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Game 3 may not be an elimination game, but it’s officially do-or-die time for the Phoenix Suns.
You’ve probably heard the stat before: No team in NBA history has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a playoff series. In 151 instances where a team trailed 3-0 in a best-of-seven series, they’ve lost that series every single time. Only four teams forced a Game 7 in that position, and 92 of those 151 instances resulted in a sweep.
At some point, somebody will finally become the first team to win four straight games after starting a series 0-3. But based on the way Games 1 and 2 have gone against the Minnesota Timberwolves, and based on historical precedence, there is exactly zero reason to believe Phoenix will be the ones to do it if they lose Game 3 at home.
“Talking and the rah-rah speeches and all that stuff is cool to a certain point, but you gotta go out there and execute, and I think we haven’t done that,” Kevin Durant said. “We’ve done it in spurts, don’t get me wrong, throughout this series. But it’s not good enough doing it in spurts, you know? So sometimes you just gotta do it instead of thinking too much or talking too much.”
Basically, it’s put up or shut up time. In terms of Game 3 adjustments, there are some tactical tweaks the Suns can make, which we talked about on a new Take That For Data pod:
But to Durant’s point, a lot of Phoenix’s adjustments are more of the “be better” variety. Here are five ways the Suns can be better in Game 3.
There’s a scene from Liar Liar where Jim Carrey’s lawyer character is compelled to tell the truth for 24 hours. He receives a call from a client who just robbed an ATM and is in need of legal advice. A weary Carry hollers into the receiver: “STOP BREAKING THE LAW, ASSHOLE!”
The Suns didn’t ask for our input, but replace “breaking the law” with “turning over the ball,” and you have the best advice we could possibly offer them.
This is not a new weakness. Yours truly went through the film of every single turnover the Suns committed this season to properly diagnose the problem. The most intriguing part of our findings was not that the Suns needed a point guard; but rather, that the Big 3 simply needed to stop being so sloppy with the ball in situations where they’d be initiating even if Phoenix did have a traditional floor general on their roster.
Unfortunately, that annoying trend hasn’t changed much in this series against the NBA’s No. 1 defense. In three regular-season meetings against Minnesota, the Suns flipped the script, averaging just 13.3 turnovers leading to 14.0 Wolves points off turnovers in those games — down from Phoenix’s season averages of 14.9 turnovers and 18.2 opponent points off turnovers a night.
The Suns actually won the turnover battle, forcing the Wolves into 16.3 turnovers leading to 24.3 points off turnovers per game for Phoenix.
As we feared, Games 1 and 2 didn’t follow that pattern. Minnesota has ratcheted up the defensive intensity and capitalized on those mistakes. The turnover margin has been close, with the Suns committing 35 to the Wolves’ 29, but Minnesota has a gargantuan 54-21 advantage in points off turnovers so far.
Game 2 in particular was horrendous, with the Suns getting outscored 31-2 in points off turnovers. The margin was so drastic that Devin Booker thought a question about that discrepancy was intended as an insult.
“Is that like a back-sided question?” he quipped.
So is this problem fixable? Once again, an alarming number of Phoenix’s turnovers are sloppy, completely avoidable mistakes, usually while trying to push the tempo:
“A lot of them were just, like, mishandling the ball, just playing a little too fast,” Durant said. “I think that’s where a lot of our turnovers all year has been coming from. It’s just us, we’re speeding ourselves up, we’re just playing at a faster pace, trying to get something going, trying to make a thread-the-needle pass, trying to make something work.”
Against the league’s top-ranked defense, these types of mistakes can’t happen. The Suns have given extra life to a team that ranked 17th in offensive rating and 29th in fast break points during the season. The tough part is Phoenix’s defense did its job in Game 2, holding Minnesota to a half-court offensive rating of 95.1. But those live-ball turnovers allow the Timberwolves to play in transition, which not only hurts the Suns in the possession battle, but also in having to face a set defense.
“We’re playing pretty good half-court defense, but when they’re able to get out and score some easy ones and get an advantage playing 2-on-1, 3-on-2, whatever it is, it’s tough for us,” Grayson Allen said. “And it’s tough for us to have possessions where we don’t get up a good shot, then have to take the ball out of the net and walk it back up.”
The Timberwolves deserve credit too. A lot of Phoenix’s errors feel unforced, but some of them are a product of the constant ball pressure that Jaden McDaniels, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Anthony Edwards and even Rudy Gobert and Naz Reid are applying on the perimeter:
“We gotta handle their pressure smarter, and we gotta be smarter in how we’re attacking their defense,” coach Frank Vogel said.
This season-long problem won’t suddenly evaporate against a team that ranked top-10 in steals, but if the Suns can get their turnovers down to a more manageable 13-14, they’ll be in better shape. Remember, Phoenix went 23-13 when they committed 13 turnovers or less, compared to 26-20 when they committed 14-plus.
“You just have to play through their disruption, their physicality and aggressiveness they play with on the ball, smart rim attacks against Rudy,” Allen said. “And you just have to be really, really poised with the ball, or else they can get you out of sorts.”
As we’ve covered at length, the Suns are clearly overloading help on Anthony Edwards to cut off the head of the snake. He broke free in Game 1, but in Game 2, their defensive process was better, limiting Ant to 15 points on 3-of-12 shooting.
Sure, he added 8 assists and guys like Jaden McDaniels (25 points on 10-of-17 shooting) and Mike Conley (18 points on 7-of-13 shooting) made them pay, but the Suns defense did its job overall. If you hold an opponent to 105 points, you should win.
