PHOENIX — The Phoenix Suns have rounded into form, ready just in time to show us what this season really has in store for us.
An 8-5 start, five-game winning streak and victories in seven of their last eight contests has them playing high-quality basketball as their schedule really gets cooking, with Thursday’s 133-98 bloodbath over the Indiana Pacers serving as the final tuneup.
Out of the Suns’ eight wins, seven have come against teams that already have at least eight losses. It’s nothing to fault them on. They’ve played the competition in front of them. And now have started to work ’em, I should add. All five on the streak include a Suns lead of 18 points or more.
But now, a visit from the Atlanta Hawks on Sunday and Tuesday’s trip to Portland are two decent teams on the docket before a Western Conference gauntlet kicks off a week from Friday and rolls through Christmas.
It will be a valuable five weeks to learn what this team is all about, and if this is just a scrappy group or something more special than that.
Here’s what we’ve got for now: The Suns, through three weeks, are everything they were advertised to be.
They play hard-nosed, connected basketball with a recognizable style of play that brings out the best in their players. You don’t need to pull up to the foundation and point out the cracks to us. We see them. It’s just a matter of how synchronized this group can continue to be through the bumps in the road, because if what they’ve shown so far comes with maintaining consistency in the controllable elements, that will go extremely far in making up for deficiencies in talent and roster makeup.
Therein lies the beauty of the game that can also sour into a rancid toxin if it is not nurtured properly, as evidenced previously. Phoenix thus far appears to have brought in the right cleanup crew to fumigate.
Thursday was a tricky back-to-back despite the Pacers now holding a 1-11 record and being without Tyrese Haliburton (Achilles), Bennedict Mathurin (right toe sprain) and Obi Toppin (right foot fracture). They do look like a shell of themselves, and at the same time, have that capable potential they showed in the NBA Finals last year.
No trap game in sight, though. The Suns rode a career-high 24 points in the first half for Dillon Brooks to lead by 18 at halftime.
And while this one had some weird energy to it like Wednesday’s victory, it never got too weird. The occasional slippage on defense and timely shot-making (from others beyond Devin Booker) on offense crafted this odd flow where it feels like the Suns have been definitively better than their opponent (because they have been) but are also susceptible to letting the healthy lead slip away.
The Suns on the first basket of the second half extended their lead to a game-high 20 before the game took another turn when Pacers elite 3-and-D performer Aaron Nesmith suffered a left leg injury after his right foot landed on a teammate’s, giving him no support as his body bent the opposite way of that leg. He valiantly tried to get up to walk it off but couldn’t and was helped to the locker room.
That happened with Indiana down 16, and it got within 10 a few minutes later into the third quarter. Shortly after, Devin Booker scored or assisted 16 of the Suns’ points in an 18-4 surge over less than three minutes to establish a 25-point lead. The night felt over from there.
And it was. But no one told the Suns.
They scored the first 20 points of the final frame across the opening 6:11 to make the lead grow to 42 and eventually 46.
Brooks ended up with 32 points on 12-of-18 shooting in 28 minutes. He was, as always, supremely confident with the ball when looking to score.
You’d think, like me when asking him about it, that he’s always been that way. That is not the case, however, and it turns out the most confident of players can still be brought down the environment around them. Brooks remembers his failures in the playoffs against the Los Angeles Lakers two years ago when his prized attribute was suddenly gone.
Through a shooting slump, he alluded to Memphis’ general manager telling him to only take six shots a game, saying it was, “Not giving me the confidence I needed. You can feel that energy coming from front office and coaches.”
So a supportive ecosystem is just as important as the confidence itself?
“Yeah, this game is all about confidence,” Brooks said. “No matter what level it is, you gotta be confident in your game. … Once you have a good surrounding cast and a good team and great front office and good coaches, that stuff shows and you see it in every game in good teams and good organizations.”
