The NBA has sometimes seen teams try everything possible and have their season end in disappointment. But the league has never seen a situation like the one the Phoenix Suns found themselves in after a crushing first-round series loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Sunday night.
Their reality is that the poker analogy ends there. Because of how deeply they have mortgaged their future and the rules of the new collective bargaining agreement that restrict the ability to change its roster, Phoenix may be able to make up for this season’s shortcomings only by being bought back or even acquired by a different hand. Can’t address even by hoping.
Never before has a team had so many options to make changes to its roster in the offseason.
The high-risk/high-reward acquisitions of Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal to form a star trio with Devin Booker have netted the franchise four future first-round selections and six future second-round selections. Phoenix also sent four first-round pick swaps, effectively zeroing out its draft assets.
With next season’s payroll already exceeding $200 million, the Suns will be in the second apron of the NBA’s luxury tax, leaving them facing heavy restrictions on trades and free agency. Additionally, they cannot freely re-trade Beal even if they wanted to redraft their top three stars, as he retained a no-trade clause with the Washington Wizards.
Considering all this, how the Suns plan to fix some of the major issues this season — namely the lack of a true starting point guard and one of the shallowest benches in the NBA — without creating other holes, remains a mystery. .
Figuring out those problems is just part of an 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 a potential contract extension for Durant.
Durant can extend his contract from July 8. He still has two years and $106 million left on his massive deal. He will turn 36 at the start of training camp in September.
If the Suns and Durant want, they can add another year for less than $60 million for the 2026-27 season, when Durant will be 38. This is not an easy thing. However, given how interested the Suns and Durant are in doing so, it creates a natural checkpoint in the relationship and something that will be closely watched elsewhere in the league. If a deal doesn’t happen for any reason, it won’t demonstrate confidence in the future of the relationship.
Durant is likely to be named to the All-NBA team for the first time in three years after averaging 27.1 points, 6.6 rebounds and 5.0 assists. He was also remarkably healthy, playing 75 games, his most since the 2018–19 season.
But there were times when he seemed lost within attack, particularly during the series against Wolves, when he went for large parts of the game without much of a role, either as a floor-spacing decoy or Served in or simply moved the ball to the next station.
This is where Durant and Vogel’s future may lie. Figuring out how to get the most out of the Sun’s aggressive stars, Vogel needed to answer a question. The front office and ultra-aggressive owner Matt Ishbia may consider making a coaching change in the coming days, just a year after he fired coach Monty Williams, who led the team to the Finals in 2021.
Vogel, who has made a career of showing confidence in every situation, clearly hopes to be back.
“Very (confident),” Vogel said before Game 4 on Sunday. “I have the full support of Matt Ishbia.”
At the very least, Vogel will need to improve his coaching staff. Associate head coach Kevin Young, who made $2 million this season as one of the NBA’s highest-paid assistants, directed the offense but now becomes BYU’s new head coach.
In Vogel, the Suns saw a coach with a championship pedigree and a track record of massaging the egos of several star players. The Suns wanted a coach with a title on his resume and talked to ring-bearing coaches Mike Budenholzer and Nick Nurse before hiring Vogel.
The idea was that Vogel’s methods and strategies would maximize the team’s star power, while Williams’s were perhaps too rigid and slow to adapt. Even when the Suns were sluggish and inconsistent throughout the season, Vogel continued to sell his belief that the team would regain momentum in time.
For various reasons, this never happened.
Beal missed most of the preseason and then played in six of the Suns’ first 30 games, undermining a plan to build chemistry on a team with only four returning players. The front office-supported concept of playing Booker at point guard had its moments; He averaged a career-high 6.9 assists and made the All-Star team, but Phoenix was never the offensive juggernaut that was dreamed of after the Beal acquisition.
In what was a theme for all aspects of the team throughout the season, the Stars were highly inconsistent in aggression. With hopes that they could end up with one of the most powerful offenses in history, the offense has only marginally improved from 14th this season to 10th in 2022-23. And this despite the defense falling out of the top 10, where Williams had regularly maintained it.
“We have times when adversity comes up and we kind of lose,” Beal said after the Suns’ Game 3 loss on Friday. “Why does this happen, I wish I had the answer.”
Another real issue for Vogel’s evaluation was the Suns’ utter destruction in the fourth quarter, a disastrous anchor that dragged the team to that No. 6 seed. Phoenix ranked 4th last in the NBA in offensive efficiency, a shocking figure given the team’s hitting ability, and 22nd in defensive efficiency.
