Suns’ quick rise from doormat to contender offers hope
PHOENIX — Before the Suns got around to doing what championship contenders are supposed to do to rebuilding teams like the Rockets, before the Rockets built a nine-point lead and the Suns erased it on the way to a 15-point cushion, Rockets coach Stephen Silas thought back to another time when things were very different.
The Suns are legitimate championship contenders. They proved themselves with a run to the NBA Finals.
They also have put together one consecutive season with a winning record.
In the four seasons before Monty Williams took over as Suns coach, the Suns went a combined 87-241. They went 3439 in Williams’ first season, capped by sweeping their run through the bubble, then had their breakthrough in 2020-21.
The Rockets entered Thursday’s meeting with one consecutive losing season, though they predictably left with a 1-7 record heading into a back-to-back against the Nuggets and Warriors beginning Friday in Denver.
As always, there were lessons to take from their latest loss, but even before the Rockets crumbled under the weight of a 15-2 Suns’ run in the third quarter, Silas sought to see the bigger picture.
“For us as a group, every night is a new experience, and we learn from those experiences,” Silas said. “This (Suns) team … they weren’t very good not too
long ago. Monty came in and has done a great job making these young guys get better. This is a blueprint we’re looking towards as far as our group, being a young group that wasn’t as successful as they wanted right away but could potentially be really, really good down the road.”
The Rockets face a long road to “really good.” But when Suns star Devin Booker was a 19-year
old rookie shooting guard, he averaged 13.8 points and 2.6 assists. Through eight games, Jalen Green, the Rockets’ 19-year-old rookie shooting guard, has averaged 14.8 points and 3.3 assists.
The Rockets would rather not wait for Green’s sixth season before he enjoys his first with a winning record, as was the case with Booker. But the Rockets have jumped all the way into their rebuilding, giving their young players a chance to learn from their struggles, while Booker’s career began with him out of the rotation in three of his first eight games.
The latest lessons came courtesy of the Suns’ run when the Rockets felt the momentum changing and stopped playing as they had when they built their lead.
It should be no surprise that the Suns made a run, or as Silas put it, “came at us like a hurricane.” The Rockets had to learn how to handle it.
“We’re young. We’re going to have some dips in our play. We don’t know how to win yet,” Silas said. “Having, finding consistency, learning what it takes to win, which is even play instead of up-anddown play, those will be the things that will help us get over the hump.
“We’re playing some really good teams right now. We’re in a bear of a stretch right now, on the road. So we’re learning a lot about ourselves. It’s hard. The NBA’s tough. When you’re playing against a team that went to the Finals and the Lakers, and we have Denver and Golden State coming up, it’s a tough stretch on the road.”
The Rockets have continued to battle. They came back from down 28 to within 10 in the first game against the Lakers. Their nine-point lead Thursday came after the Suns rushed to an early 11point lead. Even after the Suns’ third-quarter surge took the lead to 15, the Rockets made it a sevenpoint game and had two good looks, a midrange Kevin Porter Jr. jumper and an Eric Gordon drive, to make it a two-possession game with four minutes left.
But while the Suns were in the midst of their run, with a series of highlight blocked shots, fast breaks and alley-oop slams, the Rockets strayed from the style that had worked.
“We were moving the ball,” Rockets forward Christian Wood said. “We were making the extra pass to guys. Then, I felt like in the third, it kind of got stagnant. We kind of went into iso situations. The ball stopped moving a little bit. We had a bunch of turnovers.”
There was a certainty about the Suns’ playing with urgency when down nine in the second half. When teams make their move, the Rockets need to learn to rely on their style and strengths even more.
That would be the “know how to win” Silas is trying to teach.
“They were in the championship last year, but we can’t make that an excuse,” forward Jae’Sean Tate said. “That’s the third game in a row that we are doing the things that we’re supposed to do, we’re moving it, we’re getting it up in transition, and we just lose it.
“That’s what separated a good team from a … bad team. We got to put a whole game together.”
The Suns were that “bad team” not long ago. That could offer reason for the Rockets to believe things can improve for them, too.
In the meantime, learning from losses can make the growing pains pay off along the way.