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In this undated photo, Phoenix Suns trainer Brady Howe helps a player stretch before a game in Phoenix. Howe is an Ogden-area native who experienced a quick ascent to a top spot in the Suns organization.

Photo supplied, Brady Howe

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In this June 30, 2021, photo, Brady Howe, the Phoenix Suns senior director of health and performance, holds the NBA Western Conference championship trophy after the Suns defeated the Los Angeles Clippers in Los Angeles.

Photo supplied, Brady Howe

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In this undated photo, Brady Howe, right, then the head of the NBA D-League's Idaho Stampede, poses for a photo with his wife Emily and daughter Maci at what was then called CenturyLink Arena in Boise, Idaho.

Photo supplied, Brady Howe

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In this photo from the early 2010s, trainer Brady Howe, left, speaks with a Weber State football player as they walk off the field during a game at Stewart Stadium in Ogden.

Photo supplied, Brady Howe

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In this Oct. 4, 2002, photo, Bonneville's Brady Howe (6) pursues Box Elder's Eric Rollins in a prep football game at Bonneville High School in Washington Terrace.

ALAN MURRAY, Standard-Examiner file photo

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Six games into the eight-game conclusion to the NBA’s COVID-disrupted, 2019-20 season that concluded in “the bubble” in Orlando, Florida, Brady Howe saw Damian Lillard down the hall in their shared hotel.

The surging Phoenix Suns were in the midst of an 8-0 bubble run under new head coach Monty Williams, a sudden playoff push that meant Howe, the Suns’ senior director of health and performance, had some banter for his college friend Lillard.

“I saw him and put my arm around him in the hallway and said ‘hey man, I need you to cool off a little bit.’ He smiled and shook his head, and said ‘you know I can’t do that,” Howe recalled.

Lillard had just scored 51 points in a game to beat Philadelphia. He then scored 61 to defeat Dallas and, with all of the Suns cheering and groaning in their hotels, Lillard scored another 42 points to edge Brooklyn.

That meant Portland was in the playoffs and the Suns were going home the next day. Howe returned to the hotel’s training area to clean some things up, and Lillard was already there getting treatment for the playoffs.

“He saw me coming and just shook his head, just like, ‘you can’t make this up,'” Howe remembers. “This game is such a crazy thing and you never know what it’s going to give you every day.”

Howe and the Suns were sure those moments would help catapult them into contention this season. Not only did Phoenix end its 10-season playoff drought, but the Suns are now in the NBA Finals, two wins from hoisting the championship trophy with Saturday’s Game 5 looming.

With star point guard Chris Paul battling injuries to get himself and his club to the title for the first time ever, the Ogden-area native Howe and his performance team are in the thick of it.

“It’s just what you do. We all have a role in providing care and serving the players. People probably see it differently than we do, because we’re in the day-to-day with them, they’re family to us,” Howe explained. “It’s just all about how can we win the day and help our guys be as ready as possible.

“It’s not unusual or anything. It’s everything I’ve gone to school for and made sacrifices for, so even though I’m working with high-caliber professional athletes, they’re human beings, they all go through the same emotions and day-to-day as we do.”

• • •

Howe grew up in Roy and his family moved to Washington Terrace before he began elementary school. He grew up next to Weber State University honchos like Dutch Belnap and Ron Abegglen, and eventually became a ballboy as a young teen during the late 1990s for the Wildcat teams featuring Eddie Gill and Harold Arceneaux.

He graduated from Bonneville High School and later got a degree from Weber State in athletic training while also walking on to the football team for a couple seasons.

His first job out of college took him back to Roy High School — his family lived yards away when he was young — as the athletic trainer for all Roy sports.

The dream was always to work in the NBA, he said, so during his first year at Roy, he began writing letters and sending Facebook messages to possible employers. An assistant trainer with the Utah Jazz was one of few to respond, and Howe got hooked up with the NBA D-League team in Orem, the Utah Flash, which was affiliated with the Jazz.

He worked there and at Roy simultaneously until the Flash made him the head athletic trainer. In the D-League, however, that meant doing everything: training, medical, and strength and conditioning, unwittingly setting the foundation for his current NBA role.

“People don’t believe this because it sounds made up, but I even drove the bus,” Howe laughed. “I have some incredible stories picking those players up in a bus and driving them all over.”

The Flash folded and moved after Howe’s one season as head trainer/bus driver, so he spent that next summer as the trainer for the Ogden Raptors. Through connections at Weber State, he then returned to the hill and was an assistant trainer and strength coach for three years, including in Lillard’s final seasons at WSU.

He left to teach and be a trainer at Bonneville High where his brother was competing in sports as a senior — a “passion project” he really wanted to see realized so they could reconnect as siblings.

