When you’re watching a good basketball game, your heartbeat starts to climb. It’s part of the rush, part of the stress, part of why we watch in the first place. The game pulls you in, and before long, your pulse matches the pace on the floor.
On Thursday night in Phoenix, it raced right along with Jalen Green as he attacked the rim, showing flashes of everything fans hoped he could be. Next to Devin Booker, that vision finally felt real.
Then the game ends. The heart rate settles. Life goes back to
normal. The next day, you think about what you saw. Jalen Green putting up 29 points, hitting 6-of-13 from deep, finishing with a +30 in only 23 minutes. It was the kind of performance that makes you believe in what could be.
Still, it’s on us to stay grounded. That’s what being a fan of this team means right now. It’s an exercise in balance, in managing expectations, in understanding growth for what it is. This season will test that patience, but it will also show us who this team can become.
So yeah, I was fired up yesterday, heart pounding through those Jalen Green highlights. I’m still feeling good today. But now comes the reset, the reminder of where we are and where this thing could actually go.
After that kind of performance, I decided to take a little trip through some Houston Rockets boards and social media threads. I wanted to see what their fans thought of it. Green spent four seasons there, 307 games in Rockets red, so their perspective means something.
Most of what I saw wasn’t surprise. It was pride. They were happy to see him shine in his debut here. Over and over, though, one theme kept popping up. It was never about whether Jalen Green had the talent. It was whether he could find consistency. That was always the challenge. That was always the opportunity.
I did a little digging, combing through every game Jalen Green played in his four years with Houston. I charted his scoring totals, probably to a level no sane person should, and what I found backed up everything Rockets fans were saying. When you look at his game-by-game points, the pattern jumps out right away. The highs are electric. The lows come more often than you’d expect.
His points graph looks like an EKG, or maybe a Richter scale. There are stretches where he’s dialed in, stretches where he fades, and the overall view is one of inconsistency. Sure, there are a million possible reasons behind that. Changing roles, playing through injuries, learning new systems. I get all that. But the numbers still tell a story. He’s scored 30 or more points 51 times in his career, but he’s also finished with 15 or fewer in 107 games. That’s 35% of the time.
I bring this up not as a critique, but as a reality check.
Jalen Green is wildly talented. He’s explosive, athletic, and he’s going to bring something this team badly needs. But there will be nights when the shot doesn’t fall. Nights when he forces an early look instead of letting the play develop. Nights when he drives into traffic instead of finding an open shooter on the wing. We saw flashes of that in his debut too.
That’s where the challenge lies. With consistency, both in scoring and in feel. How he reads the floor, how he fits within the system, how he balances aggression with patience. The hope is that the peaks start to level out the valleys.
That’s the story of potential, really. It’s never about what you can do once, it’s about what you can do again and again when the lights hit and the defense adjusts. Jalen Green showed us something Thursday night, something real and worth getting excited about. But what comes next will matter more than what came first.
If he can steady those swings, if he can turn flashes into habits, the Suns will have found the spark they’ve been chasing for years. Until then, we’ll ride the highs, brace for the lows, and keep that pulse steady. Because this might be the start of something that’s worth the wait.
