As It Turns Out, Isiah Thomas May Have Played A Huge Role In The Bradley Beal/Chris Paul Trade

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As exciting as it may be as a Suns fan right now that Phoenix has said fuck the new CBA and built the latest superteam around KD/Devin Booker/Bradley Beal/Deandre Ayton (who is probably about to be traded for depth), this little nugget from Chris Paul while talking about the trade should be very concerning.

In Febraury after Matt Ishbia bought the Suns, we started to hear more and more rumors about who he would be bringing into the front office

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It didn't take long for the denials to come out, and by not take long I mean the very next day

Well here we are a month later and listen to how Chris Paul is talking

"I realize that, you know, Mat and Isiah, I guess, just wanted to go in a different direction"

"But like I said, Mat and Isiah must have wanted to go different"

Call me crazy, but does that sound like a situation where Isiah Thomas has zero role within the Suns organization? Who cares whether he has a formal title or not, Isiah Thomas is clearly involved with what the Suns are doing. Given his history as someone in charge of building a basketball roster, that should terrify Suns fans. Thomas was famous for bringing in absolutely terrible contracts while in charge of the Knicks, so no shit he probably had no problem with what the Suns just did to their books. He probably helped convince Ishbia that this was a good idea in the first place.

Who knows, maybe this was ultimately the work of James Jones, but you see in that interview from Paul he suggests he talked to James Jones the day before and didn't really have any idea this was about to happen. Does that tell you that this was a James Jones move and not something more along the lines of Isiah Thomas? That presents a whole other set of issues that the Suns will have to figure out if the owner is taking the advice of someone who doesn't even work for the team over the President of Basketball Ops and GM. 

We all know how things ended with Isiah running the Knicks. There's a reason there haven't really been a ton of teams lining up to hire Isiah to run their basketball team, yet here the Suns are. It sure sounds like they took his advice and went with his plan regardless of what it meant for their future. That's quite the gamble that has the potential to become a big time disaster relatively quickly.

Or, it could win the title. Only time will tell.