Chasing Shadows - Has the NBA Passed the Phoenix Suns by?
The cost of nostalgia and the Phoenix Suns' struggle in a new NBA era.
As the sands in his hourglass dwindle, Kronos tightens his grip on the march of time. The Doomsday Clock is ticking…
After falling to a severely depleted Memphis Grizzlies team on New Year’s Eve and again to the Pacers after a brief rest, the Phoenix Suns find themselves three games under .500 and on the outside of the Play-In Tournament. Fans and onlookers are teetering on the brink - this is the most expensive roster in NBA history, paying hundreds of millions of dollars in luxury tax to teams like the OKC Thunder to kick their asses.
Kevin Durant is one of the singular talents in the history of the league and Devin Booker is an All-NBA level guard coming off an ‘unsung MVP’ performance in the Olympics. Bradley Beal is not far removed from seasons where he scored 30 points per game and the supporting cast consists of high-level role players like Tyus Jones, Royce O’Neale and Grayson Allen. How can this be the result?
We’re only 33 games into the season; there is still time to turn things around. For example, the Boston Celtics started the 2021-22 season at 17-19 before finding their rhythm and winning 34 of their next 46 games, finishing as the No. 2 seed in the East with a 51-31 record. While they didn’t get over the hump to secure a title that season, they’ve been crushing opponents ever since and are now the defending champions.
Obviously, this is an outlier. In most cases, NBA teams show you who they are with the results. As Steve Kerr put it recently, “you are what your record says you are.” For the Suns, this would mean they’re…well, bad. There isn’t really any other way to describe a No. 12 seed in the conference with a minus-2.3 net rating.
Their 13-5 record with both Durant and Booker in the lineup offers a modicum of hope, but we shared similar sentiments about this team last year only for them to be savagely shredded by Anthony Edwards and the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round of the playoffs.
All that doesn’t even consider the vibes and eye test. This team looks old, slow, small, devoid of energy and rather soulless. Fans are calling for heads to roll, and while things could turn around at any point, it certainly does not look like that’s going to happen any time soon.
How did we get here? Why can’t this team of stars and savvy veterans keep up with their opponents? They’ve got high-end talent, coaching and seemingly limitless financial resources…yet here we are.
The Suns’ outdated approach in a new era
In many ways, Phoenix is chasing the shadows of a past long gone. The NBA game has been evolving quickly and the Suns look like they’re still trying to catch up. The league has become more analytically driven and more spaced out, driving changes in things like shot distribution, pace, possession management and defensive coverage.
Roster Construction
The first thing observers notice on this topic is roster construction. At its most basic level, many will point to the fact that they have an obscene amount of salary tied up into a small amount of players at the top of the roster.
The salaries of Durant ($51,179,021), Beal ($50,203,930) and Booker ($49,205,800) combine to be 107 percent of the league’s total team salary cap for this season. There are five teams (Detroit, Utah, San Antonio, Charlotte, Orlando) whose payroll for their entire rosters are lower than what the Suns are paying these three players!
This wouldn’t necessarily be a kiss of death in all circumstances, but it severely limits a team’s flexibility, putting a ton of pressure on this trio being a seamless fit and finding some keepers in the bargain bin who also fit perfectly. As you know, these things have decidedly NOT been the case.
Their three best players have not fit together well, particularly this season, where they’ve logged a minus-6.8 net rating. It’s been especially bad on defense, giving up 118.7 points per 100 possessions together.
One could argue they were a bit unlucky by the timing of the implementation of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that introduced all the new aprons and restrictions that make salary cap management more difficult.
Having these roll out as soon as they found a new owner with no qualms about spending through the roof is a rough go, but the new CBA was developed with the team owners at the negotiating table. I can’t be certain how late in the game this all came about in the talks, but the complex nature of the result indicates that they likely knew this was coming for a while.
Maybe they knew and just didn’t care. As mentioned, teams can make it work, it just depends on how you go about it. Since it’s still new, it will take some time to figure out the best way to navigate it, but Phoenix has obviously failed with this attempt.
