Allow me to reminisce for a bit. Let me take you back to the year 2013. Wes Johnson is playing for the Suns. He starts the season mostly riding the pine, getting DNP’s interspersed with bursts of eight or ten minutes of playing time. He’s only 25 years old, still on his rookie deal, but his career looks like it’s close to being over. Mediocre talents Jared Dudley, Markieff Morris, and Michael Beasley are ahead of him in the rotation.
Then, after the all-star break, something miraculous happens: Wes starts to get minutes again. Whether to accelerate the tanking process or to see what they really had with Wes, or both, his minutes per game shoot up, and he regularly gets thirty minutes in a contest. A directive comes from above: give Wes as many shots as he wants. So for the entire months of March and April, Wes shoots. There are a lot of bricks. He’s not used to being the focal point and it shows. As the losses pile up, Wes puts together the most consistently high-scoring stretch of his professional career. His future as an NBA player is saved.
Wasn’t that fun to think about? Now Wes, at thirty years old, is a low-volume role player who will never live up to the spot at which he was drafted. But we’ll always be able to look back on his eventful tenure with the Suns and remember the fun times.