Is The Sun Setting in Phoenix?

After a busy year in which they shipped out all of their draft capital and their former number one overall pick for a first ballot Hall-of-Famer and a former scoring champ, the Suns are not off to the start they would have hoped. What is behind their bumpy beginning to the 2023-24 season?

On Sunday night, Devin Booker threw a beautiful lob pass from well behind the three-point line to Drew Eubanks for a ferocious alley-oop and-one to put Phoenix comfortably up 97-84 with only 35 seconds remaining in the third quarter, a game that the Suns looked like they had decisive control of. However, the Suns would go without a field goal over the next 4:36 of game time, en route to being outscored 37-18 the rest of the game against the Grizzlies. The same Memphis Grizzlies that were without Ja Morant and that entered the night only 6-20 without Morant on the season.

Throughout a long 82-game season, it’s not uncommon for a seemingly superior team to overlook a less talented group and fall victim to what many call a “trap game.” Unfortunately for Phoenix, this kind of inconsistent play has been far too frequent for a team that came into the season with championship aspirations. It’s been a rollercoaster for the Suns, as they started the year 4-6, then caught fire with a 7-game winning streak before losing 9 out of their next 12. Since then, they put together a 4-game win streak but have since lost two out of three games, sitting at 19-17 and currently on the outside looking in on the playoff picture as the 9th seed in the West.

What is behind the Suns’ season-long up-and-down play? Can we really trust them as the contenders they were advertised to be before the season started? There are a number of factors that have led to Phoenix’s lackluster play, but the real question is if those issues are correctable in time to prove they are true championship contenders.

Victims of the “Death Quarter”

During the Suns’ franchise record 64-win season back in 2022, Phoenix had an astounding 53-0 record when leading after three quarters across both the regular season and the postseason. This was only four games short of the NBA record held by a 2020 Lakers team that went 57-0 in such games, a team that brought home the Larry O’Brien trophy.

During that season, the Suns were 1st in the NBA in fourth quarter offensive rating, 5th in fourth quarter defensive rating, and led the NBA in fourth quarter net rating with a ridiculous +9.8, a full 3.2 points better than the next best team in the league. That fourth quarter dominance was led by a strong defense, the elite shot making of Devin Booker, and probably most importantly, Chris Paul’s all-time-great game management.

However, just two years later, it is night and day for this team in terms of closing out games. Not only have they been shakier in the fourth, but they’ve made blowing leads in the fourth quarter a full-on personality trait of the team, highlighted by the following blown leads heading into the fourth:

Suns Blown Leads Heading Into The 4th Quarter

Phoenix has only played 36 games so far this season, yet they’ve already blown a lead heading into the fourth quarter nine times. That is a shocking rate of one blown game every four contests, a frequency that is entirely too high if they want to put together any level of sustained success.

It’s not that the Suns have been inconsistent in the fourth, because calling them inconsistent would imply there are some highs to go along with these lows. In reality, they have been consistently bad and are among the worst in the league in the fourth in virtually every facet of the game and have been specifically disastrous on the offensive end.

Suns 4th Quarter League Ranks

To say they’ve been a mess is an understatement. They haven’t made shots (only 42.6% from the field and 29.6% from 3PT), they are sloppy with the ball (3.8 turnovers), they don’t generate turnovers (only 1.4 steals), and despite missing a ton of shots, they are still right at the bottom of the league in offensive rebounding.

They are a completely different team in the fourth quarter compared to the rest of the game, and the differences in the stats are staggering.

Suns Performance in First Three Quarters

Suns Performance in 4th Quarter

The contrast for this team in the fourth compared to other quarters is hard to explain. In the first three quarters, the Suns look like a borderline contender: they look elite offensively, passable defensively, and have a net rating better than that of the defending champion Nuggets or 1-seed Timberwolves.

But in the fourth, they essentially play as the worst team in the entire league, worse than even the Pistons, a team that just broke the NBA’s all-time record for most consecutive losses. Playing better than the Nuggets for three quarters before cratering to even worse than the Pistons in the fourth is nothing short of bizarre, especially when you consider Phoenix’s personnel.