Depth is becoming more and more important in the NBA. Players are covering ground and pushing their bodies more than ever before. Teams are shifting toward lower minutes for their stars (if they can) and employing nine- or ten-man rotations of quality NBA players, where there’s much less of a drop-off between, say, the fourth- and eighth-best player in the rotation. This is a lot easier when there isn’t an obscene amount of money tied up into your best players.
The Memphis Grizzlies, Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City Thunder and Orlando Magic are all near the top of the standings with payrolls in the bottom half of the league. These teams have all suffered injuries throughout the year (Rockets will be tested starting now) but have the depth to keep them afloat.
Again, you can have a good team that is expensive (see the Boston Celtics), but if you’re going to commit these kinds of resources, you’ve got to get the mixture right.
Defensive Playmaking
One of the ways the roster construction has blended sub-optimally with playstyle on the floor is on the defensive end. This roster is largely devoid of size and athleticism and that rears its head most notably on this end of the floor. Take a look at some of these metrics from Bball-Index:
These charts outline some trends related to defensive activity over the last nine seasons. As you can tell by the distribution of the dots (teams), the league is becoming more and more active and disruptive on the defensive end. Similarly evident is that the Suns are not keeping up with this trend.
To add to the theme, the team is also 27th in the league in forcing turnovers. They are committing 1.3 turnovers per 100 possessions more than they are forcing, which is the seventh-worst differential in the league this season.
The Suns have precious few players on their roster with the combination of positional size, athleticism and defensive talent to make a truly impactful defensive player. Josh Okogie likely qualifies but has historically been a negative on offense. Ryan Dunn absolutely will become an elite defender as he matures but is still a rookie and prone to rookie mistakes.
Durant can be an impactful defender but only for short spurts at this point. Jusuf Nurkic, for all his warts, has been a positive defensive center in the regular season for most of his career but his lack of athleticism rears its head in loud ways against the best of the best. Royce O’Neale fights hard and rebounds well but is undersized and does not have the quickness to contain dribble penetration.
Booker has never been a good defender and seems to have regressed this season, while Beal started the year valiantly on that end but has tailed off through injuries and the team’s general malaise.
The team is also small. They’re operating at a significant disadvantage on the perimeter almost every night in this area with Booker, Beal and Tyus Jones attempting to corral opponents at the point of attack. This becomes a bit less of a problem when they don’t have a true point guard on the floor, but Jones has been critical to the offense for this team so far.
They’re not covering ground, disrupting passing lanes or ball handlers and they’re not contesting shots either. The Suns are just 26th in the league in contested shots per game and give up the tenth-most open shots (closest defender four-to-six feet away) per game as well.
The lack of suitable personnel makes things difficult. In addition, Coach Budenholzer has always employed a relatively conservative defense in all his stops, adding to the lack of dynamism.
The rest of the league is using their depth and defensive acumen to force turnovers and disrupt offenses. It’s not necessarily an absolute prerequisite to being a good defensive team in all circumstances, but the Suns have not made up for it in other areas and now boast the seventh-worst defense in the league.
Shot Diet
In a recent exchange with fans on X pertaining to the discourse around shot selection in the modern NBA, Durant called out the alleged hypocrisy of complaining about all the 3-pointers taken today compared to the “bad” mid-range shots taken in years past.
Yet Durant and the Suns continue to take these “bad” shots at the second-highest rate in the league. They convert on these shots at 44.8 percent, which is ninth in the league and amounts to 0.90 points per shot attempt so far this season. This is impressive shot-making, to be honest. They have some of the best mid-range assassins in the league and it shows. They do their best to compensate for it with this, but the team still has the second-lowest expected effective field goal percentage based on shot location.
As good as they are in the mid-range, it still doesn’t generate the number of points that other shots do.
The 3-point attempts are what gets all the publicity these days, and with good reason. In 200-06, the average portion of a team’s shot attempts throughout the league that came from behind the arc was just 19.8 percent. Now, this number is 39 percent, hence the trigger for discourse.