The Suns were trailing by an average of nearly 12 points per 100 fourth-quarter possessions during the regular season. This is where the Suns felt the loss of floor general Chris Paul most, who was a major salary piece traded to acquire Beal.
Vogel, naturally, was asked about this repeatedly during the season. It was the subject of intense analysis internally as the Suns’ basketball operations department tried to understand the lineups, strategies and decisions that led to such a decline. Vogel often had no clear answer to what was going on, because, as deep diving revealed, there were no clear answers.
“It’s all kinds of different things,” Vogel said in February. “We’ve seen it all, and there’s a lot of different things happening.”
This is unsatisfactory, if ultimately true. The Suns had issues with turnovers, ball stagnation, defensive lapses, very slow play and periods of cold shooting. Vogel tried different lineups, mostly moving Booker around on offense as the team struggled in fourth-quarter minutes when he sat. There was no bright line to focus on. At times, including in the series loss to Wolves, this came with a loss of composure.
After the Game 2 loss, Booker said, “My frustration is just within the team. We need to execute. We play well when we’re playing and then we need to stay united when things go bad.” “We’ve done that all season long. (It’s) something that needs to be fixed.”
The fourth quarter may not have been the root of all of Surya’s problems.
The team lost the fourth quarter in 47 of its 82 regular season games but went 25–22 in those games. They led 43–10 after three quarters.
The raw data from the fourth quarter is the basis for Vogel to be tough, and those losses knocked the Suns out of a better seed that could ultimately come back to bite them. But it was not the only culprit.
The roster construction was extremely top-heavy. Beal, Durant and Booker made a combined $130 million and as a result, the Suns had 10 players on minimum or two-way contracts on opening night. General manager James Jones traded four of them and signed two more during the season as the Suns looked for cheap players who could provide some production.
The cost of acquiring Durant and Beal hollowed out the roster and emptied Phoenix’s stockpile of draft picks.
The Suns believed they had scored with some of their minimum signings last summer, notably Eric Gordon, Yuta Watanabe and Keita Bates-Diop who were wanted elsewhere. But Vogel never found a bench-heavy lineup he could rely on, and the Suns finished last in another key offensive stat: bench scoring, averaging 26.6 points per game.
Whatever blame may be placed on Vogel, relying so heavily on brand new minimum-salary players was a risky strategy that didn’t pay off.
That’s why the Suns didn’t have much room to maneuver when giving Grayson Allen a contract extension just before the start of the playoffs. Allen, who beautifully played his role as a floor spacer in leading the league with 46.1% shooting from 3 and leading the team with 205 of them, signed a four-year, $70 million deal earlier this month. Won the contract.
Restricted by the rules of the collective bargaining agreement on high-salary teams, the Suns simply could not afford No To re-sign Allen. Had he left free agency in July, the only way to replace him would have been in the minimum salary market, which has disappointed the Suns this season.
The same benefit is ahead for midseason pickup Royce O’Neal in the trade with Brooklyn. O’Neal doesn’t need a big competitive offer when he approaches free agency to put pressure on the Suns this summer. He performed reasonably well in 30 games after the trade, averaging 8.1 points and shooting 38% on 3, but he could not be replaced after his departure.
With Booker’s 2022 supermax extension triggered next season, the bill for Durant, Beal and Booker will increase to $150 million in 2024-25. Assuming they keep their three stars together, the Suns will be a second-tier tax team. At that level, a new deal for Allen and even a new deal for O’Neal that comes close to his $10 million salary from this season would generate $100 million in luxury tax alone.
This is a long way of saying that the Suns have underachieved this season, but they are largely locked in on this roster. They could explore the trade market for Jusuf Nurkic, who will make $18 million next season, but he is the franchise center, and any deal for him would have to include a plan to replace him without any salary flexibility.
Unless there are any significant roster moves, the Suns will have to find improvements somewhere. It is not so easy to say that they can expect better health.
Durant had a great season and Booker played 68 games after averaging 63 games the previous six seasons. It may have seemed like Beal was hurt, but he played in 53 games, his most since 2020-21. If anything, based on trends the Big Three could be projected to play fewer games next season.
The poker chips are in the middle of the table for the Suns and they have to stay there. This reality may lead to some soul-searching this summer, where the best-case scenario is that everyone agrees to give it another try and hope for better results in Year 2. The worst that can happen is that someone wants to fold it.
If there’s any drama from the Suns this offseason, it could be right here.
