He led the NBA in technical fouls with 17 this season. He was swept by the OKC Thunder after he trolled star player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. He hate-watched the Lakers’ second-round exit while draped in diamonds. Dillon Brooks sat with content creator N3ON for a therapy session, and the NBA’s self-appointed villain revealed that the role he has built his career around is considerably harder to carry than the public performance suggests.

Brooks has spent his career leaning into the villain persona, from his Memphis days through his first season with the Phoenix Suns. On the NEON show, he opened up. “I got a lot to get off my chest,” Brooks said via N3ON, “especially in the game that I play, very stressful with all the foul baiters, all the media, and the stressors to play the game of basketball at a high level and perform every night.”

His first-round series against the Thunder was defined by it. Dillon Brooks had called out OKC for having “a lot of foul baiters” before the series began, telling reporters the Suns needed to “show their hands.” Gilgeous-Alexander was awarded 49 free throws across the four-game sweep, while the entire Suns team attempted 79. Brooks averaged five fouls per game across the series.

During the 2023 first-round playoff series between the Memphis Grizzlies and the LA Lakers, Brooks repeatedly challenged LeBron James both physically and verbally. He said after Game 2: “I don’t care, he’s old.” He added that he wouldn’t respect LeBron until he scored 40 points against him. Game 3 became even more controversial when Brooks struck LeBron in the groin while attempting to steal the ball. Officials assessed him a Flagrant 2 foul and ejected him.

“It is not the critic who counts… the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” Brooks said as he cited The Man in the Arena from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech. He wrote about it in a Players’ Tribune piece titled “No Way in Hell They Wanna See Us,” describing the villains of previous eras, Joe Dumars, Dennis Rodman, as the templates for how he built his identity. 

How Brooks Manages What the Villain Persona Costs

The therapy session with NEON brought something that the mind games he does carefully conceal: Dillon Brooks finds all of this genuinely hard. The stare he gives that crowds and opponents have mocked as arrogance is, to the Suns star, a coping mechanism.

Three of the eight technical fouls rescinded by the league this season belonged to Brooks, including one called by the same referee twice, in games where Brooks later noted he already knew it would be rescinded before the call was even processed by the scorer’s table. The Suns’ front office has been vocal about wanting to keep Brooks long-term, with ownership saying they see him as part of a championship team in Phoenix.