Kevin Durant hopes Suns fans booing will help team avoid early playoff elimination

The Phoenix Suns entered the 2023-24 season hoping to compete for a NBA Championship and have not come close to living up to the preseason hype. You'd think a team featuring Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal would be capable of making a deep postseason run, but with how things are shaping up it looks like that won't be happening.

The Suns find themselves down 3-0 in their first-round series against the Minnesota Timberwolves after Friday's 126-109 defeat. The Timberwolves have won all three games by double figures and have looked like the far better team.

As the Wolves pulled away in the third quarter, Suns fans let their frustrations known by booing their own team. With Durant looking for answers, he hopes that those boos will fuel a historic comeback.

Kevin Durant hopes Suns use boos as fuel in upcoming comeback attempt

"They expect so much out of us and they pay their hard-earned money, and they deserve to react how they want to react," said Suns star forward Kevin Durant, who finished with 25 points. "It's on us as players to use it as fuel, and hopefully it ignites us for the next game."

The Suns should already be playing with fuel with their season on the line and boos from the home crowd often don't just cause the team to play better, but it's good to see Durant trying to turn that into a positive, I guess?

The bottom line is that the Suns need to play better. How the fans react to their play should not dictate how they play. It should not take boos for this team to step up when their season is on the brink. They had a tall task ahead of them facing a formidable Timberwolves team, but there's no excuse for how they've played, especially in the second halves of these games.

Durant, Booker, and Beal have all played below their season averages. If the Suns have any ideas of even getting this series back to Minnesota let alone doing what no team in NBA history has ever done in coming back from a 3-0 series deficit, those three will have to play much better.

Perhaps Durant's Suns do take these boos, turn them into fuel, and find a way to win four straight. That's just about all they can hope for at this point.