How the Phoenix Suns could reshape their roster around Kevin Durant, Devin Booker - ESPN

The boos echoed while new Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia trudged from his courtside seat through the tunnel and toward a private room in the bowels of the Footprint Center.

Mateen Cleaves, Ishbia's longtime friend and guest for the night, walked behind his former Michigan State teammate and offered words of encouragement after the halftime buzzer had sounded on Thursday's Game 6.

«Chest out! Chest out!» Cleaves told Ishbia. «You all right! You all right!»

They returned to Ishbia's seats, located in the corner across from the home bench, and watched the rest of the Suns' elimination game despite the result being a foregone conclusion.

Most others in the home crowd didn't have such patience, as many fans fled for the exits early in the fourth quarter, as the Suns' season-ending 125-100 blowout at the hands of the top-seeded Denver Nuggets created some eerily familiar and painful feelings in Phoenix. (The Suns were eliminated by the Dallas Mavericks in similar fashion at home in last season's Western Conference semifinals.)

«This is two years in a row where we lost in an elimination game like this,» Suns coach Monty Williams said, «and it's just a bad feeling.»

Suns superstar Devin Booker, the only player to start both of those games, had nothing to say after the blowout, uncharacteristically exiting the arena without speaking to the media.

While Booker has been a constant in the Suns' rise to contender status, so much has changed for the team in the past year, most significantly Ishbia's purchase of a majority share of the franchise ending Robert Sarver's reign of incompetent and inappropriate behavior.

«We're going to try to win championships,» Ishbia said during his introductory news conference in February. «We can't win