Two years after reaching the NBA Finals, Phoenix is embarking on a franchise overhaul. The team traded for Kevin Durant in February. Monty Williams, the NBA’s Coach of the Year last season, was fired after the playoffs. And now, Chris Paul has been shipped to Washington as part of a trade that will send Bradley Beal to Phoenix.

It’s evidently not a coincidence that all three of those moves were made after the team was sold to billionaire Mat Ishbia. (He also owns the WNBA’s Mercury.) The Durant trade was made three days after the sale of the franchise to Ishbia was formally approved and made possible by Ishbia’s being willing to pay the luxury tax associated with the move. All three moves are risky, too. The oft-injured Durant will be 35 at the start of next season and is owed an average of $51 million for the next three years, and coaches as well respected as Williams are hard to come by. Now, the team is taking another big swing to acquire a star at the expense of its bench depth.

So who is it that’s deciding to take these risks? Ishbia, of course, but also apparently someone who isn’t formally employed by the Suns. In an interview with The New York Times on Monday, Paul said repeatedly that his understanding of the trade was that “Mat and Isiah, I guess, just wanted to go in a different direction.” Isiah who? Isiah Thomas.

Ishbia is a Michigan native who grew up a fan of Thomas and the Pistons. The two have become friends, and Thomas even has a seat on the board of Ishbia’s United Wholesale Mortgage company.

“There is no role for Isiah at this time,” Ishbia said during his introductory press conference. A Suns spokesperson also shot down a February report from TNT’s Chris Haynes that Ishbia intended to hire Thomas in a “prominent role in the front office.” But now Thomas is apparently at least helping to call the shots.

Paul said he was surprised by the trade because he had just spoken with Suns general manager James Jones, and there was no indication that he was about to be traded. He also found out about the move in a text from his 14-year-old son—not from Ishbia, Jones nor his agent.

Ishbia is allowed to do what he wants with the team that he owns. He’s also allowed to consult whoever he wants to before making moves. That’s one of the perks of having several billion dollars. But if Thomas was as involved in the trade as Paul makes it sound, Suns fans have every right to be worried about the future of the franchise. Thomas’s tenure as president of basketball operations for the Knicks was a disaster, marked by poor decisions in the draft, ill-advised free-agent signings and the same sort of dice-roll trades involving boatloads of future draft picks that Suns have now made. Hiring Thomas in any sort of official capacity would be bad enough, but having him operate behind the scenes is more worrisome.

The trade is a boom-or-bust move for the Suns. As Chris Mannix points out, Phoenix will now have three of the NBA’s premier scorers playing side by side, but all three (Durant, Beal and Devin Booker) are high-volume shooters who like to operate in the midrange. At the moment, the Suns have just six players under contract for next season. Durant, Booker, Beal and Deandre Ayton is an impressive core, but right now, next year’s roster looks like it’ll be, as Mannix puts it, “a quartet of players making around $160 million and a bunch of guys on minimum contracts.”

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The top five...

… things I saw last night:

5. The name of SMU’s newest offensive line recruit.

4. Joey Votto’s home run in his first game since August.

3. Pirates rookie Henry Davis’s double in his first MLB plate appearance.

2. Mike Yastrzemski’s walk-off homer into McCovey Cove.

1. Reds rookie Elly De La Cruz’s superhuman speed to beat out a routine grounder to third.

SIQ

True or false: Former NFL running back Darren Sproles, who turns 40 today, is the league’s all-time leader in games played among nonkickers 5'8" and shorter.

Friday’s SIQ: On June 16, 1991, Otis Nixon became the first player in 89 years to steal six bases in an MLB game. Who is the most recent player to tie Nixon’s record?

Rickey Henderson
Kenny Lofton
Rajai Davis
Carl Crawford

Answer: Carl Crawford, who did it on May 3, 2009.

Only four players have recorded six steals in a single game: Nixon, Crawford, Eric Young Sr. and Eddie Collins. Collins did it twice in a span of less than two weeks on Sept. 11 and 22, 1912. There have been 28 five-steal games by 25 different players, most recently Billy Hamilton in 2015.

The Red Sox had no answer for Crawford in his record-tying game. He stole second in the first inning and advanced to third thanks to a bad throw by Jason Varitek. (Varitek was charged with an error, so that counted as only one steal for Crawford.) He stole second again in the third, swiped second and third in the fifth and seventh, and stole second again in the eighth to tie the record. Three of his steals didn’t even draw a throw from Varitek. (You can watch them all here.)

Crawford said after the game that he didn’t even know he was making history with his half dozen thefts and that he would have been even more eager to keep running if he knew he could set a record.

“I probably would have broken it if I knew. I’d have definitely tried,” he said. “I didn’t even try. I don’t know if that will ever happen again.”

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