The most disappointing season in franchise history is officially over. After Sunday night’s 122-116 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves in Game 4, the Phoenix Suns and their Big 3 have been swept right out of the 2024 NBA Playoffs.
Despite a playoff career-high 49 points on 13-of-21 shooting from Devin Booker, plus another 33 points on 12-of-17 shooting from Kevin Durant, the Suns couldn’t stave off elimination at home in the only close game of the series. It simply took too long for Phoenix to get their stars going against the NBA’s best defense and find the requisite amount of fight.
“I think pride was on the line, but everybody’s response is, ‘That should’ve been from the start,’” Booker said afterward. “And I completely agree.”
Booker and Durant were inconsistent throughout the series, but in the Suns’ do-or-die moment, they didn’t get enough help from the other guys to keep pace. No one else on the roster reached double figures in the scoring column, with Bradley Beal and Jusuf Nurkic adding 9 points apiece.
As Booker and Durant scored or assisted on 99 of the team’s 116 points, the Suns’ season ended the same way it felt during last year’s second-round exit: Book and KD against the world, without the help of a reliable supporting cast. Now, all eyes will turn to what this underwhelming team is supposed to do moving forward.
“It’s disappointing,” coach Frank Vogel said. “There’s no other way to put it. There’s no worse professional feeling in the world than getting swept in the NBA playoffs. I’ve never been a part of it. I feel pretty low right now. I want to speak to our fans directly and say I share your passion. I’m as disappointed as y’all are.”
Vogel may share in Suns fans’ disappointment, but the question is whether he’ll stick around long enough to fix it. As is always the case in these situations, the first name to come under fire is usually the head coach. Before the game, Vogel asserted that he has the “full support” of owner Mat Ishbia:
With that being said, reports from ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, The Athletic’s Shams Charania and plain common sense suggest Phoenix could move in a different direction.
“When you lose, you always want to evaluate everything,” Vogel said. “I would say, personally, no one’s harder on me than me. I always look inward for ways that I could have done things differently or pulled different strings with our group. I’ll make sure that I evaluate myself that way.”
Phoenix has a lot to evaluate — with its coach and its roster in general. Ask all 18 Suns players and their head coach why this group never came together to reach its full potential, and you might get 19 different answers.
“We could be better in all areas,” Durant said. “It’s hard to pinpoint just one thing right now. When you reflect back on the season, I think that, like I’ve been saying, we just were inconsistent with our play and the style of play that we wanted. But that’s as far as I’ll go.”
Durant declined to provide further context, noting that when a player does so, it’s usually spun as an excuse. For Booker, the devil was in the details, ranging from rebounding to getting more possessions than their opponent to properly spacing the floor.
“There’s a lot of details to the game that go into it, but I’ve always been saying it all year, communication trumps all,” Booker said. “And we weren’t good with that this year.”
Vogel pointed to more tangible issues, including the Suns’ season-long struggles with turnovers and establishing the right balance on offense.
“We turned the ball over too much,” he said. “We didn’t ultimately become good enough from a rebounding standpoint. And I think we didn’t really find our rhythm in terms of being consistent with our offensive flow. So there’s some things that I think that we can look at and find ways to be better.”
A season that began with title aspirations may have ended in a first-round sweep, but it wasn’t just the last four games that felt disappointing. Vogel called it a “positive” for Phoenix to snag a playoff spot in this bloodbath of a Western Conference despite all the injuries and roster experimentation early on, but the margin for error won’t get any more forgiving with so many teams on the rise.
“We put this team together with the mindset that we have a 3-5 year window, that every year we’re gonna have a team that has the firepower to compete for it,” Vogel said. “But this league is loaded with firepower. We’ve got a talented group. So do the Timberwolves. Every team in the top-10 teams in the Western Conference are loaded with talent as well. So we’ve gotta evaluate and figure out ways we can get better and just process this tough series loss.”
Vogel spoke with a fair amount of confidence he’ll be back next season to try and steer this Suns team in a more positive direction. Whether that actually winds up being the case remains to be seen, but it was surprising to hear him, Booker and Durant all on the same page — a rarity lately! — about the importance of continuity as the team moves forward.
Durant referred to guys getting in the gym with one another, hanging out in the offseason and staying in constant communication to keep building together, and he even included the coaching staff among the people who will be working over the summer to prepare for a better result next time around.
“I think guys will dig deep this summer, work on what they need to work on individually, coaching staff, go and try to make adjustments, ’cause we got stuff on film all season on who we could be as a team,” Durant said. “So it’s a great opportunity in the summertime to focus on your individual game, enjoy your time off, but also realize, come back and try to make some adjustments so we can not go through this again.”
Booker, meanwhile, mentioned the importance of bonding over this shared pain.
“At the end of all this, there’s gonna be one winner, and everybody that doesn’t win is gonna go into somewhat of a panic mode and feel like they have to make changes and do this and do that,” Booker explained. “But I think over time, experience is the best teacher. So the more that you can spend time together and feel this hurt together and go through it together, the better off you are in the future.”
