The

Phoenix Suns The Phoenix Suns are an American professional basketball team based in Phoenix, Arizona. They compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA), as a member of the league's Western Conference Pacific Division. The Suns are the only team in t ...

are a professional

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appr ...

team based in

Phoenix, Arizona Phoenix ( ; nv, Hoozdo; es, Fénix or , yuf-x-wal, Banyà:nyuwá) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities and towns in Arizona#List of cities and towns, most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona, with 1 ...

, United States. They are members of the Pacific Division of the Western Conference in the

National Basketball Association The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America. The league is composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada) and is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United S ...

(NBA). The Suns began playing in the NBA as an

expansion team An expansion team is a new team in a sports league, usually from a city that has not hosted a team in that league before, formed with the intention of satisfying the demand for a local team from a population in a new area. Sporting leagues also ...

in the

1968–69 NBA season The 1968–69 NBA season was the 23rd season of the National Basketball Association. The season ended with the Boston Celtics winning the NBA Championship, beating the Los Angeles Lakers 4 games to 3 in the NBA Finals. Notable occurrences * ...

. In their inaugural season, the Suns posted a win–loss record of 16–66. They participated in the playoffs only once in their first seven seasons. In the 1975–76 season, a rookie

Alvan Adams Alvan Leigh Adams (born July 19, 1954) is an American former professional basketball player. Adams spent his entire career with the Phoenix Suns and retired in 1988 as the second all-time Suns scorer with 13,910 career points. College career D ...

helped the team reach its first

NBA Finals The NBA Finals is the annual championship series of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Eastern and Western Conference champions play a best-of-seven game series to determine the league champion. The team that wins the series is awa ...

, which they lost to the

Boston Celtics The Boston Celtics ( ) are an American professional basketball team based in Boston. The Celtics compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Eastern Conference Atlantic Division. Founded in 1946 as one of t ...

4–2.

Charles Barkley Charles Wade Barkley (born February 20, 1963) is an American former professional basketball player who is a television analyst on TNT. Nicknamed "Sir Charles", "Chuck", and "the Round Mound of Rebound", Barkley played 16 seasons in the Natio ...

and

Steve Nash Stephen John Nash (born 7 February 1974) is a Canadian professional basketball coach and former player who most recently served as head coach of the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played 18 seasons in the NBA, ...

won the

Most Valuable Player In team sports, a most valuable player award, abbreviated 'MVP award', is an honor typically bestowed upon an individual (or individuals, in the instance of a tie) whose individual performance is the greatest in an entire league, for a particu ...

(MVP) award while playing for the Suns. Barkley led the Suns to the 1993 NBA Finals, where they lost to the

Chicago Bulls The Chicago Bulls are an American professional basketball team based in Chicago. The Bulls compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Eastern Conference Central Division. The team was founded on January 1 ...

. After signing with the Suns in 2004, Nash led the team to three straight division titles, but after reaching the Conference Finals in 2009–10 the Suns subsequently experienced their worst period of on-court failure, missing the playoffs for ten consecutive seasons until the 2020-21 season (the franchise's previous record playoff drought was five seasons, which happened after the team made the postseason in only their second year of existence during the 1969–70 campaign). Despite their failures in the 2010s, the Suns franchise has the NBA's eighth-best all-time winning percentage winning 53 percent of its games, as of the 2020–21 NBA season. In their first forty-three seasons, the Suns made the playoffs 29 times, posted nineteen seasons with fifty or more wins, appeared nine times in the Western Conference Finals, and advanced to the NBA Finals three times in

1976 Events January * January 3 – The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights enters into force. * January 5 – The Pol Pot regime proclaims a new constitution for Democratic Kampuchea. * January 11 – The 1976 Phila ...

1993 File:1993 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The Oslo I Accord is signed in an attempt to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; The Russian White House is shelled during the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis; Czechoslovakia is peace ...

, and

2021 File:2021 collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: the James Webb Space Telescope was launched in 2021; Protesters in Yangon, Myanmar following the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état, coup d'état; A civil demonstration against the October–November 2021 ...

