The Suns are a disaster of epic proportions
The courteous thing for the Phoenix Suns brass to do would be to send the biggest fruit basket it can find to Nico Harrison and Co. in Dallas. Because if not for the spectacular self-combustion of this Mavericks' season, we'd all be talking a lot more about the catastrophe unfolding in The Valley.
To summarize: The Suns are as all-in as a team can possibly be, having put together by far the most expensive roster in the league and relinquished control of all their own first-round draft picks from now until 2032. Yet they sit 33-37, tied with Dallas for 10th in the Western Conference, with one of the league's hardest remaining schedules. Their play-in hopes are kept alive only by the grace of an equally calamitous outfit.
Unlike those Mavs, though, the Suns can't even point to crushing injury luck as an excuse for their sorry state. Sure, they've had occasional bumps and bruises, but they've been one of the 10 healthiest teams this season by total man games lost, with the top nine guys in their rotation missing just 76 games combined. They also were swept out of the first round last spring with all three of their max players in uniform. They aren't snakebitten, they're just not very good.
Plus, their best player is 36. And did I mention they don't control their own first-round pick in any of the next seven drafts?
How did a team fronted by Kevin Durant and Devin Booker get this depressing? That's a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer still performing at a top-15 level, and a two-time All-NBAer who should be smack dab in the middle of his prime at 28. The team's formula for success was supposed to be this: pair an overwhelming offense with a defense barely good enough to let that offense carry the day 50-odd times a season. Instead, Phoenix has been appalling defensively, and just good enough offensively to keep it in play-in territory.
It's been a steady march in a straight line to this hopeless place for the Suns, who came up two wins shy of a championship less than four years ago and won a franchise-record 64 games the following season.
The year after that, Mat Ishbia bought the team from disgraced former owner Robert Sarver. He took control right before the trade deadline, amid a midseason malaise brought on by injuries to Booker and a creaky-looking Chris Paul. Three days later, at Ishbia's insistence, the front office fired nearly every arrow in its quiver to acquire Durant. It then doubled down by trading Paul and its scant remaining draft assets for Bradley Beal the ensuing offseason.
Phoenix also dealt former No. 1 overall pick Deandre Ayton that summer in a trade that brought back Jusuf Nurkic and Grayson Allen (though sending out 52nd overall pick Toumani Camara in the same deal wound up stinging way more). On the sidelines, Monty Williams was relieved of his coaching duties, and Frank Vogel lasted all of one season as his replacement. Mike Budenholzer was brought in this year, and the ice already appears to have grown thin beneath his feet.
This is what it looks like when a team gets stuck in a death spiral, throwing good money after bad, compounding desperate moves with even more desperate moves. The Suns' attempts to squirm out of the quicksand has only served to pull them down faster.
It's admittedly a bit disingenuous to lambaste them now, with the benefit of hindsight, for moves I was at least able to rationalize at the time they were made.
The Durant trade is what set Phoenix down this path to ruin, but that felt like a worthwhile gamble because it lifted the short-term ceiling as high as it could conceivably go for a team that was otherwise petering out. I saw the justification for the Beal trade in the context of trying to maximize Durant's twilight years. And I believed, despite the defensive question marks and the financial constraints his untradeable contract imposed, that his ability to get to the rim and be a high-level tertiary creator could correct multiple deficiencies and make Phoenix's offense unstoppable. Oops.
While acknowledging that the Suns deserved blame for letting the Ayton relationship fray to the point he had to be dumped at the nadir of his value, I thought they got a solid return for him given the circumstances - theoretically shoring up their rebounding, shooting, and connective playmaking with Nurkic and Allen. I thought Royce O'Neale could be a game-changing role player for them, and I thought they did pretty well to fill out the back end of their roster with only minimum deals to offer, bringing in the likes of Eric Gordon, Bol Bol, Jordan Goodwin, and Keita Bates-Diop. Yikes.
Heck, even after writing Phoenix off following last year's playoff whimper against Minnesota, I managed to talk myself into Tyus Jones addressing the team's turnover woes and lack of offensive structure, Mason Plumlee bolstering the paper-thin big-man rotation, and Budenholzer bringing schematic tweaks that would make the whole equal to the sum of its parts. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
Lucky for me, all I've had to suffer for those freezing cold takes is a bruised ego and maybe a hit to my analytical credibility. Not so lucky for Phoenix's front office, which has taken nothing but Ls ever since Luka Doncic ripped that 64-win team's heart out in a second-round series that feels like it happened 800 years ago.
Durant, Booker, and Beal just never clicked. All three of them have great off-ball skill sets that allow plenty of room for co-stars, but their ability to accommodate others failed to translate into synergy or symbiosis between them, perhaps because none proved to be good enough lead playmakers. They've also all individually played below their previous standards this season. Age could explain that for Durant, yet he's still easily been the best of the bunch.
Booker's come around recently, but he shot the ball poorly until about mid-January and he's taken a clear step back defensively. Beal's scored efficiently but his offensive decision-making has been highly erratic, his defense even more so. All three have negative on-court net ratings, and they've been disastrous as a trio.
The Suns are small and punchless around them, despite rookie Ryan Dunn establishing himself as their best wing defender. (Dunn's hot early-season shooting regressed to the point that he temporarily found himself out of the rotation.) They've somehow gotten even worse at taking care of the ball despite the Jones addition, falling from 25th to 28th in turnover rate. Couple that with terrible rebounding, and the Suns are getting about five fewer shooting possessions per game than their opponents. That's how a team that ranks third in true shooting percentage winds up underwater.
The coup de grace from the front office came before this year's deadline, when they traded their unprotected 2031 first-rounder for heavily protected firsts in 2025, 2027, and 2029, in the hopes of using those picks to get Jimmy Butler. But that plan was immediately and predictably foiled by Beal exercising his no-trade clause, so they pivoted to shopping Durant instead. It seems inevitable now that a Durant trade will happen in the offseason, as the Suns try to duck the second apron and restock their barren asset cupboard. It's equally inevitable they'll get back a fraction of what they gave up to acquire him.
Meanwhile, after the Ayton trade paid dividends last season - when Allen led the league in 3-point percentage and Nurkic posted the team's best individual net rating - Nurkic was so bad this year that Phoenix ultimately had to expend another first-rounder just to turn him into Cody Martin. Even setting the Ayton situation aside, it's crazy to think how much better the Suns' short- and long-term outlook would be if they had Camara in the fold.
After the playoff debacle last spring, Ishbia proudly proclaimed that 26 other teams would trade places with his Suns if given the chance. Inject him with a dose of truth serum today and he'd probably make the inverse claim: the Suns would jump at the chance to trade places with 26 other teams.
The only way out of this mess is through. They're going to have to trade Durant for whatever they can get, ride out what's left of Beal's contract (which will mercifully end with a $57-million player option in 2026-27), and hope they can retool around Booker quickly enough to re-emerge while he's still in his prime. More likely, though, they'll eventually have to trade him, too. Preferably to the Rockets to reacquire their own 2027 and 2029 first-rounders, so they can bottom out and rebuild properly.
I'd love to be able to offer a dash of optimism or anything resembling a viable alternative, but it's hard to see how anything besides pain awaits this franchise for the foreseeable future. To quote George Costanza, one of the great philosophers of our time: If you're bleak, you're bleak.
Joe Wolfond covers the NBA for theScore.