Barnstorming: The Phoenix Suns are falling apart

For the past two weeks, the Phoenix Suns have been losing a lot. There were the seven actual losses, by a combined 75 points. There was the loss of their best player, Eric Bledsoe, to a meniscus tear. There was the loss of composure as Markieff Morris threw a towel in the face of his head coach, Jeff Hornacek. This weekend the front office took action, firing Hornacek’s top two assistant coaches. This current rough patch fits neatly into a difficult season, with a 12-21 record, that has mostly been characterized by chaos.

You can’t really talk about the present Suns without acknowledging their surprising 2013-14 season as a turning point. Or, as it is usually framed, an accidental cage of their own making. That season the Suns were focused on developing their youthful talent and securing another high draft pick but instead they gelled quickly and stumbled into the Western Conference playoff race. Being better than they thought, sooner than they thought, changed the dynamic, foisting some pressure to keep the wins coming. And so the maneuvering began.

The roster turnover has been significant–two years have passed and only five players remain from that 2013-14 season (Bledsoe, Archie Goodwin, P.J. Tucker, Alex Len and Markieff Morris). Of those five, only Morris, Tucker and Bledsoe were in the regular rotation that season and Morris seems destined to be offloaded at any moment. This season’s team is, for the most part, not some continuous legacy. The Suns didn’t freeze that 2013-14 group or try to finish them off with a few hypothetical final pieces. They kept rebuilding. While their roster moves over the past two seasons are certainly open to criticism, many for being downright bizarre, they were not the desperate gambles of a win-now team. At least not in the way we usually recognize them. The Suns were the ninth-youngest team in the league last season and they’re twelfth-youngest this season. It’s not like they’ve been out here swapping their young talent for cagey vets in “85 cents on the dollar” deals.

Zach Lowe touched on this same point yesterday in a thorough breakdown at ESPN:

"That is true, but look again that 2013-14 Suns roster and ask yourself what cornerstone young players the Suns have forsaken to build their current mishmash team. Marcus Morris is the only candidate. He’d be the Suns’ best small forward now, but Marcus Morris alone is not determining the fate of any franchise. The Suns did not destroy a young team destined to grow into a contender."

Phoenix has made some mistakes. Clearly. You don’t get to a 12-21 without a few wrong turns. But those mistakes are not as simple as frantically pushing the throttle on the rebuild, that narrative is too easy. They’ve spent badly, traded badly, and drafted badly. They’ve misjudged how players would age and how they would fit together. Bad luck has struck repeatedly and some fundamental disregard and/or naiveté about the human side of the equation has just exacerbated things.

Basketball is a business and trading Marcus Morris is defensible. The problem is that Phoenix seemed unprepared and planless when it came to mitigating Markieff’s predictable fury. The signing of Isaiah Thomas was value in a vacuum. In practice, it was the penultimate straw piled on Goran Dragic’s commitment to the team (which it’s worth noting was already strained by the partnership with Bledsoe). Brandon Knight’s ability to play both guard positions might make him a nice strategic complement to Bledsoe but the fact that Knight strongly prefers to think of and label himself as a point guard matters a lot.

The current handling of Hornacek feels like more of the same. Not being offered a contract extension before this season applied a certain amount of pressure and now firing his top assistant coaches as the stick to spur improvement seems absurdly misguided. It’s a little like the flawed educational reform of encouraging struggling schools to get better by punishing them with less financial resources. The whole thing has the air of a heavy-handed threat for a guy who probably doesn’t need any reminders that his job is on the line.

What the Phoenix Suns do now is a fascinating question.

The turmoil is deep and a significant rebound this season seems unlikely, the Bledsoe injury is just too big. He was having a career year. Now he has a torn meniscus in his left knee, the same injury he had to his right knee that cost him 33 games in 2013-14. The optimistic timeline is that he will be back in six weeks. But even before this, the cracks had already begun to show in his pairing with Knight. Their collaborative flaws had been somewhat covered during the first few weeks of the season by exquisite shot-making but then our old friend, mean regression, reared its cool and rational head. Trading Morris would be good for migraine relief but he’s unlikely to fetch a meaningful piece in return.

The obvious path forward is to go back to the beginning. Reset back to that 2013-14 season and start over with the plan of playing young, accepting losses, and waiting on the draft picks. The thing is, Phoenix never really moved forward from that moment in the first place. They’ve been sliding sideways for a year-and-a-half, waiting for a door to open for them in the Western Conference’s top-tier. They had a good season, changed over their roster but, as an organization, never really entered another phase. Time travel (actual or metaphorical) is unnecessary here because the Suns are still functionally in the same place they started.

Pick up the pieces. Learn from mistakes. Try to keep moving forward, because that’s really all there is.