. As a result, based on their all-time winning percentage, the Suns are the 2nd-most successful franchise to never win an

NBA championship The NBA Finals is the annual championship series of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Eastern and Western Conference champions play a best-of-seven game series to determine the league champion. The team that wins the series is awa ...

, behind only the

Utah Jazz The Utah Jazz are an American professional basketball team based in Salt Lake City. The Jazz compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Western Conference (NBA), Western Conference, Northwest Division (NBA), ...

. The 2020 Finals loss to Miwaukee moved Phoenix past the Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz for the most Finals losses without winning a title (Orlando and Utah, as of 2022, have been to 2 NBA Finals apiece but haven't won any of them yet).

Table key

Seasons

''Note: Statistics are correct as of the end of the .''

All-time records

{, class="wikitable" style="text-align:center; font-size:95%" , - !Statistic !Wins !Losses !Win% , - , align=left, Regular season record (1968–2022) , 2,335 , 2,026 , {{winpct, .535 , - , align=left, Postseason record (1968–2022) , 154 , 155 , {{winpct, 154, 155 , - , align=left, All-time regular and post-season record (1968–2022) , 2,489 , 2,181 , {{winpct, .533

Notes

{{reflist, group=lower-alpha *{{note label, GB, a, a This is determined by adding the

absolute difference The absolute difference of two real numbers x and y is given by , x-y, , the absolute value of their difference. It describes the distance on the real line between the points corresponding to x and y. It is a special case of the Lp distance for a ...

in wins between the leading team and the team of interest to the absolute difference in losses between the two teams, and dividing by two. *{{note label, Lock1, b, b Because of a lockout, the season did not start until February 5, 1999, and all 29 teams played a shortened 50-game regular season schedule.{{cite web, last = Donovan, first = John, title = Let the semi-season begin: Expect injuries, intensity and a new champion in '99, publisher =

CNN Sports Illustrated CNN/Sports Illustrated (CNN/SI) was a 24-hour sports news network. It was created by Time Warner, merging together its CNN and ''Sports Illustrated'' brands and related resources. It was launched on December 12, 1996. Other news networks like E ...

, date = February 4, 1999, url = http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/nba/1999/nba_preview/news/1999/02/03/nba_expectations/, access-date = April 28, 2011 *{{note label, Lock2, c, c Because of a lockout, the season did not start until December 25, 2011, and all 30 teams played a shortened 66-game regular season schedule. *{{note label, AS, d, d Shaquille O'Neal shared the All-Star Game Most Valuable Player award with

Kobe Bryant Kobe Bean Bryant ( ; August 23, 1978 – January 26, 2020) was an American professional basketball player. A shooting guard, he spent his entire 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Widely r ...

of the

Los Angeles Lakers The Los Angeles Lakers are an American professional basketball team based in Los Angeles. The Lakers compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Western Conference Pacific Division. The Lakers play their ...

References

;General *{{cite web, title=Phoenix Suns, work=basketball-reference.com, publisher=Sports Reference LLC, url=https://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/PHO/, access-date=April 28, 2011 *{{cite web, title=Suns History: The Seasons, work=NBA.com, publisher=NBA Media Ventures, LLC , url=http://www.nba.com/suns/history/history_index.html , access-date=April 28, 2011 *{{cite web, title=Phoenix Suns , work=databasebasketball.com , publisher=databaseSports.com , url=http://www.databasebasketball.com/teams/teampage.htm?tm=PHO , access-date=April 28, 2011 , url-status=dead , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121012081536/http://www.databasebasketball.com/teams/teampage.htm?tm=PHO , archive-date=October 12, 2012 ;Specific {{reflist, 2 {{NBA season-by-season team history {{Phoenix Suns {{Phoenix Suns seasons {{featured list

seasons A season is a division of the year based on changes in weather, ecology, and the number of daylight hours in a given region. On Earth, seasons are the result of the axial parallelism of Earth's tilted orbit around the Sun. In temperate and pola ...