hope to win now," Ishbia said. "And then we'll do the work and figure out how to manage it later."
A few weeks later, the Suns landed Beal and signed a group of promising, minimum-salary free agents -- the only avenue they were able to compete in after the Beal acquisition exhausted other options. They won another set of recruiting battles to land players with multiple offers such as Eric Gordon, Josh Okogie, Keita Bates-Diop and Yuta Watanabe.
Working with Vogel, Jones identified the players who would fit around their existing core, mostly players with length and some outside shooting prowess, and recruited them. Ishbia cleared a strategy to offer many of them player options for a second season, a maneuver that cost millions in additional salary and luxury taxes.
In a rare move for players at such a salary level, Ishbia personally called them to help close the deals.
It's possible this high level of involvement from ownership would be a turnoff to those in basketball operations and lead to changes within, even with a hugely increased budget than the Suns were used to under previous governor Robert Sarver (team payroll is now projected $60 million higher than Sarver's last full season in 2021-22).
Bradley Beal discusses his excitement to be with the Phoenix Suns and the challenges ahead.
There was a reasonable amount of skepticism within the league that Jones would remain in his role overseeing basketball operations, even though he had led the team to major success since getting the job in 2019. This was especially true when, in one of Ishbia's first big personnel moves, Bartelstein was hired away from the Detroit Pistons to oversee both business and basketball for the Suns and the WNBA's Mercury.
Jones' reputation is sterling. He won three NBA championships in 13 seasons as a player, was a part of players' union leadership for years, studied under the franchise-building tutelage of Pat Riley with the Miami Heat for six seasons and built deep respect from both rank-and-file and superstar teammates along the way.
It was not a surprise that two years after Jones was promoted to general manager (he was made president last year), the Suns were in the 2021 Finals.
Ishbia came in, raised the stakes and pushed the envelope -- leading Jones to trade away players he had drafted or traded for, as well as draft picks he had protected. And Ishbia hired someone over Jones, but the 42-year-old executive has embraced the challenge.
Not only has Jones stayed in the job, but he says Ishbia's new structure has opened doors for the team, and that has left him energized to get this roster back to competing for a championship. Jones, who retains strong influence, was a driving force in the controversial decision to move on from Williams, sources said.
"Josh was hired as the CEO and I wanted him to come in and lead as the CEO," Jones said. "Mat became the owner and I was ready for him to come in and set the direction as owner. We had been in limbo for far too long."
Bartelstein's father, Mark, is a highly-respected longtime agent. Mark represents Beal in a twist of fate that certainly helped the recruitment and trade process. When Josh left his job in the Pistons' front office in February, he was forbidden from joining the Suns until April as part of a non-compete agreement.
So he spent a month shadowing Ishbia at his mortgage company, learning about his practices and preparing ideas for taking over on the business and basketball fronts.
Often when there's a new boss hired in the NBA, there are major changes below that person. That hasn't happened in Phoenix, where the parties promise -- on record -- that the new marriage is working and the sharing of duties has helped them execute what could end up being a dynamite offseason.
"Mat has empowered us and challenged us," Josh Bartelstein said. "He wants to do spectacular things."
The sustainability of it all can be called into question, especially with the Suns trading away so many draft picks. But with Booker, Durant and Beal all in the middle of long-term contracts and Ishbia pushing his front office to hunt for ways to improve -- the team recently made an inventive but somewhat risky pick swap deal with the Memphis Grizzlies to acquire three second-round picks to use in future trades -- the strategy isn't without merit.
"We've been encouraged and charged with doing bigger things," Jones said. "When you do bigger things, it requires more work, more output. And it requires more collaboration and more cooperation from the entire team. We're here to do great things, not just be a good team but be an elite team."
THE DAY AFTER the Suns agreed to trade for Beal with Paul's expiring salary as a centerpiece, the future Hall of Fame guard did an interview with the New York Times as part of a promotional tour for his book, "Sixty-One."
Several times in the Q-and-A style interview, Paul referred to "Mat and Isiah" making the decision to trade him. Though Paul had his contract fully guaranteed (earning him an additional $15 million) as part of the trade, it was clear there were some hard feelings.
Paul mentioning Isiah, who is 62-year-old Hall of Fame point guard Isiah Thomas, as part of the decision process to trade him caused a reaction in the media about the level of influence Thomas had on the Suns' major decisions.
Thomas and Ishbia are close friends, and Thomas serves on the board of Ishbia's mortgage company.
In 2006, a civil jury found Thomas and the New York Knicks were liable for sexual harassment against former team executive Anucha Browne Sanders, who was awarded $11.6 million. Thomas was fired by the Knicks as head coach and team president in 2008. He later was the head coach at Florida International University and was the team president of the WNBA's New York Liberty from 2015 to 2019. He has been a longtime analyst for league-owned NBA TV.
Thomas has spent time in Phoenix informally advising the Suns' front office, sources said, but that has reduced in recent weeks as Ishbia added to his front office. Thomas was not part of the Beal recruitment and subsequent trade, sources said. Thomas has been at the NBA 2K24 Summer League in Las Vegas working for NBA TV and has spent time with Suns executives.
In addition to Ishbia bringing in Bartelstein, in March the Suns hired Gerald Madkins, who worked as a scout for five years under Thomas with the Knicks as part of his long career, as assistant general manager.
"As I said the day I was introduced, Isiah is a friend and has no formal role," Ishbia said. "If that changes, we will announce it."
Thomas was sitting next to Ishbia in May in courtside seats at the Footprint Center in Game 4 of the conference semifinals against the Nuggets when Okogie crashed into Ishbia's bank of seats chasing a loose ball. Okogie ended up in the second row and the ball ended up in Ishbia's hands.
The moment went viral when Nuggets star Nikola Jokic, seeing a chance to start a fast break with the Suns down a man, came and pulled the ball out of Ishbia's hands. That's where things got a little wild as Jokic made contact with Ishbia, who flung his arms into the air and fell back into his seat. Jokic was hit with the technical foul and was later fined $25,000.
"I wasn't flopping, I put my hands up and moved back because I wanted to make sure I wasn't touching [Jokic]," Ishbia said, talking about the event publicly for the first time. "It happened in three seconds. I was trying to help Josh Okogie, who fell over us. [Jokic] barely touched me.
"Durant and Booker were joking with me, they said 'You got us a point, when has an owner gotten his team a point'?"
Ishbia's profile was dramatically increased by that moment, but perhaps it accelerated what was bound to happen anyway. As the architect of a Suns roster makeover and heavy investment into star players, Ishbia was going to draw a lot of attention one way or another.
In the fall, though, that focus will be back on the court. And through all the machinations behind the scenes, whether this grand gambit of Ishbia's works or not will become apparent.
Ishbia, needless to say, believes it will. And regardless of what the conventional wisdom might be about the process and his involvement, his front office says they're standing with him.
"I love where we are right now," Jones said. "We're talking about forming the best team in the NBA."