When teams struggle late like the Suns have, it typically is correlated with not having “a guy” that can go get you a bucket, but ironically enough, the Suns have two of those “guys”, and not just any two guys, but two of the absolute best in the world at getting a bucket. Devin Booker and Kevin Durant have built perennial all-NBA level careers on being elite shot creators, generating good looks, and making high difficulty shots, but for whatever reason, Booker and Durant’s offensive firepower has just not translated to success in the fourth quarter this season.

To make matters worse, the fourth quarter woes are only a subset of their issues. They have been victims of the “death quarter” all season long, irrespective of which point of the game it is.

The Suns have had 14 different games this season in which they were outscored by 10 or more points in a single quarter while also outscoring their opponent over the other three quarters of the game. They’ve lost 13 of those games, and ironically enough, the only one that they managed to win was the game in which they were outscored by the largest margin of any quarter this season, 21 points to the Warriors on opening night.

Notable Lopsided Quarters for Phoenix This Season

This shows a major inability by Phoenix to play a consistent 48 minutes. They can put together impressive spurts in which they look dominant offensively and competent on defense, but they’ve been susceptible to basically one guaranteed big run by the opposing team each game, and that run is almost always too much for the Suns to overcome.

Is it a lack of focus? Lack of adjustments? Are their main guys getting tired late in games? It could be a combination of all of those, but most importantly, the team just doesn’t put together consistent efforts throughout the entirety of each game.

If the Suns want to turn their season around, they need to limit the big runs by other teams and focus on putting together a consistent effort across an entire 48 minutes, because as we’ve seen, even 12 lackluster minutes can be the difference between a win and a loss, no matter how well you play the rest of the game.

Championship teams know how to close out games, and right now, the Phoenix Suns just do not.

Lack of In-Season Continuity

As crazy as it sounds, Devin Booker is the only player still on the roster from the 2021 NBA Finals team. After a few seasons of building up their core, this team has had as much roster turnover as any in the entire league over the past few seasons.

Does that lack of continuity immediately rule Phoenix out as a team that can compete for a championship this season? Well, it depends what you mean by continuity.

The last three NBA champions are all examples of how the continuity of a core of players can pay off. In the 2021, the Bucks won the Finals in Giannis and Middleton’s eight season together. One year later, the Warriors won their fourth ring with their same core group of Steph, Klay, and Draymond. Then just last year, the Nuggets finally got over the hump in Murray and Jokic’s seventh season together.

However, the idea that year-to-year continuity is a prerequisite for being a true contender is more of a misconception than most realize. There are numerous examples of recently constructed teams that have made it to the NBA Finals in just their first season together:

Teams to Make the Finals Their First Season with a New All-Star (Since 2008)

The idea that you need a longstanding core of top players that have been playing together for years in order to win big is not a hardcore requirement, but just a recent trend. It’s been said by many that cover the league that “you can’t just throw a team together", however, history says that you actually kind of can, with one caveat — it must be done in the offseason.

I bring this up not to say that continuity isn’t important. It is absolutely important, but just not the kind of continuity that people typically discuss. It’s not season-to-season continuity, but in-season continuity that is a much better indicator of success. Getting reps and building a repertoire between your top players within a single season is not just a nice-to-have, but recent history says it’s a must-have.

A phrase we hear often is “we just need to be healthy by the playoffs and we’ll be fine”, but history tells us that couldn’t be further from the truth. If we look at how many minutes that recent NBA champions have had with their presumed top three players, the numbers show that you simply cannot get away with just “figuring it out” once the postseason rolls around.

Minutes Played Together By Top 3 Players On NBA Champions (Last 20 Years)

That is an average of 1,206 minutes played together between the top three players on each champion over the past 20 seasons, and outside of one exception, every single threesome played at minimum 900 minutes together during the season they won it. It’s easy to see that the one outlier, the 2022 Warriors, is more of just an exception than the rule, considering that their core of players had already won three championships prior to that run.

That precedent is not ideal for the 2023-24 Phoenix Suns. Through 36 games as a team, the trio of Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, and Bradley Beal have played only a combined 88 minutes together.

