PHOENIX — MVP chants rang through Mortgage Matchup Center when he was at the foul line. Loud repetitions of his name during live play soon followed.
No, I am not talking about Devin Booker. And he’s more than fine with hearing those for someone else.
“Hell yeah, I’ll share ’em every night,” he said.
It was instead a career-high 42 points and franchise-record 10 3s from Grayson Allen that captivated Phoenix Suns fans on Monday in a 121-98 win over the New Orleans Pelicans.
“I don’t know how many times that’s going to happen. That was pretty cool,” Allen said of the MVP chants.
Allen was on a heater all night, scoring 18 points in his first 14 minutes and adding 17 in the third quarter before reaching those new bests in the final frame. He did all of this in just 28 minutes on 12-for-17 shooting. It’s only the 26th time in league history someone has scored at least 42 points on 17 shots or fewer, per Stathead.
He admitted that the 10 3s were a figure he was really gunning for once he got within range, knowing the three other times as a Sun he got stuck on nine.
It helped that he had his own hype man on the bench. And it was the one teammate that had a pretty good reason to not be in the best mood.
“I was talking to Jalen (Green) the whole game,” Allen said. “And Jalen, every time I came back to the bench, he was just amping me up to, ‘Go for 40, go for 50, go get 10 (3s), go get 11 (3s) go get 12 3s.'”
Green re-injured his right hamstring on Saturday and is set to be out for the foreseeable future, something that didn’t damper his spirit enough to prevent him from supporting his teammates as a guy who is not even remotely used to missing games.
Allen’s outing was the type of excellence in marksmanship that begins to lock in the crowd more and more, appealing to everyone from diehard hoop heads to an everyday civilian at their first sporting event. Fans were only watching him at points of the fourth quarter, swirling with buzz when it looked like he was about to shoot the ball.
“It’s cool but it also puts a lot of pressure on those shots when everyone’s anticipating it going in!” Allen said.
“When you catch the ball and start going into the shot, you hear the volume of the crowd start to rise a little bit,” Allen added. “The loud cheer or the ‘Awww, he missed.'”
The ultimate standard of this, of course, is when Stephen Curry does this for the Golden State Warriors at Chase Center, transforming a normal basketball game into a one-of-a-kind event. Allen agreed it was like his own version of that.
The statement performance spotlighted Allen’s resurgence.
He entered the night averaging career highs in points per game (16.3), assists per game (4.7) and steals per game (1.7). Most of that comes with more time on the ball, now being used more in a combo guard fashion like he was at the beginning of his career in Utah and Memphis.
While Allen noted as a shooter you just get used to a role either way, it does help to have the ball in your hands more to establish a flow.
“It’s not even about getting a shot up, it’s just about touching the ball, being involved and being in a little bit more rhythm,” Allen said. “That helps. It definitely makes it easier to find that rhythm throughout a game. But at the end of the day you gotta be able to do it whether you have it or not.”
Allen’s always been a polarizing supporting cast member here in Phoenix. His playmaking has frustrated a portion of the fanbase over his two seasons with his proclivity to get stuck in no man’s land and turn the ball over, but the numbers spoke to how that irritation inflated the overall perception of how much he actually commits giveaways. He would get picked on defensively as well, often when miscasted in a role to defend top opposing ball-handlers.
Regardless, Allen was a strong performer two years ago before regressing last season (through some injuries). He looks right back on track.
Allen is often cast aside for those in the mood to look back on the Deandre Ayton trade, an exercise that inspires a desire to stick your head in the dirt with how Portland’s Toumani Camara very well might be the best long-term piece involved in that deal after the Suns initially drafted him in the late second round.
But Allen’s just a damn good NBA player for what he does, one of the league’s best shooters that plays smart basketball while working his ass off across the floor.
Suns cruise all night
Monday presented a challenge we shouldn’t have expected for the Suns to deal with anytime soon, but they dealt with it swiftly.
Phoenix was a significant favorite in this contest. New Orleans is already down Dejounte Murray (right Achilles) for a significant stretch of the season, and once Zion Williamson (left hamstring strain) inevitably got hurt, it put the Pelicans in an extremely compromising position from a talent perspective. Add on no Jordan Poole (left quad strain) or Yves Missi (illness), along with reports just three games in that head coach Willie Green’s future was in jeopardy, and this should have been all Suns.
It was.
They led by 24 just 18 minutes in, pouncing on a very wounded franchise in a way good teams do. This was on their first full game since Green reaggravated his hamstring again, signaling to the Suns they’d have their work cut for them offensively through perhaps the rest of the calendar year.
In the first half, Phoenix shot 11-of-24 from 3, including a 9-for-13 effort in the second quarter. This was all done with only one assist for Devin Booker, a massive credit to how well the offense is moving the ball and creating good looks beyond just one-pass kickouts from the superstar. When this team shoots well, they do not struggle to score at all despite a clear lack of overall scoring pedigree.
Allen (10 3s) and Royce O’Neale (4) made up 14 of Phoenix’s 19 makes on 43 attempts (44.2%). Both are having career-best seasons with scoring, directly connected to sizable bumps in 3PAs thanks to Jordan Ott’s system and buy-in to play with constant pace and space. Ott wants both to take even more and Allen said film sessions include plays when he passed up a decent look, even on nights when his attempts are in the double digits.
“Don’t pass any up,” Allen said of the mentality.
After the Suns extended the lead to 32 early in the third quarter, the Pelicans never really made it a competitive game the rest of the night. Ott has been aces this year with taking timeouts once slippage starts percolating, and two separate stoppages triggered by him in the third quarter were imperative to the proceedings not getting too dramatic. New Orleans very much met the billing of a broken group, and with all the noise surrounding Green, you wonder if this is the type of loss that does him in.
Booker is in a complete groove, fully resembling the guy who was the best player on a Finals team and then the year after finished fourth in MVP voting as a First Team All-NBA honoree. Take your pick on what had that dude go M.I.A. the last two years, whether it had more to do with him or what was going on around him, but he’s back. He only had to play 27 minutes and scored 19 points on 8-of-13 shooting with three assists and three turnovers.
Booker does not buy any leadership narratives you want to run with just because he’s playing elite basketball and the team is performing when it’s his show now.
“I’m still the same person,” he said. “The good teams I’ve been on, you realize it’s never just one leader, it’s never just one person that’s the most vocal — it changes night to night. You do it as a collective group and you want to make sure everybody’s on the same page and starts following coach’s word and that’s what we’re all doing. Everyone’s bought in. I’ve been saying, even in our losses we still come in and get better.”
What he does buy is that Ott’s system on offense is exactly what he has been looking for the last couple of years.
“It’s just spacing, it’s just constant movement,” Booker said of the qualities that make it that. “It’s different doses, different points of attack. It’s hard to defend the controlled chaos or what looks like freelance out there but we’re taught in certain spots of the floor the type of spacing we’re supposed to have, the cutting and sliding, the bigs setting unbelievable screens — we’re locked into the details right now.”
The Suns have now won five of their last six games after falling to 1-4, doing so without hardly any contributions from the entirety of their return from the Kevin Durant trade. Green has played in five quarters, Brooks has now played in five games and rookie Khaman Maluach has yet to crack the rotation.
There is always the antsy itch of projecting what this team could be in a few months time given the quality of the immediate transition into Ott’s style of basketball and how seamless it has pieced together. For now, though, it’s more important to emphasize the Suns now have the base of their foundation in this new era, all less than a month into it. We now know what it’s supposed to look like when things are rolling. Suns basketball has an identity again.