Brooks will have a handful of games this year where that confidence will look like it comes at a detriment, when those shots are not falling like they were on Thursday. But as he said, confidence is the most important skill to own in basketball. And when it’s at his level, that rubs off on his teammates too, multiplying its value exponentially.
It’s what Phoenix needs now more than ever, as Grayson Allen left this game with a right quad contusion and did not return. With Jalen Green (right hamstring strain) still sidelined for at least a month, the Suns need everything they can get from all able bodies.
Booker scored 33 points (12-of-22) with five rebounds, seven assists and one turnover in 29 minutes. Once more, to give Brooks his flowers, Booker for the first time I can remember admitted he didn’t have a lot of energy for Thursday’s game. Phoenix’s schedule has been off-kilter to begin the year, varying wildly between home and away with no extra-day breaks that are conveniently present for the league’s elite franchises (tending to a national television schedule) and vanish in a poof once that status fades.
He credited his teammates for bringing the juice to get him going.
“I looked around the locker room, everybody was ready to go and it kind of revived me,” Booker said.
That comes from culture-drivers like Brooks.
“He’s one of the hardest workers I’ve been around,” Booker said of him. “He’s spends countless hours — even when he was going through his core injury, I was telling him, ‘You supposed to be going that hard?'”
Starting center Mark Williams sat for the second game of a back-to-back as Phoenix continues with its long-term plan for his health. The Suns have two of them remaining in November, from Nov. 23-24 and Nov. 28-29. The next one wouldn’t come until the day after Christmas, so perhaps that is the next potential progress point if Williams continues to avoid injury.
When Williams is on the bench, Phoenix has often struggled, but was also coming off the season’s best effort from the reserves on Wednesday. Williams was actually a -5 in that win over Dallas. The general ineffectiveness of both Oso Ighodaro and Nick Richards has played into that disparity, creating curiosity to see if any rotation changes would come without Williams, such as the inclusion of No. 10 overall pick Khaman Maluach.
Ott recently flipped his rotations at the backup 5 in the last two games, setting Nick Richards as the first big checking in and then later inserting Oso Ighodaro. Richards is still playing less minutes than Ighodaro, but in the previous three contests, another tweak has been baling on using Ighodaro at the 4 after the duo was used as a frontcourt for a total of 28 minutes in the opening eight games.
For Thursday, Richards got the start, a chance for him to expand on slim minutes and take the extended time to clean up some of the mistakes on both ends that have made his play shaky. But Richards underperformed in the same ways, getting to his spots a step late and just lagging behind in general. That meant it had to be a huge night for Ighodaro, and he delivered.
Ighodaro contributed 17 points, seven rebounds, three steals and three blocks in 26 minutes to be a staggering +52. That’s the highest plus-minus in Suns history across the play-by-play era, per Stathead.
“Just felt like I was going after winning,” Ighodaro said. “Feel like that’s been my focus the last 4-5 games. Not worrying about stats, not worrying about anything like that. Just trying to impact the game in a positive way.”
He showed a lot of emotion on the court and got a whole lot of love from the bench when checking out for the last time. Everyone knew how much he needed that.
This was not a night like a handful earlier in the season when the Suns decisively were the better team with the possession battle. But Thursday is an example of how not letting it get away from them can be valuable too. Indiana’s 16-10 advantage in offensive rebounds and turnovers at 12-11 Pacers never got those differences too extreme, and is what allowed Phoenix to do what it was supposed to do when shooting over 20% better than its opponent — win big.
“It’s easy to say in the pregame, it’s easy to say in practice but it definitely takes a little bit more to focus on it and we have all (our) guys doing it,” Booker said of how every team is preaching the possession game.
“And just being on the other side, you guard a good possession and then give up an offensive rebound, it’s what the basketball gods do (from there) — it usually ends up to a wide-open 3 or a putback layup,” Booker added.
In a second straight strong performance from the bench, it was the same for Jordan Goodwin. He added 10 points, nine rebounds and five assists. If the shot keeps falling, he will keep playing.