With their top three presumably all healthy now with the return of Durant on Sunday, that would leave only 46 more games for the Suns’ big three to begin working towards that 900 minute threshold. In their four full game together to this point, Beal, Durant, and Booker shared the court for roughly 20 minutes together on average. If we take the 88 total minutes they’ve played together thus far and project 46 more games at that 20 minutes per game together, then it would put them at roughly 1,008 total minutes on the court. That number just barely gets them above the needed baseline to qualify for the requisite in-season continuity precedent that’s been set by recent champions.

So while they still could get there, it seems impossibly unlikely. To hit the 900 minute mark, the trio would have only five total missed games to work with combined for the remainder of the season, giving them virtually zero margin for error the rest of the way. It’s just not realistic to assume that this team’s alleged big three can avoid missing five or fewer games between all three of them the rest of the season, and banking on that is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Defensive Identity Crisis

It’s a common known statistic that nearly every single NBA champion this century has been, at minimum, above average defensively. The 2000-01 Lakers are the only team to finish in the bottom half of the league in defensive rating and still go on to win the Finals. That team had the 21st best defense in the league, but all others have been 15th or better. In fact, only three champions have been outside of the top 10 in that same span.

Right now, the Suns sit at 16th in the league in defensive rating. Are they so bad that they couldn’t work themselves into the top 15? Of course not, but the team is yet to show any sign of establishing a defensive identity.

Who is guarding the opposing team’s best player each night? It could be Josh Okogie one night, maybe Nassir Little the next, and some nights it may even be Booker. That question aside, they just don’t have one thing on defense that they particularly excel at.

Frank Vogel was brought in to be the defensive guru that could help answer questions like that and hopefully turn this mediocre personnel group into a solid defensive unit. His track record speaks for itself, he’s been the mastermind behind a number of truly elite defensive teams.

Defensive Rank and Team Record by Frank Vogel-Led Teams

He’s led the number one overall defense three separate times and been in the top 10 defensively in seven of his 11 seasons. For five of those seven top-10 defenses, his team played at a 48-win pace or better, and the two that didn’t hit that mark still made the postseason.

While the numbers look impressive overall, there is also a discouraging trend to pull from them as well. Vogel-led teams have been outside of the top 10 defensively only three times (excluding when he took over midseason during the 2011 season), and in those years, his teams failed to win more than 33 games even once, and all three of those groups missed the postseason (and play-in, when it’s existed) entirely.

It seems like Vogel’s teams go as their defense goes. Does that mean he is incapable of having a solid team that doesn’t thrive defensively? Not necessarily, but we haven’t seen it yet.

Vogel’s great defenses have always had a strong defensive identity. His teams in Indiana were all about verticality and defending the paint, and he got the absolute most out of Roy Hibbert as the team’s lead rim protector.

During the Pacers’ back-to-back number one defensive seasons in 2012-13 and 2013-14, Indiana was best in the league at deterring shots at the rim and defending the three-point line. They ranked 1st in the league in field goal percentage allowed at the rim (53.6%), were top four both years in lowest percentage of shots taken at the rim, 1st in the league in that span at three-point percentage against (34.9%), and top two both seasons in lowest percentages of shots taken from three.

Those teams took away the three-point line, didn’t allow you to score in the paint, and forced you to take long midrange shots.

In 2019-20 and 2020-21 with Los Angeles, Vogel’s defenses were more focused on versatility and maximizing his rangy perimeter defenders with Alex Caruso, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Danny Green, and Avery Bradley, among others. This group was anchored by the maybe most versatile defender in the league in Anthony Davis and were elite at forcing turnovers, ranking top four both years in defensive turnover percentage.

So what is this Suns team’s defensive identity? Well, they don’t really have one right now, and that’s the problem. They aren’t necessarily terrible anywhere, but they don’t take away anything from teams consistently.

They’re only 23rd in the NBA in forcing turnovers, 11th at three-point defense, 16th in rim deterrence, 21st at guarding the rim, and 10th in transition defense.

