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One win over a struggling Los Angeles Lakers team won’t suddenly right the ship for the Phoenix Suns. After all, that 5-1 stretch from a few weeks ago didn’t suddenly prevent back-to-back demoralizing losses to the shorthanded Memphis Grizzlies and LA Clippers. But in Thursday’s 127-109 demolition of the Lakers, the Suns Big 3 took their first step toward the blueprint.
And in the process, they showed exactly why unpopular words like “patience,” “reps” and “more time” are necessary evils.
It wasn’t a perfect outing by any means. The Suns’ fourth-quarter struggles once again threatened to become an issue, even after Phoenix entered the final frame with a 27-point advantage. Grayson Allen and Eric Gordon shot a combined 4-for-19 on the night, and the offense still got a bit iso-heavy at times, with the Suns assisting on just 23 of their 46 made baskets.
However, everything else was a perfect encapsulation of what this team could be once Devin Booker, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal get enough reps together. It was only the seventh game for the Suns Big 3, but they attacked mismatches, defended well, scored 28 points off turnovers, pushed the pace, jacked up a ton of 3s and had a healthy balance of all three initiating offense instead of just “Point Book.”
The Suns usually play at a pace of 98.27 possessions per game, which ranks 28th in the NBA; against the Lakers, they pushed that number up to 101.0. They also average 31.6 3-point attempts, which ranks 26th; on Thursday, they hoisted 39 of them.
One win doesn’t automatically course-correct an entire season, but here are three signs from this feel-good victory that indicate how the Suns Big 3 took their first step toward the blueprint.
1. letting other guys initiate so Devin Booker can play off the ball
For all the consternation over the Suns’ lack of a “true point guard,” Thursday’s game served as an example of why they might not need it. A backup floor general would be useful, but that’s the best Phoenix could realistically hope to do on the trade market anyway.
A blockbuster trade for a starting-caliber 1-guard to serve up easy looks on a silver platter isn’t coming, and Booker remains — by far — the best facilitator on the roster.
However, there’s also truth to the notion that Booker needs more off-ball reps. Doing so would help the team, since offering up different looks would diversify an offense that’s largely lacked flow in recent weeks. It’d also help Booker himself, since charging him with scoring and setting everyone else up goes against his primary nature as an elite scorer, which Tim Legler pointed out perfectly on the All-City NBA Podcast:
On Thursday, we saw more of the “multiple ball-handler attack” that coach Frank Vogel has been talking about since the offseason. Letting Beal bring the ball up the court on this play allowed Booker to attack a pindown screen from Jusuf Nurkic, which resulted in a quick pull-up jumper:
In another example, with the Suns pushing the tempo off misses and turnovers, Booker curls to the low block, where Beal promptly feeds him so he can attack Cam Reddish before the defense is set.
It’s a brutally tough shot through contact for the and-1, but these are the types of ridiculous shots Booker can make when he defaults to attack mode instead of getting in his own head about orchestrating offense.
“We’re not asking him to go be Chris Paul or some of the great point guards; we’re asking him to be himself,” Vogel said of Booker back in November. “But he’s doing it with the ball in his hands to start possessions.”
That’s all well and good, but it was clear Booker’s transition to full-time point guard had hit a bit of a snag. While the Big 3 struggled to get healthy, defenses realized they could virtually take Booker out of the game by throwing every junk defense in the book at him. That would get Booker off the ball, and the Suns weren’t capable of consistently making opponents pay for it.
Fast-forward to Wednesday, and Booker was in the zone to start the game. This may have been a byproduct of Durant’s message to his teammates beforehand:
KD deserves a ton of credit for empowering his teammates to play freely, but also for taking a backseat in order to focus on defense. While Booker went off 31 points on 11-of-22 shooting and Beal led all scorers with 37 on 8-of-10 shooting from deep, Durant finished with a more reserved 18 points on 7-of-12 shooting.
But he also chipped in 5 assists, 5 rebounds, 3 steals and 1 block, all while primarily guarding LeBron James and holding him to 10 points on 3-of-11 shooting.
With Durant handling the toughest defensive assignment and the Suns mixing in on-ball and off-ball reps, Booker had one of his best first quarters in quite a while. He racked up 16 points in the first frame on 6-of-10 shooting, and while quite a few of those buckets came on isos, a few others came from off-ball activity that put him in advantageous positions to attack.
For a stretch where Booker was on a minutes restriction from the ankle sprain, he had to adjust to coming out earlier in first quarters than he was used to. Now he’s back to his old regimen, playing entire first quarters to allow him to get in a better groove. A conversation with Vogel — initiated by Durant — prompted change for the better.
“It was a conversation amongst a few of us,” Booker explained. “KD actually brought it up initially, and I was like, ‘I’ll go back to what I was doing the rest of my career.’ So I think it made sense, and I don’t know how we’ve been doing since that moment, but I like that minute setup.”
Letting other guys initiate offense made sense even when Booker wasn’t on the floor. Beal and Durant started their fair share of plays in the half-court, while the other spaced the floor, usually alongside a screen-setting big (Nurkic, Bol Bol or Udoka Azubuike) and a floor-spacing shooter (Allen or Gordon).
