Why the Suns fell way short of championship expectations
The Phoenix Suns are supposed to be still playing right now.
A team with Devin Booker, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal shouldn’t have been the first team eliminated from the playoffs.
The Minnesota Timberwolves hadn’t won a series in 20 years, but they completed an impressive sweep of the sixth-seeded Suns as a third seed last Sunday at Footprint Center.
Phoenix has since fired Frank Vogel after one season as its head coach. Not wasting any time after announcing that decision Thursday, the Suns are hiring Mike Budenholzer, sources informed The Republic on Friday morning.
So, what went wrong in a season that began with Suns team owner Mat Ishbia saying he had the best squad in the NBA?
Turnovers season-long problem
The Suns were built to thrive offensively with a defensive-minded coach in Vogel to make them a formidable team. They ended the regular season fifth in field-goal percentage and 3-point shooting and 10th in offensive rating and points per game.
Phoenix improved defensively over the course of the season. After ranking 20th in defensive rating through their first 25 games, the Suns finished 13th and fourth in their last eight games.
Those numbers were all trumped by a glaring weakness — turnovers.
It took Vogel nearly the entire regular season to admit, with a laugh, after a win April 10 at the shorthanded Clippers the Suns weren’t “a good passing team.”
They ranked 25th in the NBA in turnovers committed and points allowed off turnovers. The five teams below them failed to make the playoffs.
The Suns were even worse in the postseason, ranking 14th out of 16 playoff teams in turnovers and tied with New Orleans for last in points allowed off turnovers. The Pelicans were also swept in the first round.
So, Phoenix not only turned the ball over, but it failed to get back on defense.
Not having a point guard proved to be a bigger dilemma than the Suns anticipated. They came into the season with a plan of having multiple ball handlers and playing fast, but the Suns, starting with their Big 3, were either careless with the ball or forced the extra pass instead of taking the shot.
Not on the same page
Vogel would frequently say pregame that the Suns were ready — only to watch them start slow and out of sorts or they’d have a halftime lead and squander it within the first six minutes of the second half.
There was a clear disconnect between receiving the game plan and executing it on the court. Booker’s constant message was communication as he felt the Suns lacked it for most of this season.
On top of that, they were the worst fourth-quarter team in the NBA.
Phoenix finished last in the regular season in plus/ minus in the fourth. Forced shots, turnovers and defensive breakdowns happened far too often in winning time, especially for a team with veteran players who have won at the highest level starting with Durant, a two-time NBA champion and finals MVP.
Vogel stressed taking more 3s to compete in today’s NBA, but Durant said at times he thought the Suns were hoisting too many. The Suns had multiple coverages defensively under Vogel that took the players more than half the season to fully grasp and successfully apply on the court.
Injuries from Day 1
The Suns started the regular season without Beal, who had a lingering back issue. He didn’t play his first game with his new team until Nov. 8.
Booker suffered a bad ankle sprain in the opener and only played in one of Phoenix’s next nine games. The Suns started the season 4-6.
They got a healthy season out of Durant as he played 75 games, the most since before suffering an Achilles injury in the 2019 finals with Golden State, but the Big 3 only suited up 41 games together, going 26-15 in them.
Phoenix registered 21 different starting lineups. That factored in the Suns lacking chemistry.
Then in the playoffs, Grayson Allen, the league’s top 3-point shooter, missed Game 3 and 4 after suffering an ankle sprain in Game 1 and Game 2.
Struggle too real
It’s probably unfair to compare this team to the 2020-21 squad that reached the finals or the 2021-22 team that won a franchise-best 64 games, but those Suns played with a joy and energy the fans loved — and helped them play better.
Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson and Cameron Payne were fan favorites.
Booker was making his ascension as an NBA star. Deandre Ayton, at his best, was a force and Chris Paul provided to be the point guard the Suns needed to bring it all together under Monty Williams.
For this season’s team, it felt like a grind. Maybe it was the championship expectations or the newness of a top-heavy roster largely due to spending over the second tax apron that lacked depth with a new coaching staff outside of assistant Kevin Young. They rarely won in comfortable fashion to rest their starters the entire fourth quarter.
Seeing Jusuf Nurkic struggle finishing on the inside, or the offense being stagnant or the defense yielding dribble penetration and giving up open 3s, the Suns consistently had to overcome ills to win rather than execute the game plan, play up to their capabilities and blitz the opposition.
The West was brutal
The Suns played in a stacked Western Conference. The defending NBA champion Nuggets finished atop the West led by the league’s best player in center Nikola Jokic, a now three-time NBA MVP after winning it again this year.
The Thunder and T-Wolves are young and talented, while the Mavericks have superstar Luka Doncic, an MVP finalist.
Those four teams, along with the Clippers, posted 50-win seasons. The Pelicans won 49 games like the Suns, but finished seventh and in the play-in because they lost the head-to-head tiebreaker to Phoenix.
Ten of the 15 teams in the West had a winning record compared to eight in the East doing the same.
The Suns split four matchups with 41-41 Houston and were 1-3 against San Antonio, which had the nextto-worst record in the conference.
Again. Brutal.
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