The area they’ve stood out the most defensively is guarding the midrange. They are second best in the league in terms of midrange field goal percentage against, but is that even necessarily a good thing? In the modern NBA, midrange shots are the exact type of shot most teams are looking to force their opponent into, and Phoenix guards that shot better than any other.

They have also guarded the corner three well, as they are 2nd in the NBA in corner three-point percentage against, but can you build an entire defense around guarding the corner three? Maybe if you pair that with a suffocating rim defense or are also elite defending in transition, but likely not all on its own.

This team doesn’t force turnovers, they’re not elite preventing transition opportunities, they don’t guard the rim well at all, they lack size and versatility with their personnel, they don’t have consistent point-of-attack defenders, and they are decent guarding the three-point line, but not good enough to make up for their other defensive deficiencies

There’s still time for this group to find it’s defensive identity, and if anyone can get them there, it’s probably Vogel, but as of now, they are just sort of searching for that identity on the fly without many obvious answers.

Losing the Math Game

It’s no secret that the modern NBA has leaned into analytics in an attempt to optimize the on-court product. This charge was led by Daryl Morey in his time with Houston, where he handed James Harden the keys to be the lead banana in playing the math game.

The Rockets aimed to eliminate midrange shots, particularly long two-point shots, in favor of three-pointers and shots at the basket. Since then, the rest of the NBA has seemingly caught up to that strategy and it is now viewed as the norm across the league.

The Suns, however, are one of the few teams that have struggled to embrace it. Phoenix was dead last in the NBA in percentage of shots taken at the rim during each of the previous three seasons, and while they’ve improved there a bit this year, they still rank only 20th in the league in shots at the rim. Additionally, after being number one in the NBA at midrange frequency the past two seasons, they still rank 2nd in the league there this year as well. They also rank only 21st in corner three-pointers, 21st in non-corner three-pointers, and 22nd in percentage of overall shots taken from behind the arc.

Phoenix’s shot selection likely has a ton to do with their personnel. They built a team around three 20+ PPG scorers, all of whom shoot the midrange at an extremely high frequency.

Frequency of Shots by Beal, Booker, and Durant in Midrange

It makes sense when you consider that those are three of the best midrange shooters in the entire NBA. However, this season, Booker and Durant specifically have not hit their midrange shots at even close to the elite level they typically do.

Midrange Efficiency by Beal, Booker, and Durant (Last Two Seasons)

Last year, Booker and Durant were two of the absolute best in the entire league at scoring from the midrange, both ranking 92nd percentile or better, but this year, there’s been a clear drop off. They are still among the league leaders in midrange shot frequency, however, they aren’t knocking down at nearly the same clip.

You can attempt to fight the “threes and layups” philosophy if you are absolutely elite at scoring in the midrange, but once you start to get closer to league average as a shooter there (which Booker and KD are both only slightly above), that shot becomes massively inefficient when compared to a shot at the basket or a three-pointer.

This year, the proof is in the pudding as well: Phoenix is just 6-9 in games they have below 30 three-point attempts and all three of their top guys are shooting their lowest volume from three in a while.

Three-Point Volume by Beal, Booker, and Durant This Season

This decline in three-point attempts from their top guys does not make a ton of sense and does not bode well for them in the league’s current landscape. Especially in Durant’s case, since he’s shooting a career best and is 2nd in the league (to only his teammate, Grayson Allen) at 47.3% from three-point range this year.

Phoenix’s offense has a world of potential with Beal, Booker, and Durant, and they have been elite on that end when they all share the floor (126.6 offensive rating). Pairing them with the league-leading three-point shooter in Grayson Allen (47.4%), another great shooter in Eric Gordon (40.9% from 3PT), and a big in Nurkic that sets good screens, is a good rebounder, and a plus playmaker gives you a team that can be genuinely scary on that end of the court.

However, if their stars don’t return to their typical efficiency from the midrange, then this team will likely need some tweaks to their shot profile if they want to maximize what they can do on that end of the court, because right now, Phoenix is playing directly into modern NBA defenses’ hands by settling for difficult shots that they just aren’t making at a justifiable clip.

One-Way Rotation Concessions

Perhaps the biggest reason for a shift from the “big three” model that dominated the 2010s was the difficulty it presented in filling out a competent rotation around those stars, and this Suns team is a great example of the risk that comes with that.

