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The Phoenix Suns are in a dogfight now, and as impossible as it seemed a week ago, their title aspirations are in serious jeopardy of being dashed in the first round.
With Devin Booker sidelined by a hamstring injury since the third quarter of Game 2, the NBA’s top seed is quickly running short on viable options. They’ve lost two of the last three games, there’s been no update on Booker’s status, and after Game 4’s loss evened the series at 2-2, the New Orleans Pelicans have the momentum heading into a best-of-three situation.
Phoenix has more than enough to win this series still, especially with home-court advantage. After making a Finals run last year and winning 64 games this year, this group isn’t panicking.
“You gotta stay in the middle, can’t get too high with your highs, can’t get too low with your lows, and keep fighting,” Cam Johnson said. “Everybody who’s got to this point has been through adversity in their career. Nobody has been just winning, winning, winning with nothing stopping them, you know? It’s part of sports, it’s part of life. The fact is that you have to fight through things like this, and for us, I have the utmost confidence in our group. So in terms of there being a momentum shift, or things feeling shaky, they gotta come back to Phoenix.”
The thing is, three issues for the Suns continue to be recurring problems: the free-throw disparity, the Pelicans’ offensive rebounding and Phoenix’s worrisome 3-point shooting. With only one day to regroup before Game 5, we’ll look at each issue to figure out what’s fixable.
Game 4’s postgame pressers were basically a sounding board for the Suns to vent their frustrations over the officiating. The team and their coach seem annoyed over the level of physicality that is and isn’t being allowed on a game-to-game basis.
At practice on Saturday, coach Monty Williams said he thought his team was getting better at adapting to contesting without fouling, even though they needed to be better about not fouling by having “bonus awareness.” Those items were at the top of their list after watching film, but they didn’t get any better Sunday night. If anything, they got worse.
In Game 4, the Suns committed 28 fouls to the Pelicans’ 16. They were also outshot 42-15 from the foul line.
“You can slice it any way you want to, in a playoff game that physical, that’s amazing,” Williams ranted. “And coaches shouldn’t have to come up to the microphone and feel like they’re gonna get their heads cut off for speaking the truth. It was 17-2 in the first half, and then they end up with 42. That’s hard to do in a game like that, and it’s not like we don’t attack the basket. That’s really hard to do. And so, look, they outplayed us, they deserve to win. But that’s a free-throw disparity that you have to look at.”
The players weren’t as direct as their head coach, but they seemed equally confused.
Deandre Ayton called it “weird” that the same level of physicality from Game 3 suddenly wasn’t allowed in Game 4. Cam Johnson said he didn’t want to talk about the free-throw discrepancy before later saying they needed to “elevate our physicality as much as they’ll let us.” And Paul said it felt like “the old NBA” before pointing out the Pelicans made more free throws than the Suns attempted.
“They’ve been doing a good job, but any time we make a run, they get to the free-throw line,” Paul said. “They find a way, you know what I mean? So we gotta do better and figure out how to not let ’em get in the bonus so early and keep ’em off the free-throw line.”
With the Pelicans being a +22 in points from the foul line in Game 4, they’re now at +27 in that category for the series. They’ve taken 119 free-throw attempts through four games, compared to the Suns’ 81.
As we covered in our series preview, nobody should be expecting Phoenix to keep pace with NOLA from the charity stripe. The Suns ranked 22nd in the NBA in free-throw rate (.257) during the regular season, while New Orleans was sixth. Even so, the Pelicans’ free-throw rate has shot up from .264 during the regular season to an untenable .347. That would be the second-highest mark of any playoff team over the last six years, trailing only the 2020 Philadelphia 76ers.
With the Pelicans averaging just under 30 free-throw attempts per game in this series, the Suns will be hoping Williams’ rant allows them the leeway a top-five defense should probably afforded in order to play a more physical brand of basketball against an opponent that is upping the physicality as it is.
“That’s a question mark that we had on today: the legal physicality of the game,” Ayton said. “I think we tried to figure that out a little too late, but I think we should just come out and just do like how we did in Game 1 and Game 3, just go all out and just play Suns basketball and not worry about the refs and just play basketball.”
This one is nothing new. As we covered in our series preview, and then again in a whole separate Bourguet Breakdown after the Game 2 loss, the Suns have had a nightmarish time keeping New Orleans off the offensive glass.
In four regular-season matchups, they gave up 58 offensive rebounds and 88 second-chance points. Through the first four games of their playoff series, they’ve surrendered another 65 offensive boards and 71 second-chance points.
Since Game 1, when the Suns gave up a whopping 29 second-chance points, they had gotten better at limiting those opportunities despite still giving up offensive boards. Unfortunately, they regressed in Game 4, surrendering 19 offensive rebounds and 20 second-chance points.
“I think there’s remorse every time we give up one and guys just dig in a little bit more,” Williams said prior to Sunday’s game. “But I just think it has to be a focus for us to try to get stops and complete it. It’s not a stop until we complete it with a rebound. That just has to be our mindset, and then try not to use up that kind of energy playing twice or three times on one possession on the defensive end when you don’t have to. If we can force a stop, like, we’ve gotta come up with the ball.”
