It’s been 'The Year From Hades' for a lot of teams this season. The Sixers. The Magic. The Pelicans. Injuries and disappointment rending promising rosters and playoff hopes asunder.
But no one has had a year like the Suns.
With those other teams, you can point to injuries as the defining reason why things didn’t go right. They would get one player back and another would go out, and then the second player would come back and the first guy would go out. The season went off the rails early and then never recovered.
But the Suns? There is no explanation. They weren’t expected to be bad, or middling, or average. They were supposed to be *good*. They were supposed to be the kind of team that could at least, if you squinted, see a championship path once the calendar flipped to March.
Instead, here we are, waiting on Madness, and the Suns are just waiting to go on vacation.
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Where did the Phoenix Suns season go wrong?
After Brian Windhorst of ESPN reported last week that the Suns would trade Kevin Durant this summer, Shams Charania reported on Countdown that the Suns would indeed work with Durant’s representation to find a suitable home for him, presumably among the contenders.
We’ll have time to talk about where Durant ends up; trust me, you’re going to be hearing it constantly for months.
For now I want to take a moment to comment on how truly insane this implosion by Phoenix was.
They had two top-15 players in the NBA in Devin Booker and Kevin Durant. For as rough as Bradley Beal’s Phoenix experience has been, he’s still averaging 18-4-4 on 50-40 splits. They had a center that many felt was underrated in Jusuf Nurkic who should have been comfortable in Mike Budenholzer’s scheme.
They added a starting point guard in Tyus Jones to help with the issues of setting up the offense. They added some key veterans off the bench and drafted Ryan Dunn.
If you give Mike Budenholzer a mostly healthy NBA-caliber roster, you get 50 wins. That’s been pretty automatic.
And yet here Phoenix stands at 28-33, four games back of the last play-in spot in the West.
To lay this disaster at the feet of any one person feels unfair; that’s how much this season has cratered and how miserable it’s been for players, fans and coaches. Devin Booker hasn’t been good enough, but 26 and 7 each night on moderate efficiency is good enough if there’s buy in.
Kevin Durant is still Kevin Durant, somehow. Beal has fallen off and the defense is absolutely catastrophic when he’s on the floor. But again, the offense has been good from him. And yet the Suns are only 10th in offense, schedule-adjusted.
But those are stats. The bigger problem is the collective absence of will, of physicality, of determination. There are things that box scores and shooting splits can’t describe, and the resignation that Phoenix plays with nightly, where every run is just one of those things and “what can you do?” is painfully obvious. There’s not only no resilience, there’s an abundance of surrender with the Suns like on Sunday night vs. Minnesota.
One punch, and down they go.
Chemistry is fickle and ephemeral, it shifts from year to year. The chemistry will be different next year because Durant will be gone and the roster will change. But if the Suns hope for better days ahead, it may start with the need to find a player who can lead Phoenix in those areas of mental toughness that were torn so easily apart this season.
It’s one thing to lose. It’s another to go down easily.
It was just too easy for the Suns to fail this season.
NBA News and Notes
The Lakers keep rolling, taking two games off the Clippers at Staples as the shockingly good LA defense held up in both contests. Luka Doncic finished with 29-6-9 in the Sunday win.
The Cavaliers have now won 10 straight, again, as they beat the Blazers with Donovan Mitchell getting the night off.
Clutch God Jalen Brunson once again came to rescue the Knicks from defeat as he led New York to an overtime win over Miami with 31 points and six assists and was a clutch-time monster again.
5 Kevin Durant trade destinations for the fun of basketball
OK, I lied, we are going to talk about potential destinations for KD but only this little section. This is only for “how much fun would it be for fans.”
1. Oklahoma City Thunder: The journey ends where it began as he helps the Thunder take the final step to a title next season.
2. Los Angeles Lakers: I don’t know how the money works but you would pay to see LeBron, Luka and KD every night even if two of them are past their primes.
3. New York Knicks: KD finally gets the big market to call his own and he delivers the Knicks a title? Legendary stuff.
4. Denver Nuggets: KD next to Jokic would be an incredible combination of basketball minds, and the fit with the roster is pretty seamless.
5. Milwaukee Bucks: KD is a legend, the Bucks are the team of several legends, and teaming up with Dame and Giannis would be really fun to watch.