Doubling Durant near mid-court? Good luck with that when Beal is just waiting in the corner for good ball movement to find him off Allen’s drive-and-kick:
“In the playoffs, they’re gonna find a way to take away Kevin Durant, they’re gonna try to take away Devin Booker, and quite frankly, they’re gonna try to take away Bradley Beal, so if you’re bringing double-teams on those guys, the backside should be open,” Vogel explained earlier in the season. “It’s not so much the double-teams, but the space and gravity that those guys bring. They’re guarding Kevin Durant 40 feet from the basket with no help and a lot of room for Brad and Book to operate. And I think all three of them are gonna benefit from that kind of space.”
The Suns Big 3 has only played 127 minutes together so far, but they’re a +45 in those minutes, sporting a 123.6 offensive rating as well. As their time on the floor together increases, so will their comfort level with operating on or off the ball.
2. Using Bradley Beal as a screener
Booker had 16 points in the first quarter and 23 points at halftime. The Lakers clearly needed to change things up to slow him down, and they did coming out of the locker room.
It’s no coincidence that Beal caught fire in that third quarter, scoring 20 of his game-high 37 points in that period alone.
“I always viewed him as a big-time shooter and a scorer, but the diversity offensively with which he can attack is really, really impressive,” Vogel said. “He can hurt you in all ways, including being a screener, which is a great fit when you’re playing with two other stars. And then screening and rolling to the basket and playing a 4-on-3 game, but he can penetrate off the bounce, he can post, you can put him in pick-and-roll, you can bring him off pindowns. There’s really no way out there that he can’t score.”
The iso buckets, step-back 3s and nifty dribble moves that had Austin Reaves dancing are the more memorable plays, but Beal being used as a screener really does make Phoenix’s offense impossible to plan against.
Between Booker, Allen and Beal, the Suns have plenty of willing screeners when they run small-small actions. Beal was used more as a screener last year with the Washington Wizards than ever before, and it’s a “counter-punch” Vogel plans to use more often to keep elite defensive big men like Anthony Davis or Bam Adebayo away from the play.
“You want to try to get him away from the action as much as you can, and to run that type of stuff is a good counter-punch,” Vogel explained. “I still think we haven’t scratched the surface of how effective we can be in that. There’s a lot of execution pieces that we need to continue to grow. Even though it has been effective, it can be really dynamic, the slot-slot action, the slot corner action.”
When the Lakers double-teamed Durant out of the pick-and-roll with Beal, the Suns got two easy midrange looks out of it:
Allen, who is no slouch as a screener himself, summed it up best: “It all comes down to the same thing, and it’s just having five guys out there that are screeners, rollers, poppers, playmakers.”
3. Jusuf Nurkic connects the Suns Big 3
In order to have five guys capable of screening, rolling and making plays, the big has to be able to do those things too. Fortunately, Nurkic fits the bill.
Despite only finishing with 9 points and 2 assists on 3-of-6 shooting, Nurk’s value as an offensive connector was on display Thursday night. One of the Suns’ best examples of good ball movement started when Nurkic got the ball at the elbow and turned away from a Durant-Beal screening action.
Nurk quickly proceeded into a dribble handoff with Booker, who got doubled and quickly slipped a bounce pass to Nurkic on the roll. Nurk took a power dribble, saw LeBron James slide over as the low man, and kicked it to Grayson Allen in the corner. Allen swung the ball against the rotating defense, finding Beal for an open 3 on the wing:
The misconception that the Suns don’t run offense isn’t entirely fair; more often than not, their offense only devolves into iso-ball after the first action fails.
“We just need to go to our next option,” Booker explained after the Suns’ loss to Memphis last week. “Sometimes when the first option’s taken away, like we said [with] how they’re playing, just over-denying everything, it has to be an immediate next action. Go to the next person, go dribble handoff somewhere else, stop playing so slow.”
The play above was a perfect example of Phoenix learning to work through those hiccups in real-time, with Nurkic shifting the play to the other side of the floor and setting up the next action.
As the Lakers’ defensive focus shifted to Booker in the second half, everything opened up for Beal and even Nurkic in the post. Los Angeles kept trying to hide the 39-year-old LeBron James on Grayson Allen, so the Suns gave him the ball and let him run pick-and-roll with Nurk.
James switched onto Nurk on the block, and despite LeBron’s size and strength, that’s still a mismatch. Jarred Vanderbilt got caught shading over too far, and before Nurkic even thought about scoring, he zipped the ball from the post out to Booker for a catch-and-shoot 3:
There’s nothing fancy or overly complicated here; just high-IQ basketball in locating mismatches and exploiting over-helping defenders. The Suns’ offense is so high-powered that, even after the Lakers attempted to slow Booker, they wound up surrendering the exact type of look you never want to give up to a red-hot scorer.
The win-loss column hasn’t reflected these tantalizing glimpses just yet, but the Suns’ latest win with a healthy Big 3 revealed how their process should eventually yield more promising results. From here, it’s just a matter of repetition.
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