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Brian Windhorst, Senior Writer, ESPN
In the NBA, we’ve seen teams sometimes try to go all in only to have their seasons end in disappointment. But the league has never seen the situation the Phoenix Suns found themselves in after losing their first-round series to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Sunday night.
Their reality is that the poker analogy ends here. Because of how deeply they’ve mortgaged their future and new collective bargaining agreement rules clamping down on their ability to make roster changes, Phoenix can’t address this season’s shortcomings simply by buying back or hoping for another hand.
Never before has a team had so many options to change its roster as it enters the offseason.
The high-risk/high-reward acquisitions of Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal to build a trio of stars alongside Devin Booker cost the franchise four future first-round picks and six second-round picks. Phoenix also sent four first-round pick swaps, effectively zeroing out their draft assets.
With next season’s payroll already exceeding $200 million, the Suns will enter the NBA’s second luxury tax apron, subjecting them to tighter restrictions on trades and free agency. Additionally, they are not free to re-trade Beal even if they want to reformat their top three stars, as they have retained the no-trade clause he signed with the Washington Wizards.
Considering all of this, it’s a mystery how the Suns plan to address some of this season’s major issues (namely, the lack of a true starting point guard and one of the shallowest benches in the NBA) without creating other holes.
Identifying these issues is just one part of the uncomfortable offseason checklist. The Suns also have to address the future of coach Frank Vogel, who is under scrutiny after missing the playoffs, and manage the possibility of Durant’s contract extension.
Durant can extend his contract starting July 8. He has a whopping two years and $106 million left on his contract. He will turn 36 when training camp begins in September.
If the Suns and Durant want, they can add another year for less than $60 million in the 2026-27 season, when Durant turns 38. This is not a given. But how interested the Suns and Durant are in doing so creates a natural checkpoint in the relationship and will be closely watched elsewhere in the league. If a deal doesn’t happen for any reason, it doesn’t project trust into the future of the relationship.
Durant averages 27.1 points, 6.6 rebounds and 5.0 assists and is likely to be named to the All-NBA team for the first time in three years. He’s also been very healthy, playing in 75 games, his most since the 2018-19 season.
However, there were times when he looked lost in attack, most notably in the series against Wolves where he did not feature and moved through large swaths of the game, acting as a floor spacing decoy or simply moving the ball to the next station.
This is where the future of Durant and Vogel could be connected. Figuring out how to get the most out of the Suns’ offensive stars is a question Vogel will have to answer. Front office and ultra-aggressive owner Mat Ishbia may be considering a coaching change in the coming days, just one year after firing head coach Monty Williams, who led the team to the 2021 Finals.
Vogel, who has made a career of projecting confidence in all situations, is clearly looking forward to returning.
“I’m very (confident),” Vogel said ahead of Game 4 on Sunday. “I have Mat Ishbia’s full support.”
At the very least, Vogel will have to overhaul his coaching staff. Associate head coach Kevin Young, who earned $2 million as one of the NBA’s highest-paid assistants this season, has been leading the offense, but now has a new job as BYU’s head coach.
In Vogel, the Suns saw a coach with a championship pedigree and a history of massaging the egos of several star players. The Suns wanted a coach with the title on his resume and spoke with ring-bearing coaches Mike Budenholzer and Nick Nurse before hiring Vogel.
Vogel’s methods and strategies would have maximized the team’s star power, while Williams would have been too rigid and slow to adapt. Despite the Suns’ struggles and inconsistencies throughout the season, Vogel continued to have faith that the team would find its rhythm in time.
For various reasons, that never happened.
Beal missed most of the preseason and appeared in six of the Suns’ first 30 games, derailing any plans to build chemistry for a team with just four returning players. The front office’s concept of playing Booker as a point guard had its moment. He averaged a career-high 6.9 assists and made the All-Star team, but Phoenix was never the offensive juggernaut it dreamed of after acquiring Beal.
The Stars have been very inconsistent on offense, something that has been a theme for basically every aspect of the team throughout the season. With expectations of finishing with one of the most potent offenses in history, the Suns only improved slightly from 14th in offense in 2022-23 to 10th this season. And the defense fell out of the top 10, where Williams consistently ranked.
“There are times when adversity hits us and we just get numb,” Beal said after the Suns’ Game 3 loss on Friday. “I wish I had an answer as to why that happens.”
Another real issue when evaluating Vogel was the debacle the Suns suffered in the fourth quarter. It was a devastating anchor that propelled the team to a No. 6 seed. Phoenix ranked last in the NBA in offensive efficiency four times, a shocking number considering the team’s firepower, and ranked 22nd in defensive efficiency.