The question is how the Suns specifically get better. They can change coaches and hope that’s enough to push Phoenix over the hump, but the roster is what it is.
The money owed to Booker, Durant and Bradley Beal alone puts Phoenix over the salary cap for next season. The seven players Phoenix has under contract — the Big 3, Grayson Allen, Jusuf Nurkic, Nassir Little and David Roddy — will put them over the second tax apron before they even fill out the rest of the roster, which includes re-signing Royce O’Neale and possibly Bol Bol. After that, they’ll only have veteran minimum deals to offer outside free agents.
Four more players — Eric Gordon, Josh Okogie, Drew Eubanks and Damion Lee — could be back if they opt into their player options. Because Phoenix will be a second tax apron team, they won’t have the mid-level exception at their disposal. Their trade options will be limited, since they won’t be allowed to take back additional salary in any deal, send cash out in trades, use trade exceptions or aggregate multiple outgoing players as part of a trade.
It’s not impossible for the Suns to retool the roster, but it will be difficult, since their only trade chips (starting on draft day) are the 22nd overall pick in this year’s draft and the team’s 2031 first-round pick. Booker and Durant aren’t going anywhere, and because of his no-trade clause, Beal probably isn’t either. Allen is ineligible to be traded until mid-October, and Nurkic and Little don’t have much trade value.
In other words, it’s hard to see how different this team will actually look next season.
For better and for worse, patience may be the only feasible solution for the corner the Suns have backed themselves into. Assuming they take care of business and re-sign O’Neale, a top-six of Durant, Booker, Beal, Allen, Nurk and O’Neale isn’t terrible. Upgrading the center spot, finding more size and defense on the wing, and adding a backup point guard should be top priorities, but the foundations of a contender are there.
As inconsistent as this season was, the Big 3 only played 41 games together before the playoffs. There’s something to be said for allowing a team more than half a season to jell before frantically changing things every offseason.
“Yeah, continuity is important,” Durant said. “All the great teams in the league thus far has been together for two, three years — the Minnesotas, Denvers, Bostons, the Lakers OKCs. A lot of teams have been together for a few years, so I’m looking forward to building.”
Booker seemed to share that sentiment, saying after Game 4 that he believes the Suns had enough to win from a roster standpoint. But again, for this group to reach its goals, it all comes down to the details.
“Everybody talks about the firepower, but you look around the league, it comes down to the details,” Booker said. “I don’t want to keep saying that, but it’s a super important thing. You can’t just go out there and think you’re gonna win off talent. The game is more complicated than that.”
The coach is the one responsible for those details, but in order for the team’s general communication to improve, Booker will have to take on even more of a vocal leadership role. It felt like Phoenix sorely lacked that type of Chris Paul presence in the locker room this year, with Book, Durant and Beal all failing to fill the void.
Booker and Durant have always been “lead by example” stars, while Beal might be too happy-go-lucky to take on that task. With or without Vogel next season, the Suns’ on-court leaders have to be much better in this respect after a humiliating first-round sweep.
“Hopefully everybody’s feeling the same type of hurt, and it has to be fixed,” Booker said. “I have to be better. Kevin has to be better, Brad has to be better, coach has to be better. If we’re the leaders of the team, we can’t be out there unprepared.”
Getting Booker and Durant on the same page more often — like they were in Game 4 — would certainly help. The Big 3 never fully got their bearings, with one or two of them usually cooking on a given night while the other one or two took a backseat. The Athletic mentioned Durant felt like he was relegated to the corner too often, and that was one of many symptoms indicating this offense never fully found its rhythm for its three stars.
But Booker and Durant both seemed committed to their partnership after the loss.
“It continues to grow,” Booker said. “We were the core of the team that felt this hurt last year and added a bunch of guys around, so chemistry and time spent is the best teacher.”
“Yeah, it’s been steady, man,” Durant agreed. “We’ve been building, we understand each other more and more. I feel like I know Book in and out and vice-versa. So yeah, we just keep building from there. Like I said, continuity is a major part of being a successful team and rough times as well, a lot of teams that are successful right now have been through some rough times. So we just keep grinding.”
Booker will turn 28 around the start of next season, which means his best window to contend is over the next few years. At age 35, Durant just submitted one of the greatest seasons in NBA history for a player his age, but given all that he’s accomplished, given the way this disappointing season went, and given the state of the Phoenix Suns, it’d be easy to question what his current level of motivation looks like.
Durant, however, made sure to set the record straight on that.
“I live and breathe this shit, bro,” Durant said. “At this point in my life, I got a lot of shit going on outside of basketball, but what I’m mainly focused on is ball, bro. So yeah, I got motivation. I love to play. I’m gonna come back next year ready to hoop. So yeah, I don’t think you should question that.”
No one should doubt Durant or Booker’s love for the game, but as for all the other question marks surrounding the Suns and their future? This first-round sweep ensured the offseason will be spent trying to answer them, and the most crucial one is this: Can the front office truly embrace a future where the most disappointing team in franchise history has to push toward continuity through patience?
And more importantly, is there any other choice?
