The whispers were loud on the Phoenix Suns wanting to add a center the last couple of weeks, and a new regime in the front office achieved that objective and then some.
Phoenix selected Duke center Khaman Maluach 10th overall in the 2025 NBA Draft on Wednesday, and mere moments later, it was reported the Suns had acquired Charlotte Hornets center Mark Williams in exchange for No. 29 in this year’s draft and a 2029 first-round pick that will likely land in the 20s.
It was quite the bang-bang whirlwind to react to in real time and creates even more questions than we had about this basketball team coming into the draft. All after the draft was supposed to eliminate a few of the many.
To start with the most important bit, getting Maluach at that position in the draft is a big-time victory, the first of general manager Brian Gregory’s tenure. This is Phoenix’s best chance by far at adding a top 30-50 player in the next three years, and Maluach has lots of upside to become just that in a way the next tier of prospects did not.
Maluach, 18, was widely seen as part of a seven-prospect group that came after Cooper Flagg and Dylan Harper. That seven-player group had a clear degree of separation from the next-lower tier.
All expectations were Maluach and those other six names would be gone by the time the Suns picked. Instead, in some divine redo of five years ago when Tyrese Haliburton fell into the Suns’ lap with the same numbered pick, this time they accepted the gift.
There is a ton to like about Maluach. He’s giant, 7-foot-2 with a 7-foot-7 wingspan. That made him a tremendous presence as a rim protector. While not an explosive leaper, Maluach is fluid and quick. He can move laterally better than you’d expect, and won’t be relegated to just the deep drop coverage almost every big of his size will play.
The defensive potential is obvious. On the other end, he finishes everything. Maluach also flashed a capability from 3-point range while playing internationally, something that Duke did not want him to explore. He took only 16 trey, while a 77% mark from the free-throw line is a solid indicator of some promise there.
Maluach is going to be a project. He didn’t even begin playing basketball until 2019, when he used to be a soccer player. The tale goes from The Athletic’s Sam Vecenie that Maluach growing up in Uganda didn’t even have access to a basketball hoop, having to walk 40 minutes to the closest workable rim.
From there, he attended one of former Chicago Bull Luol Deng’s camps and was eventually a part of the NBA Academy in Africa. He played professionally in the country before joining the South Sudan’s national team, competing in the Olympics. By then, he was a top-10 recruit and committed to the Blue Devils.
There are shortcomings. Vecenie is very concerned about Maluach’s hands, with that and his hand-eye coordination specifically having the look of someone who used to play soccer most of his life instead of basketball. You will see right away on the tape how that inexperience affects his feel on the court, so it’s going to take major time for his floor sense to develop.
The kid is raved about as a hard worker, so you feel good about his opportunity to come closer to his ceiling than his floor.
The timing of his selection, Phoenix not thinking he would be there and the Williams trade almost happening instantaneously is confusing. Not on the Maluach end, but the Williams end.
Williams, who turns 24 years old in December, should be a Los Angeles Laker. Charlotte and L.A. agreed to a trade at the February deadline to fill the Lakers’ massive need after the Luka Doncic trade, only for the incredibly rare put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube by the Lakers after large concerns over Williams’ medicals were flagged.
Again, L.A. was desperate for a 5 and had no path toward contention without one, but had to dial back because the injury worries were so profound. Williams has played 106 career games in three seasons. His price clearly dropped, as the Lakers gave up an unprotected pick in 2031, a swap in 2030 and rookie first-round pick Dalton Knecht in the original deal.
Williams has all the ability to be an All-Defense performer. How much feel he has as an anchor on a good team remains to be seen given he has existed in the Hornets ecosystem his entire career. This is the same type of hiccup that got blurted out after Phoenix’s acquisition of Nick Richards, and his lack of polish was glaring in the second half of the season.
There are mixed opinions from national experts on where Williams falls on that spectrum. And that affects how you feel about him overall, whether he’s firmly a top-15 center or someone on the edge of being outside the top-20.
Williams, another Duke product, is a similar build physically to Maluach and is more the quick-twitch guy of the two. As a diver, he can dominate games with how he gets into space. Phoenix just got a tremendous and much-needed boost in athleticism.
Zooming out, it’s a laborious attempt to figure out what the value of acquiring Williams is. Well, at least not with one of those aforementioned questions sprouting up.
