As the saying goes, everyone has a price. The Phoenix Suns and owner Mat Ishbia found theirs on Wednesday by agreeing to buy out Bradley Beal.
Beal agreed to give back $13.9 million out of his remaining $110.9 million due over two years, a figure that gets condensed to $96.9 million that is now stretched to $19.4 million of dead money across each of the next five seasons.
The primary benefit for Phoenix is saving on its tax bill. While there is context to the reasoning for what the Suns are doing, it’s difficult to deny that this tops the list, given it is a $176 million difference just this year on that bill. By staying out of the tax this year, Phoenix gets closer to staying out of “repeater” territory in an attempt to avoid punishments that multiply how expensive it becomes to string together multiple years as a tax-paying team.
No matter how stacked Ishbia’s resume for spending is, suggesting that saving $176 million doesn’t matter to him would be naive. So would failing to find understanding in why the Suns would do this. It’s $176 million for a team that would be lucky to win 35 games, a team that could snap PHX Arena’s sellout streak at some point and a team that will need time baking in the oven to reach the levels of excitement compared to the first three seasons Ishbia oversaw.
Ishbia will spend when the time is right and spend to erroneous levels. The time is not right, and eating that bill again presumably was not of interest.
Phoenix’s internal frustration with how massively Beal’s tenure submarined the last two years is also worth mentioning before we get too deep into the weeds.
A reasonable choice would have been offering Beal what his role could have been — off the bench and somewhere in the realm of 20 minutes a game — and seeing how he responded. If the Suns didn’t feel good about that conversation or having Beal around at all, they could have just sent him home and revisited the situation at the trade deadline or next summer. That is exactly what they did with Jae Crowder three years ago.
But with the depths that Beal disappointed, there was no way the Suns were going to accept paying him over $50 million to be a stay-at-home dad.
Instead, they are paying him nearly $100 million to go away.
He was not going to be on the team next year, one way or the other. Ishbia has a way of just getting things done, one way or the other. This way, which might look like a lack of patience, also saves a whole lot of money.
Other benefits are entirely dependent on how the Suns take advantage of their newfound flexibility.
Phoenix was drowning under the burdens of the second apron. Those and the restrictions from the first apron are gone. It has unlocked some of the exceptions teams use to sign free agents without cap space — they are no longer limited to offering the veteran’s minimum.
This graphic shows the implications if Phoenix finishes below the 2nd apron this season.
Phoenix will need to finish below the second apron in 2025-26, 2026-27 and 2027-28 (or 3 out of 4 seasons) to have their 2032 first become unfrozen. pic.twitter.com/g2fGd9bi5N
— Bobby Marks (@BobbyMarks42) July 16, 2025
By moving under both aprons, the immediate reward is the Suns don’t have to sweat the second apron specifically and another first-round pick getting frozen, meaning they couldn’t trade it until it was unfrozen.
Part of unfreezing the 2032 pick, a consequence of the repeated second apron appearances, is getting out of it for three of the following four years. Starting that process as soon as possible is helpful. Assuming the Suns don’t have a bonkers, unforeseen blockbuster in their near future, that should be easy enough with no pricey extensions coming soon beyond Devin Booker’s.
Doing this now lets the Suns operate the trade market with much more freedom. Same with free agency.
The, uh, problem is free agency is mostly already done. Hands are already up and ready to be held in that position to admit this assumption was wrong, if Phoenix turns and burns some legitimate, meaningful roster improvement this summer after the waive-and-stretch.
To that point, the wait now begins for a trade that takes advantage of this flexibility in a profound way, one that brings a serious boost to the Suns’ long-term prospects. If not, then the anchor of Beal’s money is much tougher to stomach.
Essentially, the price Phoenix was willing to pay to start unfreezing that one pick, avoid the 2033 selection getting frozen and escape a cycle that could have led to first-rounders getting bumped to the end of the round was $19.4 million a year in dead money over the next five seasons. Again, while also (at present) completely eliminating its tax bill.
The narrative spin here will be that aforementioned flexibility and waiving goodbye to the second apron (plus another note on Beal’s dead money we’ll get to in a minute) makes this an arguable move for the better.
But this was not the only way for the Suns to duck under the second apron.
The Suns were previously somewhere between $10-15 million over the second apron, depending on which cap expert you asked. Trading someone like Grayson Allen or Dillon Brooks for little to nothing in order to dump their contract would have been a tough hit, but not as steep as all that dead money. The Boston Celtics acted like clockwork to rapidly make their tax troubles go away by making similar-ish trades involving two players, Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, with questionable trade value.
Perhaps that type of deal wasn’t available. Well, OK.
Then don’t trade Vasa Micic’s $8 million of non-guaranteed money for Mark Williams, a trade that has its own leaky holes of logic in the first place. Don’t guarantee Nick Richards’ $5 million for next season. Look at that — that’s $13 million right there. Phoenix still would have had the first apron to deal with.
Bailing on Richards and tanking a net loss of two second-round picks for the past trade deadline swap would sting, but so would adding two centers that make him almost entirely irrelevant after some optimism he could be the long-term answer at the 5 just four months ago. We’ll see if Phoenix can end up trading Richards this offseason for some of that second-round pick capital or surprise by getting a rotation piece.
A strange quirk worth noting here is that the dead money on the books can change form. If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is, but it is important to bring up because the Suns can use this to their advantage.
If the Suns operate as an “over the cap” team, Beal’s $19.4 million per year does not apply to the number that determines how close they are to the aprons and how much the tax bill is. The downside is that as an “under the cap” team, Phoenix could use that open money on free agents, as well as the room midlevel exception ($8.7 million). Over the cap means the Suns would have access to using the full non-taxpayer midlevel exception ($14.1 million this season) or the taxpayer midlevel exception ($5.7 million), plus the bi-annual exception ($5.1 million).
So, as long as the Suns continue to be in that “over the cap” designation, Beal’s dead money is not a hindrance to trying to avoid the aprons or tax.
A hindrance, though, is $19.4 million on the books each of the next five seasons. The cap is expected to grow steadily over the next few years, and if the estimations prove accurate, the percentage of the total cap that takes up will drop under 10% by the end of this. With that in mind, you know what would be helpful for a team that is going to need every ounce of assistance to get this rebuild right the next few years? That extra 10%.
Again, Phoenix operating under the mindset that it can make this roughly 90% of the cap work over the next few years and can side-step some of the particulars with a CBA wrinkle absolutely reeks of thinking it is smarter than everyone else. Have the Suns not learned their lesson? Do they not remember what got them here in the first place?
They were the detractors of the second apron, infamously getting featured in an ESPN article from Brian Windhorst after the Beal trade that had a braggadocios tone to it. Lines in the story suggested that the Suns would not “just break the rules, (but) smash them to bits.”
But the more the Suns looked at it, sources said, the more they came to an understanding that if they were going to pierce the second apron, it was better to explode right through it. If they just crept over the line, as they were sure to flirt with anyway based on their roster’s current salaries, it would have been challenging.
But if they just went all-in and went way over, their situation might be workable. Go barely over the line, the Suns believed, and it would be hard to make moves in the future. Go way over the line by adding all the talent they could now, and it opens up some options.
That is a brutal read two years later.
The unavoidable part of this to swallow is this is once again the consequences of the Suns’ actions, their own ineptitude coming back to haunt them. Phoenix will now be weighed down by that dead money for the next half-decade as a reminder of that. Coincidentally, that will be in the summer of 2030 when it is off the books, the same NBA Draft that includes the last first-round pick Phoenix swapped into a monstrosity via the Beal deal and others.
Those are the patterns that cannot be ignored.