Corbin Explains: Devin Booker and the Phoenix Suns

Over the next few weeks, Corbin Smith will be bringing his enormous intellect to bear here at The Step Back, explaining some aspect or essential quality relevant to each NBA team. You can follow along with the rest of the series here. You’re welcome. 

Is Devin Booker good? I truly don’t know. He has scored seventy points in a game, yes, some s**t that like, only Elgin Baylor and other NBA Hall of Famers have done, and he occasionally flashes high-level NBA skills. He shoots okay, drives alright. His defense is probably absolutely horrible, but it’s hard to judge that realistically, considering players don’t exist in a vacuum and how tremendously unaccomplished the rest of the team he plays on is.

There’s some skill there, for sure. Maybe, someday, he will become true all a contender spins on. Truly, who knows. But basketball is, I think dependent enough on star production that we can say that when you’re the usage leader on a team that wins 22 games, nearly on accident, you are probably, at the very least an imperfect player. But what is Devin Booker devoted to? It is honestly hard to say. If it truly is winning basketball games, it’s hard to say that our man is doing what needs to be done, considering the sheer number of basketball games he has lost.

But then again, maybe our man is just miscast. He is the center of the Suns terrible, awful attack, racking up massive fantasy numbers while his team craps the bed night after night, but maybe he is just a man who doesn’t understand what he is yet. Maybe he is waking up every morning, sticking that Michael Jordan hat onto his head and marching into work demanding that everyone acknowledge his supremacy as a scoring beast, when the reality is… more banal for our man. Maybe he is supposed to be living life as a spot-up shooter, a second or third option.

Here he is, scoring 70 at some point late in 2017. He is the youngest player to ever accomplish this feat, and joins only Chamberlain, Baylor, Kobe and David Robinson in achieving this. He is amazing at the rim, executing dull turnarounds and stylish layups with technical precision and a gifted touch. He shoots 3s with the confidence of a dude twice his age. He doesn’t pass so bad, even if maybe he doesn’t quite do it enough. He is, at age 20 or whatever, a master at his craft.

But watch his team just suck wind, minute after minute, against the loathsome-but-tactically-accomplished Celtics. A 20-point gap turns to 10, then wiggles around 15, but the game never really approaches anything resembling serious competition. The game ceases to even BE a Suns vs. Celtics game, honestly. It becomes a display case for the gifts of Devin Booker. Heck, the Notably Jingoistic Northeastern City crowd starts cheering for him, that’s how un-scared everyone is by this particular 70-point game. It’s not even happening in front of a crowd who might appreciate it! It’s a pointless masterpiece, a technically accomplished barrage of scoring that, nevertheless, contributes to an obscure mid-season road loss.

It’s like the modern day Steely Dan live show, one of those obscenities where the band flawlessly squawks out 20 songs no one likes, and don’t play even one note of Reeling in the Years. A dork might enjoy it, a mid-range jumper enthusiast or a Suns fan trying to convince themselves this anemic team has a future but c’mon man, no one is coming away from this thing convinced or moved or enthused.

But who am I, a lump, sitting here on a laptop, watching Infinity War as a half-distraction and scratching out a blog post for some money, to tell a dude as relatively strapped with muscles and tremendous basketball skill and a big ol’ NBA paycheck how to live his life, play his game? What am I to deny what nature has put in his spirit? To say, well obviously, this guy isn’t efficient enough, he’s terrible at defense, the Suns are never gonna make this work? What if his journey isn’t ABOUT winning? What if it’s this, forever, making beautiful, precise noises on bad teams and in losing seasons, year after year after year? Even if I don’t like it, who am I to say it’s entirely without value? There is a kind of impressiveness in it, by most measurements.