Howe had a diversity of experience in the realm of sports training and performance heading into the summer of 2014 when his Utah-based bubble would soon dissolve into a series of interstate moves.

• • •

Howe paced the halls of the hospital while his wife Emily, a native of Roy, was about to give birth to their only child, a girl and ball of energy named Maci.

In those momentous hours, Howe received a call from one of his former colleagues with the Utah Jazz. The Jazz were buying the NBA development team (now from the NBA G League) in Boise, the Idaho Stampede, he was told, and they wanted Howe to return and help run the strength and training program.

That would mean moving to Boise for at least two years. But he had also fielded a one-season internship offer from the Cleveland Cavaliers at the same time LeBron James was set to return to the team.

“That was a hard decision to make,” Howe said.

After two years, he helped move the Stampede to Utah and worked one more season with the Salt Lake City Stars, in the meantime doing everything he could to network and realize his dream of working in the NBA — emails, phone calls, finding lunch dates at NBA Summer League.

That year, the head trainer for the Atlanta Hawks gave him a call and offered him the chance to be the team’s assistant athletic trainer. He planned to continue to grow in the Jazz organization but couldn’t say no.

“When an opportunity comes knocking, you never know when you’re going to get another one,” he said.

So the Howes went off to Atlanta, with plans to buy a house and make Georgia roots. But after one season, Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer and the team agreed to part ways.

They began to realize they should have no assumption of longevity if working in the NBA was the goal.

“I trek my wife around the whole country to follow my dreams of doing this, she loves basketball and is at every game,” Howe said. “She’s been great.”

That’s when the Suns called and offered Howe to be the head strength and conditioning coach. He’d be trading the medical/training focus for strength training, and Phoenix was a destination that thrilled he and his wife.

Then again, after one season, came uncertainty.

The Suns fired head coach Igor Kokoskov, who Howe knew from their time in the Jazz organization, after his only season as head coach. Much of the training and operations staffs left for other opportunities.

“It was one of the scariest times of my life. We were in Atlanta, then very shortly we went to Phoenix, then a year later there’s only two or three people left in the whole basketball ops team and we’re just left to wonder what it meant,” Howe said.

But the Suns’ next move was crucial for Howe. They elevated James Jones to general manager, and he “gave me the opportunity to create something.”

Jones made Howe the head of player performance in Phoenix, overseeing the whole shebang: medical, training, strength and conditioning, nutrition and sports science, sports psychology and mental health.

“Basically, how do you prepare a player through and through, whatever they need, to perform at the highest level,” Howe explained.

Jones hired the well-regarded Monty Williams as the Suns’ next head coach, beginning the trajectory that has led Phoenix to the cusp of its first NBA title.

“The positive culture, it started instantly. Right then and there. Just both of those guys, their relationship and their approach to each day, it’s contagious,” Howe said of the GM/coach combo. “They brought in an amazing staff who all have the same values and traits, which is doing everything they can to serve the players and build the culture. It’s been an incredible thing to be part of.”

A year removed from rooting for his friend Lillard to not be quite as awesome in the bubble, another mental conflict arose. The Suns finished this season 51-21, just one game behind the Utah Jazz (52-20) for the best record in the NBA.

After Phoenix took care of the Lakers in six games, and Utah slid past Memphis in five, the Suns swept the Nuggets and had time to spare. They’d face the winner of the Jazz and Clippers; Utah had built a 2-0 lead and was up 2-1 at the time Phoenix dispatched Denver.

Howe was a lifelong Jazz fan. He was at the heartbreaking Finals Game 6 in Salt Lake when Michael Joran hit “The Shot.” And he spent years of his professional life with the team.

But his childhood and adult loyalties are different, and he has his guys in Phoenix now.

“It was a conflict back home, though,” Howe said. “If the Suns play the Jazz, people are asking my parents, ‘I know it’s Brady, but you’re rooting for the Jazz right?’

“And they’re like ‘no, we’re going to support our son.’ People are giving them a hard time about being life-long Jazz fans. And friends are texting me saying ‘it’s going to be tough when you come to Utah.’ So there was maybe a little sigh of relief when it wasn’t going to be a Suns-Jazz series. And, once the Jazz lost, we took over home-court advantage.”

For now, though, Howe is still on the grind, hoping to help the Suns lift the Larry O’Brien Trophy soon. It’s busy, and sometimes emotionally draining, something he compares to the effort it takes to create a wedding day that sometimes goes by without the level of enjoyment you hoped after the intense preparation. He’s trying to soak in his first playoff experience, but it’s still all about work.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to truly enjoy this until it’s over,” Howe said.