Williams’ arrival allows Maluach to grow properly off the bench and the Suns to take a patient approach to his development. But couldn’t have Richards or Oso Ighodaro just started in the meantime?
The counterargument there is Williams is a definitively better player. But why does that matter exactly? The Suns are at best going to be in the mix for a play-in spot if the rest of the roster reconstruction breaks properly. That’s at best. No shot at top-six.
They don’t own their picks coming up, so there’s no benefit to losing.
Phoenix clearly values building its culture and identity. It is easier to do that through winning. The difference Williams will make in that, though, should not be significant enough to be a make-or-break in that process. This holds true when you consider other roster needs that could have been filled with the use of those picks.
This is also the last big move the Suns really have left. The 2029 first-rounder now means Phoenix does not have any tradable first-round picks left. It’s not like that selection and No. 29 had a ton of value, but they were chips left to push into the middle of the table! Now they are just about all in there.
Williams is about to get more expensive. He makes just under $7 million before becoming a restricted free agent next summer. While that’s a market the Suns would be able to control, they’ve got a real pricey roster right now already. And the guy in the trade, Vasilije Micic, was supposed to be used in a way where his team option was declined as an easy way to get closer to under the second apron. How do they get under it now?
The Suns have done that push for positional redundancy, not so much to do with Richards and Ighodaro, but Maluach. If all goes according to plan and Maluach is a good, young player, you want him playing 25-plus minutes a game by the start of the 2026-27 season. Williams would be blocking him if he is extended.
In a similar point presented in 2020 when Jalen Smith was the pick with Deandre Ayton on the roster, the plan with Smith was to make him a combo big, with some serious use at the 4. That failed and Smith is now back to playing the 5 elsewhere in the NBA like he always should have been.
Does Phoenix see some validity in Maluach playing the 4? Or is this just a combined 48 minutes for these two guys? The Suns could have used the pick itself and/or the other first-rounder traded to add a bigger wing or point guard. Ryan Dunn is the only player filling one of those two positions at the moment.
Gregory could not speak on Williams yet, as the trade has not been finalized, but was positive about Maluach’s versatility on both ends of the floor. He feels it’s there right away on defense, while the upside in Maluach’s jump shot and perimeter offense as a whole is something Phoenix believes in.
Phoenix has positioned itself to be the team that will pay Williams, something Charlotte clearly did not want to do. Even if Williams plays over 65 games, there is still a large risk in putting down long-term money on him. So on top of the need to keep him around, given what the Suns gave up for him, there are issues with ensuring that for too long.
The log jam at the 5 now could mean Richards’ non-guaranteed deal is just let go, which would be a brutal turn on how the Suns used critical assets at the deadline to bring him in. And even though Ighodaro was just a second-round pick, Phoenix traded up to get him and now he’s relegated to a third-string role.
Maybe Ighodaro and Maluach can play some 4. In the spirit of alignment, though, that contradicts the type of pace-and-space style new head coach Jordan Ott and Devin Booker want. Regardless, the value of Ott after his player development work with Evan Mobley comes in handy with all three of the bigs. Gregory said Ott’s role was a “big part” of adding Maluach.
Phoenix still has a lot of work to do. It has six rotation players between 6-foot-4 and 6-foot-6. Only one of them, Jalen Green, is an above-average athlete or better.
What sure would be nice to set all these centers up would be point guards. Plural. Not just Collin Gillespie, a restricted free agent.
The young core for the future is now fairly set. Phoenix has no first-round pick next year. So outside of Nos. 52 and 59 on Thursday, this is it for the next two years. Maluach, Williams, Green, Dunn and Ighodaro.
Outside of the extra second-round picks from the Kevin Durant deal, there aren’t any other attachable assets to go around anymore. The tools to get all of this accomplished, as previously stated, are just about gone. An optimistic way of thinking about everything the Suns got done on Wednesday would be expecting that there’s a bigger plan in place, that making two trades within four days that set them up to force more trades is all well and good if they can actually pull those deals off.
We’re about to find out if that kind of trust is worth giving. But at the same time, that shouldn’t fully overshadow the huge win of landing Maluach. If he’s a great NBA player, all the pondering on the Williams move becomes far less relevant.