When the Phoenix Suns traded for Kevin Durant at the 2023 trade deadline, their championship odds jumped from +1800 to +450. Only the Boston Celtics had shorter odds. That team lost in the second round of the playoffs to the eventual champion Denver Nuggets, but followed their defeat up with their second major blockbuster in a matter of months. This time, they landed Bradley Beal, and with the trio of Durant, Beal and Devin Booker in place, the Suns opened the 2023-24 season with +600 championship odds. Vegas only viewed the Celtics and Nuggets, at +450 apiece, as likelier champions.
Obviously, the Suns did not win the 2024 championship, nor are they going to win the 2025 championship. The Suns will not even reach the the 2025 playoffs as they were eliminated from postseason contention Wednesday night with their 45th loss of the season. Sure, we’ve seen similar disappointments before, but they’re almost always explainable. Injuries frequently derail talented teams. Trade demands can do it too. But that isn’t really what happened here. Outside of Beal, the Suns have mostly been healthy. Durant and Beal separately squashed possible trades, and Booker has made no noise about wanting out.
No, the Suns have been bad because, well, the Suns are bad. Even when Durant, Booker and Beal have been on the floor together this season, the Suns have been outscored by 3.3 points per 100 possessions, according to Cleaning the Glass. Despite all of the talent, the healthy, whole version of this team just didn’t work.
It is therefore worthwhile to explore why exactly it didn’t work, because as we’ve covered, the basketball world seemed to think that it would. How can your aspiring future superteam avoid becoming the next Suns-esque debacle? What are the lessons that can be learned here? Three stand out.
1. There’s a difference between shot-makers and shot-creators
We knew the Suns were going to be bad defensively. While Durant is a mostly good defender, he thrives in a help role. He’s a secondary rim-protector. The problem is the Suns don’t have a primary rim-protector. Booker and Beal, on defense, have followed the standard star guard arc of starting out bad, improving to around average, and then vacillating between the two just enough to protect their reputations without actually consistently affecting winning. Neither was ever equipped to guard opposing stars. Neither has the tools to offer too much in a team defensive structure. But with max salaries committed to the three, Phoenix lacked the resources to find players who could support them on that end of the floor.
Their offensive struggles, though, are the greater surprise. Durant is an all-time great scorer. Booker is a star almost exclusively on the basis of his scoring, and the same was true of Beal before his Phoenix regression. With all three of them, the Suns would theoretically never have to play minutes without at least one offensive star on the floor. The supporting cast featured plenty of shooting, so space would obviously never be an issue, and despite his lack of defensive versatility, Jusuf Nurkić was at least a dangerous interior scorer and rebounder in Portland. Yet Phoenix ranked only 10th in offense last season, and that’s right around where they’ll fall this season. How could a team with this much talent not be an offensive juggernaut? Because of the law of diminishing returns. It doesn’t matter how much star power you have if all of your stars do the same things.
There is a spectrum among offensively inclined superstars. On one end, you have shot-creators. These are the players whose presence on the floor generates easy shots for teammates. Think Giannis Antetokounmpo as an example. He is such a terrifying presence as a downhill driver that defenses have to collapse to protect the rim, which generates open 3-pointers for everyone else on his team. On the end other end of the spectrum there are shot-makers. These are the players who may not generate easy shots consistently, but are extremely valuable because of how capable they are of making hard shots. Think DeMar DeRozan here. He mostly takes contested mid-range shots. He just makes enough of them for that shot diet to be viable.
This isn’t a binary, of course. The best players both create easy shots and make hard ones. But every offensive star leans in one direction. Michael Jordan was a shot-maker. LeBron James is a shot-creator. A great offense needs a mixture of both. The Suns have completely over-indexed on shot-making at the expense of shot-creation. Just think about the kinds of shots Durant, Booker and Beal take. Durant ranks fourth in the NBA in mid-range field goal attempts per game. Booker ranks seventh. Beal ranks 35th as a No. 3 option, but ranked 10th with the Wizards in 2023. All three want to break their man down off the dribble and sink jumpers in their face. That’s valuable, and, to some extent, it does work. You can’t put your best defender on all three of them, for example. But think about what the Suns don’t do.
Phoenix does not currently have a player ranked in the top 70 in the NBA in restricted area shots per game. No team gets to the rim less than Phoenix does. It isn’t even close. The Suns take 16.2 restricted area shots per game. Every other team is above 20. Durant and Booker get to the free-throw line, but nobody else on the Suns does. They rank 21st in the NBA in free-throw attempts. Only the Celtics and Hornets score fewer fast-break points.
Just because a shot is difficult does not necessarily mean it is always a bad shot. The ability to make those hard, contested jumpers means a lot late in games, or against certain elite defenses, or just on nights in which the rest of the offense isn’t working. But if you want to be an elite offense for all 48 minutes, you have to be able to generate easy points too, and the Suns just don’t do that. Phoenix makes the fourth-most passes per game in the NBA this season … but still ranks just 10th in assists. They’re moving the ball, but a lot of that movement is aimless. If nobody is attacking the rim and creating advantages, those passes aren’t leading to good shots for teammates. Think of Cleveland as the alternative here. The Cavaliers rank 28th in the NBA in passes per game, but ninth in assists, just ahead of the Suns, because their passes have purpose. Someone breaks down the defense and draws help, and that leaves at least one teammate open for a clean look.
