This Suns season has been dead for a while, but Rockets beatdown and Kevin Durant injury sealed it

As I watched the Phoenix Suns suffer their worst loss of the season Sunday night, I couldn’t help but think of one of the more underrated scenes from my favorite movie, V For Vendetta.

For the bulk of the film, the protagonist/anti-hero named V methodically exacts vengeance on those who have wronged him, one by one. He eventually targets an elderly woman named Delia Surridge as she lies awake in her bed, appearing behind a curtain in the moonlight like the Grim Reaper. But instead of being frightened, Delia almost seems relieved. She’s been expecting death, and because of her many faults and failures that led her to this point, she even welcomes it.

“Are you going to kill me now?” she asks.

“I killed you 10 minutes ago, while you slept,” V responds, holding up an empty syringe as proof.

This miserable Suns season has been dead for a lot longer than 10 minutes, but the Houston Rockets might as well have worn Guy Fawkes masks when they held up a 148-109 beatdown as Phoenix’s own syringe.

Granted, Delia Surridge’s monstrous deeds in the film are not comparable to a basketball team failing to meet expectations, so perspective is important here! But since we’re noting differences between this random movie scene and the 2024-25 Suns season, it’s important to remember that when Delia asks V if there’s any pain, he tells her, “No.”

This season, on the other hand, has absolutely been painful, and its unofficial death on Sunday was the proverbial thousandth cut.

“You can point at everything tonight,” Devin Booker said. “Tough night from start to finish versus a really good team that’s been trending in the right direction. They’ve been building that thing for the past couple years, and they played like it.”

Sure, the Rockets are a good team, sitting second in the ultra-competitive Western Conference standings. But a near 40-point blowout? At home? When every single game could be the difference between making the postseason and missing the play-in tournament altogether? How does that even happen?

“Just fell asleep for a little bit,” Grayson Allen said solemnly. “Turned the ball over, gave up a ton of points in a short amount of time, and got down 30 and kind of lost the game.”

Pretty succinct explanation there, but he’s not wrong! The Suns were actually up 24-21 in the first quarter before Houston closed the period on an 11-0 burst. That run carried over into the second quarter, where the Suns totally unraveled thanks to turnovers, second-chance opportunities for Houston and Phoenix once again looking the part of a bottom-five defense. The Rockets outscored the Suns 46-25 in the second quarter, took a 29-point lead into halftime, and never looked back.

Phoenix wound up giving up 34 points off 19 turnovers, 25 second-chance points and a whopping 148 points in regulation. Mike Budenholzer put it mildly when he said the Suns’ defense was “just not good enough.”

“Tonight they had everything,” Budenholzer said. “The 3-point line, they hurt us there, they hurt us on the offensive boards, they hurt us driving it. They basically hurt us with everything. So I think tonight was a step in the wrong direction. So we gotta look at it and find a way to get ready for Tuesday and find a way to get stops.”

Oh, if only it were that simple! Because in addition to surrendering nearly 150 points in regulation, the Suns also lost Kevin Durant to a left ankle sprain midway through the third quarter. He was ruled out for the rest of the game, and Budenholzer said KD will stay back for an MRI on Monday as the team departs for their three-game road trip, which starts with Tuesday’s matchup in Milwaukee.

“I think until we see the MRI tomorrow, I know he’s not gonna fly with us tomorrow,” Budenholzer said when asked whether Durant could potentially join the Suns midway through the trip. “After that, I don’t think it’d be fair to say anything, but he won’t fly with us to Milwaukee tomorrow.”

As if the 39-point ass-kicking wasn’t enough, the Suns are now two games back in the loss column from the Sacramento Kings and Dallas Mavericks for the West’s final play-in spots, with only seven games left in the season…and their best player could be sidelined for a significant portion of it.

“Everybody has to step up, starting with myself,” Booker said. “The exact opposite of what went down tonight. We have it in the locker room, we just have to pull it out.”

On Monday, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that Durant would miss at least one week with the left ankle sprain. That means he’ll miss the Suns’ entire upcoming road trip against the Milwaukee Bucks, Boston Celtics and New York Knicks, and the absolute soonest he could return is next week’s home back-to-back against the Golden State Warriors (Tuesday) and Oklahoma City Thunder (Wednesday).

Phoenix Suns All-Star Kevin Durant is expected to miss at least one week through team's three-game road trip with a left ankle sprain, sources tell ESPN. Suns are 1.5 games out of Play-In with the toughest remaining schedule in the NBA.

More for NBA Today on ESPN at 3 pm ET. pic.twitter.com/grdYpJEPJ5

— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) March 31, 2025

In other words, if the Suns want to make up ground for the play-in, they’ll have to do it without Kevin Durant.

“Yeah, we don’t have another option,” Grayson Allen agreed. “So it’s just, on this road trip, next man up. We need multiple guys to try to pick up the absence of him and gotta go win some games.”

