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The Suns had to fire Frank Vogel, but their failures run deeper than their head coach
On Thursday, the Phoenix Suns made their first move to correct the most disappointing season in franchise history, firing coach Frank Vogel after just one season. Less than 12 months after hiring Vogel to replace Monty Williams, the Suns will begin another search for a new head coach.
As reports started surfacing about Vogel’s job security ahead of Game 4 against the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Suns coach was asked how confident he was that he’d be back for Year 2.
“Very,” Vogel responded. “I got the full support of Mat Ishbia.”
Just a few days later, Vogel received some affirmative remarks from general manager James Jones and owner Mat Ishbia…but he didn’t get a ringing endorsement either.
“I thought Frank did a great job given the circumstances,” Jones said. “We assembled a really talented team, primarily three scorers. And whenever you’re trying to get guys to adjust and adapt their games, there’s a transition time. It’s sometimes a struggle, but I thought he did a great job this year.”
“I think Frank Vogel did a lot of great things,” Ishbia agreed. “But we’re gonna evaluate everything.”
Aside from end-of-season media availability, Ishbia flew in last week to have conversations with his front office personnel, coaches and players in order to properly assess things over the weekend. More than a week of deliberation later, the Suns made their decision to let Vogel go.
“As we said at the press conference on May 1, team leadership including myself, Josh Bartelstein, and ownership would be looking across basketball operations to determine what changes needed to be made,” Jones said in a statement. “After a thoughtful review of the season, we concluded that we needed a different head coach for our team.
“We appreciate Frank’s hard work and commitment. We are here to win a championship and last season was way below our expectations. We will continue to evaluate our operation and make the necessary changes to reach our championship-caliber goals. We all take accountability, and it’s my job, along with Josh and ownership, to build a championship team.”
Going from “he did a great job” to “last season was way below our expectations” is quite an about-face, but it shows how two things can be true at once: The Suns had their reasons for firing Frank Vogel, but their issues ran much deeper than the person sitting in the big chair.
Frank Vogel was put in a tough situation
Vogel was not without his share of blame for the Suns’ inconsistencies all season, or for their general lack of fight in that first-round playoff sweep. Running it back completely would’ve been untenable. But context is important, especially for an organization that still has plenty of work left to do.
For starters, all the expectations of a stifling defense under a defensive-minded coach fell flat — not because Vogel was deficient, but because he wasn’t given the tools to craft that elite defense. Vogel went from fielding league-leading defenses with Roy Hibbert and winning a title with Anthony Davis, Dwight Howard and JaVale McGee as his rim protectors to a more flat-footed big in Jusuf Nurkic.
Revitalizing Deandre Ayton would’ve been quite a task for Vogel, but he did have the physical tools to get there, at least. As necessary as it was for Ayton and the Suns to part ways, going from DA’s athleticism to Nurkic made Vogel’s job of constructing an elite defense that much more difficult.
And to be fair, Vogel got a lot out of Nurk! The Bosnian Beast averaged 1.1 blocks and 1.1 steals per game, was more engaged defensively than he’s been in years, and held opponents to 8.7 percent worse shooting at the rim. That was the 14th-best mark in the league among all 102 players who defended at least 300 shots at the rim, per NBA.com, and it was a far better mark than Ayton, who held opponents to 1.4 percent worse shooting at the rim.
But Nurkic still had his flaws defensively, and Drew Eubanks looked just as hapless on that end. Defensive stoppers like Josh Okogie and Keita Bates-Diop failed to give the Suns enough on offensive juice to stay on the floor. The roster was drastically reshuffled at the trade deadline, with Royce O’Neale coming in and Bates-Diop, Yuta Watanabe, Jordan Goodwin and Chimezie Metu out.
Then you add in the injuries. Bradley Beal missed 29 games, Devin Booker missed 14, and despite Kevin Durant enjoying his healthiest season since before his Achilles injury, the Big 3 only played 41 games together. Phoenix’s starting five played a grand total of 35 games together. And O’Neale, who wound up being a key piece off the bench, only got 30 games under his belt before the playoffs began.
