Hell is always a little bit nearer at hand in the Western Conference. In the East you can want to be bad, and try to be bad, and in fact be quite bad, and still host a playoff series. Not so in the West: In the West it's possible to want to be good, to try to be good, and to be very close to good, and to wake up every morning in hell. The Phoenix Suns are in hell. They're not even the only ones. The Warriors are in hell. The Kings are in hell. Each of these teams, if they were in the East, might make the Finals. Well, probably not the Kings.
The Suns opened the season in great form, winning eight of nine against a reasonably diverse set of opponents. None of the wins were particularly convincing, but a strength of a veteran roster like Phoenix's is that it should reliably outperform opponents in the clutch. You would expect a team led by Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal to win a majority of its close games, if for no other reason than by pure shotmaking brilliance. With game-to-game load management, with reasonable (read: non-Thibs-ian) minutes limits, and with Phoenix's stars' own wisely calibrated distributions of effort, you would not bat an eyelash at the Suns posting the modest net rating of an also-ran while winning 70 percent of their games. What I am getting at is the Suns don't necessarily need to dominate every night in order to convince themselves or anyone else that they are a serious contender. Their form to start the season was more or less exactly what you'd expect.
Durant strained his left calf in a narrow road win over the Dallas Mavericks on Nov. 8. The injury cost Durant most of the rest of the month; without him, the Suns bombed out of the NBA Cup and dropped six of seven overall, with an average margin in the six losses of 13 points. Durant returned on Nov. 26 and the Suns appeared to get right, winning three of four. And these were good victories: They flattened the Lakers, stifled the Warriors, and held the frisky Spurs to just 93 points. Again, this is basically normal—Durant after all would be the best player on all but a tiny handful of NBA teams, even in his age-36 season—although you would hope that Booker and Beal could keep the team pointed in the right direction during his absences. In that Spurs game Durant was injured again, and the Suns went straight back into the toilet, and even after his return on Dec. 13 they have not been able to slop their way back onto terra firma. They've dropped 11 of their last 15 games, including a loss to the then-gutted New Orleans Pelicans and a pair of losses to the comprehensively pointless Indiana Pacers.
Their latest indignity, suffered Tuesday night, was an 11-point loss to the insanely awful Charlotte Hornets, whose fans can no longer tell whether their team is even intending to win basketball games. The highlight of the night, for Hornets fans, was presumptive top overall draft pick Cooper Flagg going coast-to-coast and finishing with a poster dunk, in a college basketball game that at least took place in the state of North Carolina. The Hornets, meanwhile, were playing their usual spiral-eyed, bussin'-haircut-ass brand of Skibidi Toilet hoops, and winning comfortably over a team that dares to consider itself a playoff hopeful.
Suns head coach Mike Budenholzer is drowning. This week he made the organizationally painful decision to shift Beal and center Jusuf Nurkic to the bench, elevating Mason Plumlee and rookie Ryan Dunn to the starting lineup. This worked out for a game, with an openly unhappy Beal posting a team-leading 25 points in a road win over the Philadelphia 76ers, but the loss Tuesday is an alarming signal of just how far the Suns presently are from where they intend to be. Durant and Booker piled up points, but the rest of Phoenix's starters combined for 10 lousy points, and the Beal- and Nurkic-led bench contributed approximately bupkis, against Hornets reserves who frequently struggle to complete high-fives without gouging out each other's eyeballs.
The Beal situation is becoming critical. He's scoring reasonably efficiently this season but is doing almost nothing else. He is, by a wide margin, the worst of the three big Suns scorers at playmaking and shot-creation, so Budenholzer's designs on using him as more of an off-ball player, and thus lowering his usage, are sensible. The problem is that Beal is no longer very good as an off-ball guy. It's not entirely his fault: The Washington Wizards failed roughly one zillion times to find a steady playmaking point guard after John Wall's body started falling apart, and so more and more playmaking responsibilities went to Beal. Beal thus entered his prime years focused on developing himself into a starving man's James Harden, as the hub of as dysfunctional an NBA offense as you will ever see, at the expense of the movement and catch-and-shoot stuff that made him an absolute killer of a second fiddle earlier in his career. The carte blanche Beal enjoyed in Washington ruined his brain, and the heavy usage wore down his body, and more and more it seems like the Suns are doing him a favor whenever they let him siphon possessions away from the team's best players.
The Beal that now absorbs a ghastly fifth of Phoenix's total player payroll isn't any longer a particularly dangerous shooting guard, in the traditional sense. He is by no means a bad basketball player, but it's been a long time since it was obvious how he might fit onto a very good team, particularly when sharing a court with other high-usage players. Not coincidentally, the Suns are five points per 100 possessions better on offense this season with Beal off the court altogether.
The Suns could theoretically trade Beal, except that he is owed about $150 million between now and the summer of 2027. There is also the complicating matter of Beal holding an ultra-rare no-trade clause, which his agent recently told ESPN Beal has not yet expressed an interest in waiving. It might seem like something will have to give, but maybe not! It's worth reminding ourselves—and I am counting Mike Budenholzer among us, for this exercise—that the Suns opened the season 8–1, with Beal, Durant, and Booker mostly on the court together and functioning as the team's core. The fit is weird but maybe not disassemble-the-starting-lineup-and-kerplode-team-chemistry levels of weird. Alienating a pair of veteran starters on the theory that a rookie and a 34-year-old Plumlee will lift your team out of a slump is desperate thinking.
But, hey, so long as they're desperate, I can think of another veteran wing who is presently agitating for a change of scenery. Jimmy Butler has certainly never been anything but wonderful for the vibes of a struggling would-be contender. Time to enter the Deal Zone.
