The Suns are 10 games into the season, with a 5-5 record. We have gotten to see everyone play (at least a little). Here are my biggest takeaways so far.
1. The Suns are at .500 because of Jordan Ott
I’ll get it up front: I thought this was going to
be a terrible team due to poor roster construction and money wasted on players who aren’t even on the team anymore. But…the Suns are beating expectations and looking average, and it’s due to the coach. Suns fans suffered through years of listless, disorganized, iso-ball play under Vogel, and especially under Budenholzer. Sure, the Suns started 8-2 under coach Bud, but you could already see they were coasting on the raw talents of Booker and Durant.
This year, the Suns clearly have schemes on offense and defense, and you can see the entire team buying into them, while their frenetic style of play tells me they’ve bought into the hustle and grit mindset. Sure, there are kinks (their 3-point perimeter defense leaves way too many players wide open, and you can see them botching perimeter rotations nightly), but there is also obviously strong buy-in to the system.
All that said, the Suns have been feasting on the bottom dwellers of the Western Conference (Sacramento, Clippers, Utah), but at least they’re beating the teams they should beat, and the win against the Spurs hints they can steal a few against the better ones.
2. The Suns need help at power forward
The Suns have tried a few options at power forward, and none have really worked out.
O’Neale, Dunn, and Brooks have been serviceable, but none of them is really a power forward: you can see them struggling against bigger, taller players who can shoot and rebound over them. Nigel Hayes-Davis, Oso Ighodaro, and Rasheer Fleming have the size. However, Hayes-Davis has played poorly, Ighodaro has gotten his minutes at center (where he’s also played poorly), and Fleming has hardly played at all (more on that in a bit).
If a trade opportunity presents itself at some point this season, the Suns will likely be looking to make a move to address this.
3. The Suns back-up center issues
Mark Williams has been the key to the Suns having a semi-respectable start, with the 2nd-best on-court/off-court metrics on the team (and arguably first, given the limited sample size of Jalen Green minutes).
With Williams out, the Suns look like a 10-win team, and they tend to look like a 10-win kind of team with him on the bench. There are three centers on the bench behind him (Ighodaro, Richards, and Maluach). The first two have been terrible, and Maluach has hardly played.
4. The rookies aren’t ready
The Suns desperately need better play at power forward and backup center. They have two rookies who play those positions (Fleming and Maluach) who aren’t seeing any playing time. This has people asking why Coach Ott isn’t playing them.
The most likely explanation is that he isn’t seeing what he needs to see out of them in practice. Ott is described as a very cerebral coach, and if players don’t make the right reads quickly enough on offense or defense, he can’t use them in his system (which is heavy on movement, switching, schemes, etc, read and react stuff).
Maluach and Fleming came into the league with a reputation as “projects” who don’t have an instinctual feel for the game. Until they’re able to implement Ott’s game plan and schemes at both ends of the court, they’re not going to see minutes outside of garbage time (where they haven’t looked great, either). It’s too early to call any of them a bust, but their basketball IQ needs to catch up with their athletic tools for Ott to be willing to play them.
5. Booker shouldn’t be the starting point guard
When the “Point Book” experiment is called into question, most people point to his assists, or how many assists he would have if the people around him could actually shoot, or something else.
But, the reality is that he’s 2nd in the NBA in total turnovers and turnovers per game with a 1.7:1 assist to turnover ratio. This is pretty bad for a starting point guard, where you’re looking for a 2:1 ratio to even be considered replacement level. Or, put another way, Booker’s assist-to-turnover ratio doesn’t put him in the top 150 players. For reference, Steve Nash was considered very turnover-prone, and his career A/TO ratio was 3.0:1.
It’s tough to envision a scenario where your primary ball handler, scorer, and distributor has a ratio like this while being a top team. Long term, the Suns need a better answer than point Book if they want to find a way back above being, at best, a team that wins 35 games a season.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ott experimenting with a Gillespie-Green-Booker-Brooks-Williams starting line-up at some point during this season, or even the Suns to make a trade for a point guard better than Gillespie at some point.
6. Ott found a way to use Allen and O’Neale…for now
Coach Ott found minutes for a couple of three-point shooting specialists who don’t seem to fit the long-term plans for the team.
The Suns have too many shooting guards and small forwards, and the ageing Grayson Allen and Royce O’Neale don’t really fit the youth movement. Despite the logjam at these spots, Ott has found minutes for them, and their experience and hustle have made their minutes productive. While both are playing out of position, they’re still, unfortunately, better than the alternatives. Indeed, both are averaging career highs in points.