The fact that the Suns were the NBA’s 13th-ranked defense is not an indictment of Vogel’s defensive prowess; if anything, it’s an indicator of what might have been if Phoenix had stayed healthy for longer than one or two weeks at a time.
“Some of this stuff takes place right away, the jelling happens immediately; sometimes it takes time for certain groups,” Vogel said. “You gotta go through some suffering to really jell and figure things out as a group with a new coaching staff and a new group.”
Despite the Suns’ roller coaster season, they still won 49 games in a loaded Western Conference, in their first year together, with a jumble of moving parts and an entirely new coaching staff. Getting swept was embarrassing, but the Timberwolves’ continued dominance over the Denver Nuggets so far in the second round is starting to show that series was as much about Minnesota’s historically great defense as it was about Phoenix’s flaws.
As a coach who got fired two seasons after winning a title with the Los Angeles Lakers, Frank Vogel understands this side of the business. On a team with Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, Bradley Beal and an aggressive owner like Mat Ishbia, he likely knew his time in Phoenix would only last as long as the Big 3 believed in him.
“We all know what we sign up for when you come here,” Jones said. “And we know what happens when we set high expectations. When you set high expectations and you fall short, people question everything. And for us, we’ll question everything. But at the end of the day, we’ll have the right answers, and those right answers will help us achieve those high expectations, which is to win the championship.”
The Suns ultimately decided Vogel wasn’t the answer, moving on just a year after they made a similarly tough call with Monty Williams. Williams obviously achieved a lot more during his time in the Valley, but they share this similarity too: As much as one might feel tempted to paint Vogel as the “scapegoat,” he wasn’t blameless by any means either.
The Suns’ disconnect reflected leadership
After the season ended, Beal bristled when asked about whether he thought Vogel should return as head coach, but ultimately expressed his support.
“I think Frank’s a great coach,” Beal said. “I think he’s a proven, obviously, winner. He has a ring behind him. That’s not really a question I like answering, ’cause I’m not responsible for coaches having jobs, being hired or being fired, or whatever. I love the staff that we had. For me, this was like an open book for me, ’cause it was new. Frank’s new, the staff was new, so I was going into everything with just an open mindset. Just welcoming everything and learning kind of everybody on the fly. And Frank’s an awesome, awesome guy, and he’s a great coach.”
However, when players were asked behind the scenes over the next week, the answers must have been mixed. Hardly anyone had a problem with Vogel, but the perception remained that he was a nice guy, just not the right guy to hold the Big 3 accountable and lead Phoenix to the promised land. Vogel would’ve needed Booker and/or Durant to go to bat for him in order to keep his job, and that didn’t happen.
The signs of disconnect were there long before those interviews with the Suns brass. It was apparent in inexplicable losses to bottom-feeders like the San Antonio Spurs and Memphis Grizzlies. It was evident in lifeless performances against the Shai Gilgeous-Alexander-less Oklahoma City Thunder, or the infamous LA Clippers beatdown where the Suns trailed 35-4 at one point.
Falling behind by 31 points in the first half against a shorthanded opponent is bad enough. Doing so, and then rolling eyes and stifling laughter at your coach’s tirade after the fact? That’s “past the point of no return” territory, no matter who’s to blame in that equation.
That report from The Athletic reflected a concern that lingered all year: The Suns seemed to lack locker room leadership. Booker and Durant were “lead by example” guys, while Beal was the new arrival whose life perspective rarely saw him taking things too seriously. Phoenix needed vocal locker room leaders, cutthroat killers, dogs who would bring a little fire.
But that never came, and Phoenix’s lifeless playoff exit put that void on full display. When asked about who the Suns’ leader was, Durant was very clear.
“The coach is the leader,” he said. “We all speak up and talk, but the leader is the coach.”