Suns season is as dead as we thought

This is the part where we redirect you back to the whole “didn’t know she was dead yet” motif from V For Vendetta. Even Delia got to finish her chat with V before death officially claimed her, and the Suns’ last seven games feel like their own version of that final conversation. With her limited time before it was all over, Delia asked an important question: “Is it meaningless to apologize?”

“Never,” V responded.

This prompted a long-awaited apology from Delia just before she went, but don’t expect such an apology from the Suns.

In fairness, they almost made things interesting for a minute there, with a four-game win streak that included impressive victories over the red-hot Chicago Bulls, the Eastern Conference’s top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers, and Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Milwaukee Bucks. The defense was actually holding its own for once, the rookies and role players were making life easier for KD and Book, and it felt like maybe Phoenix was hitting a stride of sorts.

Even if it was “too little, too late,” it felt like the Suns might have been ready for a welcome, long overdue apology to the fanbase after the majority of the season had amounted to such a disappointing slog. But then came three straight blowout losses by 30, 15 and 39 points, and that fool’s gold crumbled back to dust.

“A couple days ago we’d won four games in a row,” Budenholzer lamented. “So we gotta find a way to get back to that. This league, you’re gonna get another game. But tonight…not good. So. But we gotta find a way to flip it and be better.”

The problem is, the Suns aren’t going to “get another game” for much longer, and they’re simply not good enough to flip that switch whenever they feel like it. If that switch was even in the vicinity, they would’ve flipped it a long time ago. The four-game win streak provided a flicker of hope, but the last three beatdowns have snuffed it out for good.

“It’s really frustrating, and I wouldn’t even say it’s the losses,” Allen said dejectedly. “It’s just not even being close in these games that sucks.”

Phoenix hasn’t officially been eliminated from play-in contention, but with seven games left, and Durant expected to miss at least one of them with this new ankle sprain, the Suns’ season may as well be over. They could use these last few games to rack up some wins, sneak into the play-in and give the fanbase some sort of closure on this season from hell, but either way, this season is dead already, and no one involved seems to believe otherwise.

When I asked Mike Budenholzer and Grayson Allen whether the Suns had the requisite fight to turn things around, their responses were telling.

“No, we do,” Budenholzer said. “It’s a group that’s got fight. We gotta bring it Tuesday.”

Allen was even more concise.

“I think so,” he said. “But, we’ll see.”

We certainly will, but we’ve been seeing all evidence point to the contrary for 75 games now, regardless of what Budenholzer believes.

“I mean, tonight was a bad night, there’s no other way to paint it,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s what it’s been, to say categorically, every night. But tonight we were not good. Urgency, anything you want to put on it, we were not good.”

That’s kind of the point, though: How on earth does this happen when urgency should be at an all-time high?

Rookie Ryan Dunn was the only one in postgame interviews to take real accountability — despite the fact that he and his fellow rookie, Oso Ighodaro, are probably at the bottom of the list of people who need to be held accountable.

“It starts with me, I gotta do better, give more energy and kinda getting those effort plays,” Dunn said. “But I think everybody, 1-15’s gotta do a better job.”

The first part’s admirable, but that last bit is closer to the truth. Dunn can lament how the Suns defense gave up uncontested 3s while he was out there — an affront to a defensive-minded player! — but he’s one of the few people on the entire roster who’s actually backed up his words with actions on the court.

This group supposedly has a sense of desperation as their playoff hopes slip further and further away, but it certainly hasn’t translated to their on-court play yet.

“There’s desperation, and then you have to go play,” Budenholzer explained. “There’s an element of, at some point, you have to go and you have to get stops. You have to find a way to make things happen on the defensive end. You have to go and make plays offensively. Desperation and all those things, they’re important, but you gotta go play. And we gotta play better.”

Is that possible at this point? Do the Suns have enough to just “play better” like they did during their 8-1 start to the season, or their recent four-game win streak?

“There’s definitely enough,” Allen said glumly. “We’ve showed it before. Just need to do it for however many games we got left and do it for all four quarters of all those games.”

So what’s the first step to regrouping from a 39-point smackdown?

“Win the next game,” Booker said. “A night this bad, I feel we have to flush it, go get Milwaukee and start the road trip off the right way.”

That toilet has to be clogged from all the games this team has needed to flush this year. And no offense to anyone in that locker room who has to answer difficult questions about the season being lost without, ya know, directly saying the season is lost, but no one is falling for empty platitudes anymore. Hope has been absent for a while now, and embracing the end is a lot easier.

After all, when Delia sensed that death had finally come for her, she asked without fear, “It’s you, isn’t it? You’ve come to kill me.”

“Yes,” V answered.

“Thank God,” she replied.

Whether it’s on April 13 for their final regular-season game, in the play-in tournament, or in a first-round playoff series against the Oklahoma City Thunder, this Suns season is almost dead. And when that day arrives, everyone from the players and coaches to the fans and front office will be thinking the same thing.

Thank God.