Phoenix is a disaster this season, but how can they jump back and start heading for contention in years to come?
The Suns had a plan. Trade away aging veterans, let others walk, and stockpile young players and draft picks to begin a rebuild with a new core. Steve Nash was suiting up in purple and gold, Luis Scola and Marcin Gortat were in the Eastern Conference, and the rotation was filled with young players sparkling with future potential. They wouldn’t be competitive for the 2013-14 season, but that would yield a high draft pick to pair with their recent top-five pick Alex Len. Prognosticators from every paper and website had them in the mix for Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker, camping out on the bottom of the Western Conference.
And then they started playing games, coach Jeff Hornacek worked some sort of magic, and the Suns started winning. Way more than the 15 games some predicted, and past the 25 others listed. Even the most optimistic forecasts hit the ceiling at 30. And yet, the Suns flourished as a fast-paced team centered around a two point guard lineup and a bunch of wings hitting outside shots, finishing the season with 48 wins and missing the playoffs by a single game. Suddenly the need for a rebuild was over – this team was ready to compete.
Except it wasn’t. The Suns struggled to retain their leap forward, slipping in the standings as cracks showed in their on court and off court performance. Point guards were swapped, brothers separated, and their best assets – a high Lakers draft pick and Eric Bledsoe – are now lost to them, with the pick traded to Philly for Brandon Knight and Bledsoe out for the season with his third major knee injury. Phoenix has already fired a number of assistant coaches, are actively shopping new bench ornament Markieff Morris after his moodiness proved too potent to handle, and their long-term outlook seems uncertain. What should this team do to actually turn the corner? Let’s take a look.
How Things Stand
Phoenix sits at 13-30, good for 13th in the West and the 5th worst record overall. However, even that oversells the current team, as the Suns started 7-5 and are an abysmal 6-25 since — only the Sixers have been worse over that span, with Philly going 5-26. That’s right, the Suns have only been one game better than Tank-town since mid-November. They are being outscored by 4.7 points per game, and have fallen to 27th in offensive efficiency and 28th on defense; only the Lakers rank below them in both categories. The bottoming-out that was supposed to happen two years ago seems to have arrived.
What isn’t clear is why this collapse happened. Was it the loss of Goran Dragic, the floor general who achieved third-team All-NBA status during that surprise season? Did trading Marcus Morris drive Markieff to such grief that he is destroying the team from the inside? Did someone – player or coach – regress to the mean so rapidly the team couldn’t keep up?
While the most likely answers are always complex, the one we have so far is simple: we don’t know. The cause for the tailspin may be attributed in part to the loss of Bledsoe for the year, but the Suns lost fifteen of their last twenty games prior to his injury. He wasn’t the cause. Markieff has been terrible this season, but he wasn’t an irreplaceable linchpin of this team. Former All-Star Tyson Chandler has had little to no impact, Brandon Knight has forgotten how to play defense, and top-to-bottom this team is struggling to play basketball. Rather than rebounding on last season’s 39-win finish, their updated win projection now stands at 26-56.
The good news? Phoenix has a lot of assets, and an uncertain future is better than the situation in a number of NBA cities. They own all of their own draft picks, as well as as extra first round draft pick every other year beginning with Cleveland’s this season. Devin Booker, their rookie first-rounder, has shown flashes of being a real NBA wing, and young players Alex Len, TJ Warren, and even Archie Goodwin still have potential and time to grow into it. Bledsoe, while out for the year, was having the best season of his career prior to the injury and is locked up on a decent deal for another three years.
So if the future isn’t bleak, how should they step into it?
Steps to Take
#1: Trade Markieff Morris for a real asset – The first step this team needs to take is offloading Morris this season. Without getting into the merit of trading away Marcus Morris to Detroit to clear cap space for a player they didn’t sign, the deal made Morris feel betrayed by the organization and the already sensitive Markieff is now borderline unplayable as he doesn’t listen to anything his coach or teammates say. He needs out of Phoenix, and the Suns should get rid of him and begin restoring a positive culture.
That being said, many suggested trades are simply a stretch to match salary, from a package for Ryan Anderson to offloading him to a team with cap space for nothing. Morris, for all of his issues, is a talented NBA player who could start on a good team or be a solid sixth-man off the bench. He has a history of being a willing if not natural defender, and when he is locked in has a combination of shooting and playmaking that make him a perfect stretch four in the new NBA world. Add in his incredibly team-friendly contract (a discount he took in good faith to stay with his brother…) and Phoenix should leverage him into a real asset, either a late first-rounder or another young player. Anderson is a pending free agent and other veterans like him don’t fit in with the long-term plan Phoenix needs to have.
#2: Don’t sign Jeff Hornacek to an extension – This one is tricky, because Hornacek has shown he is an intelligent coach with a creative mind and no fear of ingenuity. But his contract, which has not yet been extended by the club, is up after this season. And whatever his on-court coaching skill, Hornacek has taken over a previously high-character team under Mike D’Antoni and Alvin Gentry that has dissolved quickly into a team with plenty of character issues up and down the roster. Hornacek may thrive elsewhere, and in general I am in favor of sticking with a coach until you provide him with the talent to win. But he is clearly not a match for this organization or this team, and they need to move on.
#3: Stop making win-now moves – The trade with Detroit during the offseason to clear up cap space to LaMarcus Aldridge. Not only didn’t the move net the Suns’ Aldridge, it deprived them of talented rotation players and alienated their starting power forward. They signed aging Tyson Chandler to a four-year deal to sweeten their Aldridge pitch, when they had their center of the future on hand in Alex Len, now blocked from starting by Chandler. They flipped a valuable Lakers’ draft pick and a talented point guard on a phenomenal deal for a score-first point guard (Knight) who gets spun around by crafty dribblers and who has played worse on his own than Isaiah Thomas, the guard they had. The Suns need to tell themselves that they should take the patient route, and then listen.
#4: Shop Chandler around – While he may not have much value, Chandler does Phoenix little good, both this season and for their long-term goals. For a team looking for a great pick-and-roll big, Chandler does that better than almost anyone in league history, and he is at least a competent rim protector. Perhaps a team would take them off of the Suns’ hands.
Conclusion
Phoenix isn’t in dire straits after this season – they have talented players and valuable draft picks. But this season seems to be a disaster, and the sooner Phoenix comes to grips with that the sooner they can set off on the right path, the rebuild they thought they were starting two years ago. Funny how time works.
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