One of the biggest problems, especially after guys like Alexander-Walker and Reid hit 3s off those Ant double-teams in Game 1, was Phoenix’s frantic closeouts to shooters. The Suns wanted to get up better contests than they did in Game 1, but in the process, they opened themselves up to drives because of their hasty — or sometimes downright lazy — closeouts:
“Yeah, I mean, we did a decent job on some of them, but definitely can be better,” Vogel said.
There’s no excuse for McDaniels to be driving like that against the Suns’ defense — especially as a guy who shot 33.7 percent from long range this year.
“Yeah, I think that’s a lot of it: closeout defense, keep the ball in front,” Durant said. “They’re stretching our defense out, and it’s a lot of long closeouts, so we just gotta be better at that.”
This has been a barometer for Phoenix all season long. The Suns are 31-7 when they beat or tie their opponent in made 3s, and they’re 18-26 when they lose that battle. So far in the series, they’ve lost both times, and they’re 0-2.
“Yeah, it’s a 3-point business, so we definitely want to try to get as many as we can up,” Durant explained. “But good shots at the right times, not shots that’s gonna compromise our transition defense. That’s always the balance you have when playing in this era of shooting 3s.”
Phoenix shouldn’t jack up 3s just for the sake of jacking up 3s, but they’ve got to press this button more often. They’ve only attempted 25.0 3s per game in this series — the lowest mark among all 16 playoff teams by a significant margin. There have been multiple instances where guys like Booker and Bradley Beal have had pull-up opportunities but passed them up to probe the defense further:
Unfortunately, even with a few more pull-up 3s here and there, the Suns are still nowhere near the 3-point output a team like this should have.
“I don’t think we’re passing up that many 3s, I think it’s tougher to generate them,” Allen said. “Their game plan with Rudy is, they trust him at the rim, so everyone else can just be physical and stay home and not help off as much. So it makes it harder. That’s why we have to be sharper offensively to try to generate those advantages where we can get open 3s, create rotations, all that stuff offensively.”
Because of how switchable the Wolves defense is, the Suns have been baited into hunting mismatches instead of moving the ball to put Minnesota in rotation, which is typically how teams generate 3s. Phoenix simply has to be better about that in Game 3.
“They’re a good defensive team, but we can attack them,” Allen said. “We have the offensive firepower to do it.”
In their regular-season meetings, the Suns ruthlessly hunted the Wolves’ dual-big lineups, turning Karl-Anthony Towns into a pigeon and going right at Gobert without fear. But the Timberwolves flipped the switch defensively once the playoffs started, and Phoenix continues trying to go to a Gobert well that’s bone-dry.
This is not Utah Jazz Rudy Gobert, whose impact could be minimized by small-ball lineups and perimeter switches:
The Suns should stop trying to target him directly on switches for isos, but that doesn’t mean they should back down from him either.
“Just his presence alone, he deters a lot of shots,” Durant said. “But also you have to challenge him. He’s a great defensive player, but there’s times when you’re gonna have to challenge him. So yeah, just finding that balance.”
Leaning away from mismatch-hunting isos and more toward actions designed to make the defense work would be a start. Despite the tricky McDaniels matchup, the Suns need to use Booker to play through the physicality and initiate more offense. Switching Ant onto Beal has eliminated a lot of his drives, and Book remains Phoenix’s best playmaker.
The Suns can still target Minnesota’s weaker links — namely, KAT and Conley — without sacrificing ball and player movement. Utilizing their Pistol actions, dribble handoffs for Booker/Beal, pindowns for KD and wide screens to counter Minnesota’s ball denials would spread the floor better, allow them get into offense earlier in the shot clock, play with more pace, and help counter the Wolves’ physicality.
“They have an elite defense, but there’s areas that we wanna attack within it, and the amount of movement that we wanna get within that to generate more rotations,” Vogel said. “I thought we did it well in the first half, and when they made a run, I thought we reverted and got away from our movement. So we have to sustain it for 48 minutes.”
Getting past Minnesota’s stifling perimeter defenders has been a struggle, but getting into the paint and opening up the drive-and-kick game would do wonders for generating more 3s as well. In short, 35 assists through two games isn’t going to cut it.
“Be more aggressive, put our head down, get to the rim, make a play, touch the paint,” Durant said. “So I think play free out there and play with force, I think we’ll be fine.”
After going 11-for-17 in Game 1, Kevin Durant shot 6-for-15 in Game 2. At least he has one good game to his name in this series, as Booker has averaged 19.0 points per game on 11-of-29 shooting, including 3-for-12 from deep. Beal hasn’t been much better, putting up 14.5 points per game on 12-of-27 shooting.
In total, this highly vaunted Big 3 that’s built for the playoffs is averaging 58 points per game on 45 percent shooting. That’s nowhere near good enough, even against a defense better-suited to test their bucket-getters than anyone in the league.
In the first two games, the Suns let missed shots early on discourage them from trusting their offensive process into the second half — despite generating good looks. Some of these are tough, contested midrange looks, but they’re still makable — as are the wide-open middies, layups, dunks and 3s that Booker, Durant and Beal missed in Game 2:
This is the whole reason the Suns went out and added Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal to Devin Booker. In the playoffs, your stars have to hit tough shots and rise to the occasion. So far, only Durant has looked capable of doing so, and it was only in the first game.
Durant said he liked the quality of shots they got in Game 2. The stars simply have to elevate their games and lead the way at home, or else their season will end within the week. It’s the most obvious “be better” adjustment possible.
“I think in the playoffs, you’re gonna have to take tough shots,” Durant said. “I think sometimes we passed up some. I think sometimes you gotta take those shots over guys instead of passing it to the other team. So yeah, I liked what we generated, we can just do more of it.”
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