Is that to say that Phoenix doesn’t have any good players outside of their main three players? Not necessarily. Nurkic has been just about everything the Suns could’ve hoped for as an Ayton replacement, Grayson Allen and Eric Gordon have shot the lights out of the ball, and Josh Okogie has continued to be the team’s go-to point-of-attack defender.

It’s not that Phoenix’s rotation players aren’t talented, it’s that they are essentially all one-way players. They either can defend, but provide little-to-nothing offensively or they are good offensive players that can’t hold their own on defense.

The league average defensive rating is roughly 116 and the league average three-point percentage is right about 36.5%, and the Suns don’t have a single qualifying role player with both an above average defensive rating and an above average three-point percentage. To highlight this, just look at their top role players, excluding bigs:

Suns Role Players with Better Than League Average 3PT%

Allen and Gordon pose by far the best fit offensively next to their stars as elite floor spacers and players that can attack off-the-dribble, when needed. When Allen and Gordon share the floor, the Suns are lethal offensively, shooting 43.4% from three as a team and sporting an elite 124 offensive rating.

However, they crater defensively when those two are on the court together and their defensive rating jumps up to 119 without any obvious perimeter defensive stoppers.

Suns Role Players with Better Than League Average Defensive Rating

To contrast, this group of players offer the best defensive fit next to their all-star trio, taking a massive amount of pressure off of those guys to have to overexert themselves on defense. For example, when Goodwin and Okogie share the floor this season, the Suns defensive rating drops all the way to 95.5, they force turnovers at an elite rate (100th percentile in turnover percentage), allow only 23% from three, and attack the glass hard (99th percentile in both offensive rebound rate and offensive rebound rate allowed).

However, when those two share the court, the offense is a total disaster. Their offensive rating drops to 113.6, they shoot only 30% from three as a team (and 18.2% from the corner), and their half-court offense ranks in only the 14th percentile.

Suns Role Players with Worse Than League Average Defensive Rating and 3PT%

Then there is the group of guys who haven’t been great on either end, Little and Watanabe. Both have shot well enough from three to garner some respect and compete relatively hard on defense, but have not been good enough on either end to grab a hold of consistent rotation minutes over other players.

Outside of the clear offensive fits in Gordon and Allen, the rest of this team’s rotation has fluctuated by the game. Everyone else has received a “DNP-Coach’s Decision” at some point during the year, and even guys like Saben Lee, Udoka Azabuike, and Bol Bol have seen extended minutes.

Phoenix’s rotation issue isn’t that they don’t have enough defense or don’t have enough offense, it’s that they don’t ever have enough of both at the same time. No matter who they throw out there, they will be making concessions on one end or the other.

When they play the defensive guys, they become very easy to guard because teams will sag off and let them shoot all night long. When the offensive guys play, opposing teams can score almost at-will without any sort of consistent resistance.

Finding this balance and ultimately solidifying the rotation will be extremely important for the Suns if they want to be true contenders. It’s unclear if the players currently on the roster are sufficient to find a balanced rotation and they may be forced to add reinforcements at the trade deadline if they want to mitigate this issue.

Contender or Pretender?

The question everyone loves to discuss: can this team truly contend for a championship? This answer is often not so black and white, but given all of the red flags and flaws this teams has, the obvious answer seems like no for this group at the moment.

However, there isn’t another team in the league that could realistically claim to have two top-8 players in the league with Booker and Durant, especially not with another high-level scorer and shot creator in Beal and elite shooters flanked next to them in Allen and Gordon. Could that be enough to realistically knock off any team in a 7-game series, even against a presumed contender like Denver? It’s certainly possible with the amount of offensive fire power this team has that if they got hot at the right time, they could beat anyone. But is it likely? That’s a different conversation.

Ultimately, unless Phoenix can solve their fourth quarter woes, add two-way enforcement at the deadline with the limited assets they have, and have their stars put together a legitimate stretch of healthy games, then this team likely peaks out as a Western Conference finalist, with a third straight second round exit not out of the question.