Unfortunately, this problem area bleeds into the Suns’ confusion over the allowed level of physicality. Over the last two games especially, with Phoenix intent on finding bodies and having a “hit-first mentality” whenever a shot goes up, the paint has become an all-out war zone. That’s led to a few instances of Suns players getting leveled with no call:
And that doesn’t include Jaxson Hayes’ dirty hit on Jae Crowder that earned him a Flagrant 2 foul and subsequent ejection in Game 3:
“The way they attack you is you gotta find the physicality, the borderline physicality with how you can guard [Brandon] Ingram and [CJ] McCollum and then keeping them off the boards, ’cause they’re hitting every time,” Cam Johnson explained. “They’re crashing for the offensive board and they’re hitting us, throwing us out the way. And so we gotta match that physicality and figure out the ways in which that physicality can turn our way.”
During the regular season, the Pels averaged 12.0 offensive rebounds (third in the NBA) and 15.1 second chance points (third) per game. Through four postseason games, those numbers have spiked to 16.3 offensive boards (first among playoff teams by far) and 17.8 second-chance points (first).
The Suns have talked over and over about cleaning up this problem area, but at this point, it might just be a reality of the series. In Games 2 and 3, the Pelicans only got 11 offensive rebounds each time. That might be the best-case scenario for Phoenix in this regard, because at least in those instances, even when they surrendered offensive rebounds, they weren’t giving up 20-plus second-chance points.
“Them second-chance buckets, those are momentum-shifters,” Ayton said. “When them dudes get a second chance after guarding, what, 20 seconds in or 18 seconds and getting another chance, it could put a little deflation in your defense, and that happened a little bit too many times today. So just stuff like that we gotta pick back up on and just be aware of the physicality and we gotta find a body.”
Williams laid the groundwork for a more favorable whistle in Game 5, but that’s out of the Suns’ control. The offensive rebounding Achilles heel probably just is what it is against a team that specializes in that area. But the Suns’ miserable 3-point shooting feels like the most likely issue that will finally resolve itself in Game 5.
Yes, you’ve probably heard before that the shots will eventually start falling.
No, it didn’t get better in Game 4.
But yes, there’s still reason for optimism the Suns’ “let it fly” mentality will finally yield better results on Tuesday night.
“You have to [keep shooting],” Williams said. “I mean, we’re getting open looks. How many open looks did we get from the top? We’re getting a lot of ’em, we just gotta — it’s gonna drop. Because we put the work in. We just haven’t been able to see it go down enough.”
After going a disastrous 4-for-26 in Game 3, the Suns went 7-for-27 (25.9 percent) from deep in Game 4. The Pelicans were even worse at 6-for-24, but they were the NBA’s 27th-ranked team in 3-point percentage during the regular season, so that felt more in line with their identity — even as they shoot an unsustainable 39.4 percent from beyond the arc in this series.
The Suns, meanwhile, ranked ninth in 3-point percentage, shooting 36.4 percent from long range. In the playoffs, that number has dried up to 29.3 percent. If you exclude Devin Booker (11-for-19) and Deandre Ayton (2-for-2), it dips to a dreadful 22.1 percent.
Just look at how some of the team’s most prominent 3-point shooters have fared compared to their regular-season averages:
Four playoff games obviously constitutes a small sample size, which explains some of the erratic behavior here. But the margin for error is slim when you’re talking about a best-of-seven playoff series. What would’ve been small sample-size theater in the regular season can become a season-ending cold streak when four losses is all it takes to get sent home.
“Yeah, usually they say the averages even out at some point,” Chris Paul said. “We gotta keep taking ’em. We’re getting great looks, and we’ll see what happens.”
The toughest part is the Suns are generating quality looks…just not enough of them. During the regular season, they averaged 13.4 “open” 3-point attempts per game (nearest defender 4-6 feet away) and 14.8 “wide open” 3-point attempts per game (nearest defender more than 6 feet away). In the playoffs, one of those numbers has dipped, at 10.8 “open” attempts and 15.0 “wide open” attempts per game.
Compounding the problem, they’ve been unable to capitalize on the quality looks they’re getting. The Suns shot 36.1 percent on open 3s and 39.4 percent on wide-open 3s during the regular season; in the playoffs, those numbers have shriveled up to 25.6 percent on open 3s and 35 percent on wide-open 3s.
“I just felt like we’ve gotten so many open looks out of what we do,” Williams said after Game 3. “It wasn’t, like, off-the-dribble open looks; it was 0.5, the-pass-is-king, open looks for us, and we just missed a ton of shots.”
The Suns haven’t been a high-volume 3-point shooting team under Williams. They ranked 26th in attempts this year, and their attempts have dropped from 31.1 per game during the regular season to 29.0 per game in the postseason. They need to find a way to get more 3s up if they want to shoot themselves out of this slump.
“No, it’s not demoralizing,” Cam Johnson said of all the missed 3s. “I keep saying this over and over again, but it’s part of basketball. It’s part of the game. Not everything goes your way every time. If it did, then there would be no need to play the game, you know?”
Heading back home to Phoenix, the Suns will be hoping this problem area finally does go their way, or else they’ll be running the risk of not having many more games to play this season.
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