Can you build a championship-caliber team with an elite offense and a bad defense? The answer is yes, and the proof, ironically, is one of Durant’s own teams. The 2021 Brooklyn Nets very easily could have won a championship with the No. 22-ranked defense in the NBA had they stayed healthy, but there was one key difference between these Suns and those Nets: James Harden. While Durant and Kyrie Irving lean toward the shot-making end of the star spectrum, Harden is among the very best shot-creators in NBA history. He gets to the rim, gets to the line and is an elite passer. The Nets had offensive balance, but the Suns don’t have a Harden, and they have an older version of Durant that gets to the rim less. The result is an offensive trio that is as redundant as it is talented.
Now, most teams won’t ever have the chance to build an offensive trio like the one that the Nets did, but the difference between those two teams is one any aspiring contender needs to take to heart. Balance is as important as talent on offense. It won’t matter how good your players are if they all do the same things.
2. Never get rushed into trades
The end of Deandre Ayton‘s time in Phoenix was unpleasant on a number of levels. There were disputes about money and role at the very least, and things got so bad that he didn’t even play in Phoenix’s season-ending loss in 2023 against the Nuggets. It’s safe to say that Ayton didn’t want to return to Phoenix. The Suns were seemingly just as eager for a split. They could not legally trade him during the 2022-23 season without his consent because they matched an offer sheet he signed with the Indiana Pacers. But they dealt him before the 2023-24 season even began.
Now, it’s possible that the Ayton situation in Phoenix was not salvageable. But it’s worth noting that the Suns were functionally an entire different team between the beginning of Ayton’s feud with the organization and his eventual exit. Between February and September 2023, the Suns changed owners, head coaches and turned over all but four roster spots, the only meaningful one of them belonging to Booker. There was at least theoretically room for a fresh start. Frank Vogel, the coach they hired ahead of the 2023-24 season, is well-known for his work with big men. At the very least, it was probably worth bringing him into the season and seeing what happened. That was true for all of the reasons we’ve covered, but mostly, it was true because the trade they made didn’t make any sense at the time.
Phoenix was so desperate to trade Ayton that, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, the team negotiated its deal with Portland without even knowing whom they were getting back. While the Suns knew that Nurkić, Nassir Little and Keon Johnson were coming, the Blazers were forbidden from revealing Grayson Allen‘s involvement in the deal by his previous team, the Milwaukee Bucks, because they were afraid Jrue Holiday would find out he was getting traded before the deal was done. According to Wojnarowski, Blazers general manager Joe Cronin frequently told Suns CEO Josh Bartelstein during those negotiations “just trust me. You’re going to like the mystery player. Trust me.”
Allen has mostly been the player Phoenix expected since his arrival in 2023, but his niche as a sharpshooter could not have been needed less on this roster. Nurkić was a similarly odd acquisition. He wasn’t a great defender at his peak, and a string of lower body injuries in Portland had sapped most of his mobility. He was certainly not the defensive anchor the Suns needed.
The deal just got worse from there. The salary implications proved problematic on a number of levels. Nurkić’s contract proved so bad that the Suns needed to attach a first-round pick just to move it. Allen, conversely, was able to leverage Phoenix’s desperation and limited flexibility into a four-year, $70 million extension that has only capped the team out further. Meanwhile, the NBA’s new second-apron rules have prevented the Suns from aggregating salaries through a trade. What this has effectively done is limited the number of players Phoenix had legal access to on the trade market simply because they lacked matching salary. Ayton’s higher individual cap number would have opened up doors for them down the line that the smaller Nurkić and Allen contracts did not.
And we haven’t even gotten to the worst part yet! As a throw-in to the deal, Phoenix sent Portland the No. 52 overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft before he’d even debuted for them. That player was Toumani Camara, who is now the best player out of anyone in the Suns-Blazers portion of the Damian Lillard deal and has a real chance of making an All-Defense Team this season. You know what the Suns could use right about now? A 6-foot-7 wing with All-Defense potential.
The Beal acquisition has drawn the bulk of the ire from Suns fans, but do not discount the damage that the Ayton trade did. It hamstrung the Suns on a number of levels, and it came about, essentially, because the Suns were impatient. They didn’t want to even try to mend their relationship with a former No. 1 overall pick, and even if it was truly unsalvageable, they might have at least discovered Camara’s value by waiting. If nothing else, they could have given themselves more room to trade for an expensive player later just by having Ayton’s contract on the books. Instead, they rushed to make the first deal presented to them, and the result was an utter disaster.
