Every franchise has a starting point — a moment when a collection of names on a roster becomes something real. For the Phoenix Suns, that moment arrived on May 6, 1968, when the franchise made its very first selection in the NBA expansion draft. The name they called was Dick Van Arsdale. Before a single game had been played, before a single fan had filled the arena, before the organization had history or tradition or legend — it had Dick Van Arsdale. "The Original Sun." Not a marketing invention. A literal fact.
Van Arsdale wore the Suns uniform for nine seasons, made three All-Star teams in a Phoenix jersey, and set the standard for what it meant to be a Sun before anyone knew what that standard should be. When his number 5 was raised to the rafters, it honored the player who had to figure it out first — who showed up when the franchise had nothing except a name and a city and a hope, and helped turn all of it into something worth remembering.
Indianapolis to New York to the Desert: Building a Pro
Richard Albert Van Arsdale was born February 22, 1943, in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he and his twin brother Tom both developed into standout athletes through Manual High School. Both Van Arsdale brothers played at Indiana University under coach Branch McCracken, and both were drafted into the NBA in 1965 — Dick by the New York Knicks with the 10th overall pick, making the Van Arsdales one of the rare sibling pairs to both receive first-round selections in the same draft.
Three seasons with the Knicks established Van Arsdale as a dependable, hard-nosed shooting guard — a consistent scorer who averaged between 14-20 points per game, who competed on defense with equal effort, and who brought the kind of professional reliability that expansion teams desperately need in their formative years. When the Phoenix Suns selected him in the 1968 expansion draft, they were not just picking a player. They were picking a culture-setter — the player who would show everyone who came after him what it meant to put on a Suns uniform and compete.
Three All-Stars and a City That Fell in Love
Van Arsdale's nine seasons in Phoenix produced three NBA All-Star selections — 1970, 1972, and 1973 — which confirmed what Suns fans had known from his first game in the desert: this was a genuine NBA-quality star, not merely an expansion player filling a roster spot. He averaged over 20 points per game in 1970-71 and remained a consistent 15+ point scorer throughout his prime years with Phoenix, giving the franchise its first genuine offensive identity.
More importantly, Van Arsdale gave Phoenix credibility. Expansion teams succeed when their early players demonstrate that the franchise is worth caring about, that the product on the floor is worth watching, and that the city they represent can sustain genuine NBA-level basketball. Van Arsdale did all of that. He competed with professionalism in every game, embraced Phoenix as his city rather than treating it as a temporary landing spot, and became the first player that Suns fans truly adopted as their own.
Why the Suns Retired #5
The retirement of Dick Van Arsdale's #5 is the retirement of a symbol as much as a tribute to a player. There are players with more spectacular statistics in franchise history, players with deeper championship runs, players whose individual brilliance was more immediately apparent. But there is only one player who was the first — who went where no Sun had gone before, who wore that uniform when no one knew what wearing that uniform meant, and who spent nine seasons helping the franchise figure out who it wanted to be.
After his playing career, Van Arsdale remained close to the Suns organization, working in broadcasting and serving as a franchise ambassador for decades. He never left Phoenix. He never stopped being a Sun. The city claimed him as one of its own, and he honored that claim by staying. #5 in the rafters at Footprint Center is the franchise's acknowledgment that origins matter — that the first player deserves to be remembered not because he was the greatest, but because without him, there was no story to tell at all. Dick Van Arsdale began the story. The Suns retired his number to make sure no one ever forgets it.
