Why the Suns are making a huge mistake pursuing Bradley Beal trade

The Suns are reportedly serious suitors for Bradley Beal going forward but Phoenix would be making a mistake to make the trade.

According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, the Suns are “serious contenders” for a Bradley Beal trade. This would be a horrible mistake.

While Charania does not list the players that would be involved in a Suns trade for Beal, it seems that Chris Paul or Deandre Ayton would be the main pieces in return for the Wizards.

The Miami Heat are the other team that has serious interest in the player and it seems like they have the inside edge. It was a bit of a surprise that the Suns seemed interested in Beal due to the fact that they should be looking at surrounding Devin Booker and Kevin Durant with solid depth pieces.

With Beal’s contract, the Suns would be candidates to be in the second tax apron of the luxury tax for the foreseeable future unless they were to make massive changes. This would have massive penalties for the Suns going forward, including losing on salary cap expectations for many offseasons going forward most likely.

Suns rotation would suffer from Bradley Beal trade

While the Suns would have to fill out the rest of the roster, they would be severely limited in what they could do to improve the roster. They would only have one more trade asset (assuming they trade Chris Paul or Deandre Ayton) to complete the rest of this roster. Addtionally, this team would not have their mid-level (assuming they waive and stretch Paul after increasing their salary intake in a Beal trade) to use to get a rotational player on this roster.

This would be a horrible mistake due to the fact that the rest of the roster would be filled out with players on minimum contracts.

This would be similar to Durant’s time in Brooklyn after trading for James Harden. The Nets were stuck in a situation where all three stars were injury prone and at the very least got injured during their time in Brooklyn, which was the reason that they never made it out of the second round of the playoffs.

Reading into it more deeply it seems like this is a situation where the Wizards are trying to increase their leverage with the Heat by involving another team in negotiations. Still, the fact that the Suns are looking into this is a very bad look for the franchise. This shows that they may prefer a third star over a depth. In the current NBA, this is unacceptable.