On average, the Suns were ahead by about 12 points per 100 fourth-quarter possessions during the regular season. This is where the loss of floor general Chris Paul, who was the key salary the Suns traded to acquire Beal, was felt most.
Not surprisingly, Vogel was asked about this repeatedly during the season. The Suns’ basketball operations department has been the subject of a deep dive internally as they try to understand the lineups, strategies, and decisions that led to these disappointments. Vogel said he often didn’t have a clear answer as to what was happening. Because, as his deep dive revealed, there was no clear answer.
“There are all kinds of different things,” Vogel said in February. “We looked at everything, and there are a lot of different things going on.”
Ultimately, if true, this is unsatisfactory. The Suns had problems with turnovers, stalled balls, defensive mistakes, playing too slow, and harsh shooting periods. Vogel tried a variety of lineups, but he mostly moved Booker around offensively because the team tended to struggle when Booker sat. He had no glaring lines to focus on. He lost his composure at times, even during the series loss to Wolves.
“My frustration is within the team,” Booker said after the Game 2 loss. “We’ve got to execute. We’ve got to play well when we play and stick together when things go bad.” “We’ve been doing that all season. (It’s) something that needs to be corrected.”
The fourth quarter may not be the root of all the Suns’ problems.
The team lost in the fourth quarter in 47 of its 82 regular season games, but went 25-22 in those games. They were 43-10 when they led after three quarters.
The fourth quarter raw data is the basis for what’s troubling Vogel, and these losses have pushed the Suns out of a better seed that could eventually bite them. But he wasn’t the only culprit.
The roster composition was very heavy. Beal, Durant and Booker earned a combined $130 million, and as a result, on opening night the Suns had 10 players on minimum or two-way contracts. General manager James Jones traded four of them and signed two more during the season, with the Suns searching high and low for cheap players who can provide some production.
The cost of acquiring Durant and Beal emptied the roster and emptied Phoenix’s draft pick stock.
The Suns believed they had scored points with their minimal signings last summer, especially Eric Gordon, Yuta Watanabe and Keita Bates-Diop, who were wanted elsewhere. But Vogel couldn’t find a lineup with many reliable benches, and the Suns ranked last in bench scoring, another key offensive stat, averaging 26.6 points per game.
Whatever the blame was on Vogel, putting too much trust in a new minimum-paid player was a risky strategy that would not work at all.
This is why the Suns did not have much leeway when they gave Grayson Allen a contract extension right before the start of the playoffs. Allen, who led the league with a 46.1% 3-point shooting percentage and led the team with 205, and played the role of a floor spacer beautifully, signed a four-year, $70 million contract earlier this month.
The Suns, limited by collective bargaining rules for high-paid teams, simply could not afford it. ~ no Re-sign Allen. If he had left in free agency in July, the only way to replace him would have been the rock bottom salary market, which has disappointed the Suns this season.
The same goes for midseason pickup Royce O’Neale in a trade with Brooklyn. O’Neale doesn’t need a big competing offer when he hits free agency to put pressure on the Suns this summer. He played reasonably well in 30 games after the trade, averaging 8.1 points and shooting 38 percent from 3-point range, but he can’t be replaced if he leaves.
With Booker’s 2022 supermax extension kicking in next season, the bill for Durant, Beal and Booker will balloon to $150 million in 2024-25. Assuming they keep their three stars together, the Suns will be the second apron tax team. At that level, Allen’s new contract plus O’Neale’s new contract, which brings him close to $10 million in salary this season, would also generate $100 million in luxury tax alone.
That’s a far cry from saying the Suns have underperformed this season but are largely stuck with this roster. They could explore the trade market for Jusuf Nurkic, who will make $18 million next season, but he is a franchise center and any deal for him would have to include a plan to replace him with little salary flexibility.
Without any major changes to the roster, the Suns will have to find improvement somewhere. It’s not that simple to say that you can expect better health.
Durant has had a very healthy season, while Booker has played 68 games after averaging 63 over the past six seasons. Beal may have felt hurt, but he played 53 games, his most since the 2020-21 season. If anything, the Big Three may be expected to play fewer games next season, following trends.
The poker chips are in the center of the Suns’ table and must remain there. This reality may lead to some soul-searching this summer, and the best-case scenario is for everyone to try again and hope to do better in year two. The worst-case scenario might be that someone wants to fold.
If there’s drama for the Suns this offseason, it could be there.