So, congratulations to Coach Ott for bringing out the best in two players whose contracts made them impossible to move over the summer. He may have made two players who were considered to have negative value into viable trade pieces again and opened up possibilities to trade for players who better fit the system and the needs of the team later this year.
7. This team is going to be a roller-coaster
One of the hallmarks of the Suns teams led by Chris Paul was that you knew basically what you were going to get every night: consistent offense and defense, a heavy dose of Spain Pick and Roll in the fourth quarter, and offensive production that would just grind teams into the hardwood over 48 minutes.
This current batch of players works hard but are very erratic.
Gillespie, Brooks, Geen, and Booker are all streaky players who are more than capable of making some amazingly bone-headed decisions with the ball. When the three-ball is falling (and they’re shooting it a lot), the Suns are going to compete with anyone in the league. They’re also equally likely to kill the popcorn guy in the fifth row with an errant pass.
8. Dillon Brooks needs to accept his role as a 3-and-D specialist
Dillon Brooks has played four games this season and averaged almost as many shot attempts as Booker. He only managed a 47.5% true shooting percentage on those 16 attempts per game, which puts him in the 7th percentile among players.
In other words, his field goal percentage was terrible, but he was taking as almost as many shots as a guy who should be getting about 30 points per game. A lot of those shot attempts were wild, inadvisable, high-degree-of-difficulty heaves.
He was a big (if not the primary) reason why the Suns had a -15.5 PPG point differential in their first three games. Brooks needs to settle down and play like the number 3 or 4 guy on the team. There’s a reason why the Suns suddenly got better after he left, why O’Neale’s on-court/off-court numbers are so much better, and Brooks’ on-court/off-court numbers are almost as bad as Ighodaro’s (no, that’s not a misprint).
In other words: more Raja Bell, less Ricky Davis.
Otherwise, Brooks will be the trade chip when looking for a PG or PF, instead of O’Neale or Allen. Ot values guys who play within the system, and some of Brooks’ antics are clearly outside of it.
9. Jalen Green is what he is. He needs to learn to trust his team and not force it
Note: I wrote most of this before Green aggravated his hamstring injury, and he looks to be out for 6 to 8 weeks.
Rockets fans and commentators who watched Green’s first game back remarked that it was classic Green: spray and pray offense, freaky athleticism, streaky shooting, some tunnel vision, and meh defense. His value to the Suns is as a second source of “gravity” on offense to give Booker a consistent outlet, and maybe to provide some additional spacing if defenses stop cheating off him.
From my vantage point, it looked like his best outside shooting was when he planted his feet and shot the three like it was in an empty gym. Shots off the dribble, pull-ups, and rising up to get it over a charging defender went all over the place, but those that were like practice went in smooth with plenty of arc and consistent form.
For Jalen Green to maximize his value with the Suns, he needs to learn that he’s surrounded by three-point shooters who can hit nearly 40%: Booker, Allen, Gillespie, O’Neale, and Brooks are all good from that range.
Green should figure out that, rather than continuing his kamikaze charges down the lane to shoot 40% on two-point shots, it’s better to dump it off to guys who hit 40% from three. Green will never be Steve Nash, but his decision-making on offense needs improvement, and will be a big part of how the Suns finish out the season.
All of this said, however, Green’s +/- numbers were fantastic in a very limited sample size, especially in the 1st quarter, where the Suns made it a habit of coming out flat. I would describe the initial results of the experiment “promising”, if not for the fact that the Suns’ number 2 guy, and main acquisition in the KD trade, appears to be taking the Kevin Johnson route out of the NBA after playing only two games.
10. There is a clear ceiling and a floor. They’re just far apart.
The Suns are an injury or two away from being a historically bad team: if either Booker or Williams misses a lot of games, we’re going to be in for some spectacularly awful basketball. Think 2011-12 Bobcats level bad without starting caliber PGs, PFs, or Cs on the team. At that point, Ott might as well roll out the ball and watch the first- and second-year players get abused like the Washington Generals.
But Ott is not playing to lose, yet. He’s still trying to claw the best-case scenario out of the season: making the playoffs as a play-in team.
A lot of things must go right for the best case to happen: key players need to stay healthy (Green is failing at this, and Williams has an injury-riddled history), Green and Brooks need to figure out how to play within the system, and the role players must continue to buy into the system and continue making 3s at a good clip.
However, there’s a clear ceiling for the team due to Booker playing at point guard (with all the ensuing turnovers). The lack of a true starting power forward on the team (resulting in poor defensive rebounding and meh interior defense) also puts a ceiling on the team’s capabilities. But the Suns seem locked into playing Book out of position, and using three small forwards in a trench coat at power forward.
But, at least the 8th seed means that whoever ends up with the Suns’ slot in the draft, it won’t be a lottery pick.