It was a mistake the Suns didn’t bother to learn from, either. At this past deadline, they traded their unprotected 2031 first-round pick to the Utah Jazz for three far lesser, heavily protected picks that came from other teams. Afterward, Jazz general manager Justin Zanik called that Suns pick “the most valuable asset on the market right now.” The charitable explanation for what Phoenix did was preemptively set themselves up for a Jimmy Butler trade. That 2031 first-round pick was their only tradable first-round pick remaining, yet they would not only have to compensate the Heat to land Butler, but pay someone else off to take Beal’s contract to make the deal work financially.
That deal was widely panned when it happened. Given how well Butler has played in Golden State, you could argue that he might have been worth that 2031 choice. The only problem was that the Suns didn’t get him. They made the trade with Utah before they knew whether or not a Butler acquisition was possible. Given the value the Jazz placed on that Suns pick, it’s hard to imagine Utah walking away from the table before the deadline. If absolutely nothing else, that deal wasn’t going anywhere. Yet Phoenix made it more than two weeks before the deadline without even knowing how they could utilize those picks from Utah to improve in the present. Thus far, all they’ve accomplished out of that deal is using one of the picks acquired to dump Nurkić. Once again, the Suns rushed. This time, there’s not even a clear explanation as to why.
Leverage is everything in trade negotiations. Unless you’re getting a superstar, the moment you’ve decided a trade is absolutely necessary is generally the moment the you’ve lost the trade. Sometimes, the best trade is the one you don’t make. If you’re going to make a trade, do it from a position of strength. Phoenix has frequently traded from a position of weakness, and that’s one of the biggest reasons the Suns are in this mess.
3. The coach might not be the problem
When the Suns fired Monty Williams — one of the most successful coaches in franchise history — they seemingly did so in part because of a feeling that he had lost the locker room. “I just felt we needed an injection of a different voice — a different energy,” Suns general manager James Jones said at the time. Given the breakdown between Ayton and the team, this was perhaps warranted, at least in a vacuum.
A year later, the Suns fired Frank Vogel. While there were problems on the court, there were also, seemingly, issues in the locker room. On April 9, 2024, Vogel ripped into the Suns after they embarrassingly fell behind the Clippers 35-4. The team didn’t respond. “Vogel’s eruption left players rolling their eyes, sources briefed on the matter told The Athletic,” Shams Charania reported at the time. “One player even told The Athletic he had to keep from laughing.”
Mike Budenholzer, for now, remains the coach of the Suns. It isn’t clear how much longer that will remain the case. Shocker, there have been reports of tension within the building. In February, Chris Haynes reported that Budenholzer called a meeting with Booker asking him to tone it down vocally. Suns insider John Gambadoro later took things a step further, sharing what he had heard from sources within the organization. “They say Mike Budenholzer is miserable to deal with,” Gambadoro said on his show.
You could absolutely poke holes in the coaching jobs that Williams, Vogel and Budenholzer have done in Phoenix over the past three seasons, but these are not, at least objectively, bad coaches. Vogel won the championship in 2020. Williams took the Suns to the Finals in 2021, where they lost to Budenholzer’s Bucks. All three have proven that they are at least capable of succeeding under different circumstances. All three ultimately crashed and burned with this iteration of the Suns.
The common denominator here is the Suns. While each of the three certainly created some problems, it’s hard to imagine that any of them were the problem when this team keeps tuning out whatever voice it hears. At a certain point, an organization needs to have a degree of self-awareness about the human beings that comprise it. If coaches keep losing the locker room, is it possible that the locker room does not have the right leaders? If front offices keep firing coaches, is it worth asking why those same people are left to hire new ones?
The lesson here is that you can’t fix a problem that you can’t identify. If a team keeps reacting to different coaches the same way, the problem is the team, not the coaches. An example of where this sort of self-reflection can go right came in Cleveland in 2016. The Cavaliers fired David Blatt despite a 30-11 record. While the bulk of the roster had been turned over since Blatt’s arrival, it must be pointed out that Blatt was the third coach Cleveland had fired in a bit more than three years, with Byron Scott getting axed in 2013 and Mike Brown following a year later in 2014.
As soon as Ty Lue took over, he made a point of challenging his players, including LeBron James, in film sessions and even during games. James famously overrode Blatt on an end-of-game play call in the 2015 playoffs against the Chicago Bulls. In one huddle after taking over, though, Lue told James to “Shut the [expletive up]. I got this,” according to CBS Sports’ Ken Berger. This approach culminated with Lue criticizing James for his defense and turnovers at halftime of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, according to Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins. James obviously internalized the criticism, accepted coaching and went on to win the championship.
This story should hit home for the Suns. After all, according to Jenkins, James approached a teammate afterward and said “I can’t believe this.” The teammate responded by rhetorically asking “is he telling the truth?” That teammate was James Jones, who is currently running the Suns. He himself knows the value of enforcing the coach’s message in a star-laden locker room. For whatever reason, he has not been able to translate what worked for Cleveland all of those years ago into a similar formula in Phoenix.
A lot of things need to change if he ever will. Drastic roster changes are needed here regardless, but a point of emphasis needs to be on the leadership both on the court and off of it. The Suns haven’t put any of these coaches in a position to succeed, and until they recognize their own part in what went wrong for all of the coaches they’ve fired, no replacement they hire will be able to fix this.