Obviously, to take more 3-pointers, you must replace shots from other locations on the floor. In the same time frame noted above, teams have gone from shooting 32.6 percent of their shots at the rim to 31.8 percent and 47.6 percent of shots in the mid-range to 29.1 percent.
The idea behind the change is to replace the lower percentage long 2-pointers with 3-pointers to take advantage of the extra point you get for making it at a comparable or even higher rate. Inevitably, some rim attempts have been taken away, but you can see that the mid-range attempts have decreased drastically more than rim attempts throughout the league.
Not the Suns, though. They have finally bumped up their 3-point attempt rate, being above league average for the first time since 2020-21 and taking over 40 percent of their shots from long range (tenth most in the NBA). But instead of redistributing the less efficient mid-rangers, they’ve further decreased their attempts at the rim.
Side note - Phoenix is just 20th in the league in 3-point attempt frequency (37.6 percent) since Dec. 1, so even that is trending in the wrong direction.
They’re dead last in the league in rim shooting frequency (23.3 percent) and are taking these shots at a rate that is 8.5 percent lower than even the league average. These are the toughest shots on the floor to generate but teams have continued to make it a priority anyway, while the Suns have not.
They still boast the league’s No. 10 offense but with how much they’ve invested in the offensive side of the ball (at the expense of the defensive side) with their personnel, that would need to be higher to justify it. There is certainly a place for the art of the mid-range game in the right situations, but chasing the ghosts of Kobe and T-Mac isn’t going to get it done.
Pace & Offensive Rebounding
Winning the possession battle is something the Suns have struggled to do. The term ‘pace & space’ has lost some of its luster, but it is still a concept that applies to the modern NBA.
We discussed the spacing above, but pace is something that has been largely ignored by the Suns this season, particularly off defensive rebounds. The Suns are just 18th in the league in transition frequency this season, another area where we’ve seen an increase over the course time.
The league average points per 100 plays in transition this year is 122.1. When compared to the average 97.1 points per 100 plays in the halfcourt, you can see the drastic difference. Scoring against a defense that has not had a chance to get set has always been a great way to manufacture points.
The Suns, for their part, are incredibly efficient in transition, scoring 132.1 points per 100 plays, which is 3rd best in the league. Alas, as mentioned, they don’t tend to make this a priority.
As seemingly a more conscious choice, they’re just 20th in the league in transition frequency off live rebounds. After a steal, they’re actually phenomenal getting out on the break, but as mentioned above, taking the ball away from opponents is an area where they’re struggling mightily.
Another way to get an advantage in the possession battle is on the glass. The Suns do a good job keeping opponents off the offensive glass (10th in the league) but are unwilling and/or incapable of grabbing any offensive boards themselves (26th).
Even though they limit offensive rebounds well, they still operate at a disadvantage of minus-1.5 offensive rebounds per 100 possessions on average. When you couple that with their unspectacular turnover differential, they end up taking 3.9 less field goals per 100 possessions than their opponents on average, which is third worst in the NBA.
Being a good team doesn’t require you to be dominant on the offensive glass. The Thunder, for example, are one of the worst rebounding teams in the league and are dominating. They destroy opponents in multiple other areas like turning teams over, taking care of the ball themselves, and suffocating first-shot defense to make up for it. As we’ve discussed, the Suns are not winning many of the other possession battles on the margins either.
In chasing the shadows of the league’s past, the Suns find themselves lost in the present. The team’s reliance on outdated strategies and misaligned roster construction has left them ill-equipped to compete in a modern NBA defined by pace, versatility and depth. Time waits for no one, and for the Phoenix Suns, the sands in the hourglass are slipping away fast.
My other recent work
Here are a couple of things I’ve worked on for FanSided NBA since my last Hoops Nexus publication:
5 under the radar stars who deserve their first NBA All-Star appearances
3 emergency trades to salvage another misbegotten Suns season before it’s too late
I must apologize for an error here, I was working with a second-round draft pick that the Suns don’t actually own. Spotrac has them owning a second that they actually dealt at the 2024 draft, so it’s not completely doable as written. But hey, the general premises still sorta work.
Don’t look now, but there’s a new No. 2 in the Western Conference, and they’re legit