It was the most basic way to make it clear that Durant wanted no part of “the Big 3 needs to lead better” headlines, inadvertently prescribing blame to the top of the food chain. But he wasn’t the only one, as Booker, Beal and several other Suns players made the disconnect apparent through responses that might’ve been overlooked on a more successful team.
Booker cited “communication” and “the details” as the main areas that cost the Suns in the playoffs, noting that he believed this roster was good enough to win.
“Yeah, roster-wise,” he said. “Everybody talks about the firepower, but you look around the league, it comes down to the details. 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.”
James Jones said after the season that he didn’t believe Vogel had lost his locker room, citing their lack of experience and familiarity together as the reasons they failed in the face of adversity. But throughout that Timberwolves series, simple questions were answered very differently between Vogel and his players.
When asked about defending Anthony Edwards, Vogel mentioned double-teaming as a necessity because no one could cover him in single coverage, but Booker and Durant noted the doubles put the Suns in too many rotations. After a Game 2 performance where Phoenix held Minnesota to 105 points, Vogel pointed to the offense and a plethora of turnovers as the reasons behind the loss, but Beal said it was their defense that came up short. And when questions about complaining to officials came up, Booker deflected, while Vogel said they just needed to move on to the next play.
These examples aren’t damning on their own, but they served as a testament to how Vogel and his players were on different wavelengths by the end. Booker’s frequent calls for better communication rang true on and off the court.
“Just talking to each other and holding each other accountable,” Booker said. “We’re all trying to fight out there, and so far in the series, once it’s turned to shit, we’ve kind of separated instead of being together. And that’s everybody top to bottom.”
Continuity, belief, fight, toughness, heart, togetherness — whatever you want to call it, when push came to shove, they lacked the requisite stuff to fight back. Phoenix never had enough time together to build toward consistency, but they also never built a true identity over the course of their disjointed season.
Injuries or not, that type of outcome in Year 1 for a team with title expectations was unacceptable, and Vogel was ultimately held accountable for it. Now the biggest question is whether a new face in the main chair will be able to do the same with the players.
Frank Vogel paid the price, now it’s on the players to be better
The Suns should be under no illusions that going from Vogel to Mike Budenholzer, Tyronn Lue or anyone will magically fix everything that ails this team. In the upcoming offseason, they still need to upgrade their center rotation, find bigger, defensive-minded wings, and add some playmaking to the roster.
But beyond that, they need their Big 3 to play like a true Big 3 when it matters most. They need their superstars to take accountability for the shared role they played in this failure of a season, and they need those three to be a hell of a lot better.
“I just thought under stress, a lot of times you saw the lack of chemistry, the lack of cohesion, and the uncertainty,” Jones said. “And that’s just something that you have to accelerate for us as a team, for our players. They just need to be better at that. But it comes with time and it comes with a conscious effort to rectify that. And so I think if you ask every single player, they would say communication, communication, but it all starts with them individually, and until they’re on the same page, you’ll get what we got.”
Calling Vogel a “scapegoat” would be disingenuous, but again, two things can be true at once: The Suns needed to make a change once it became apparent there was a disconnect between the players and their coach, and the players need to be a lot better next season about coming together as an actual team.
A more cohesive offensive philosophy that prioritizes 3s while putting the Big 3 in their preferred spots would help, but it still requires buy-in from every player on the roster.
“It’s definitely a collective thing,” Beal said. “One guy’s not gonna get you over at hump, one coach isn’t gonna get you over that hump. It’s a collective group from everybody. Like, everybody has to step up and give more, you know? I think what I love most is we’re willing to do that. I think everybody’s bought into that. So it’s not the most ideal situation to be in, obviously, but we are where we are. And all you can do is face it head on. You can’t run from it.”
Just one year into their Big 3 gambit, the Suns are already at a make-or-break moment. And no matter who walks through that door to replace Frank Vogel, those three superstars have to be better too.
“Hopefully everybody’s feeling the same type of hurt,” Booker said. “And it has to be fixed. 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.”
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