PHOENIX — It doesn’t take long watching the Phoenix Suns to see how much buy-in they have for their head coach Jordan Ott and how he wants them to play basketball. Along with a true style of play, their team is committed to the latest leaguewide trend each smart team across the NBA is trying to maximize at the moment.
Our current Moneyball turn for the NBA actually doesn’t have as much to do with this 3-point craze anymore. Once we saw 3PA/G jump in a 20-year span from 16.0 two decades ago to 24.1 a whole 10 years ago to 36.4 today, that is now a reality for everyone.
As ever before, the game is about how often the ball goes in the hoop. It’s just now about how many opportunities you give yourself to put said ball in said hoop.
Whether you want to call it “the margins” or “the possession battle,” the analytics all show an overwhelming importance on how getting a few extra shots up can be the difference in a game. When you see a coach use a challenge on an out-of-bounds call that doesn’t even include potential points, that is the possession battle in action. One extra possession, right there.
Suns head coach Jordan Ott talked about it ad nauseam with the media leading up to the season, so you can imagine how much he was emphasizing it behind the scenes.
He remembers a shift in it being viewed this critically as recently as last year.
“I think the analytics boom was shot quality and efficiency of shots, [but] they left out a lot of times (that) you can’t be in the negative in the possession game every night,” Ott said Saturday. “(You’re) basically in the hole to start the game. To the increase of offensive rebounding, to the increase of defensive pressure, some of that goes hand-in-hand with people talking about the possession game more.”
You win it in a few key areas, the two top ones being offensive rebounding and turnovers.
And there is perhaps no greater example of how much it can affect a team than last year’s Suns.
Phoenix in the 2024-25 campaign ranked 26th in offensive rebounding percentage and 28th for opposing turnover rate. To make it easier to understand, remember how many games the Suns lost when they shot a better percentage than the other team? To take it a step further, in their 10 best shooting performances last year, all in which it shot 53% or better, they maddeningly went 4-6. Those six losses include three in which the opponent took 10, 11 and 15 more shots.
“Just being on the other side (of it), 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,” Suns guard Devin Booker said Thursday.
Those problems are now long gone.
The Suns this year are in the top-10 of each category, sitting sixth in offensive rebounding percentage and 10th in opposing turnover rate, per Cleaning the Glass.
“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 Thursday.
There are three other teams in basketball entering play on Saturday that are also top-10 in these two stats. It’s Cleveland (8-5), Detroit (11-2) and Portland (6-6).
Take a look at the league standings further and you’ll see the best NBA teams being elite in one of these markers.
Oklahoma City (12-1) has the best turnover rate on both sides of the ball, as well as the second-best defensive rebounding percentage, meaning how it’s preventing offensive rebounds. The Rockets (8-3) continue to set the bar as offensive rebounders, with a league-leading 40.4% sitting far above the 29.5% league average, while Denver (9-2) is top-10 in its own turnover rate on offense and then its defensive rebounding percentage.
Outside of the Blazers, the rest of those teams have tremendous talent up and down their roster to help accommodate those margins. Teams like Portland and especially Phoenix don’t have as much of a choice. They gotta pick up every inch they can wherever it is made available.
The significance of 3-point shooting is still not going anywhere, so the Suns being quite good at that controllable margin is a game-changer as well. Ott has his guys jacking ’em up, owning the fifth best 3-point rate in the NBA. In turn, the Suns are sixth in 3-point percentage (39.2% excluding garbage time).
This is what everyone in the NBA wants to do. They want to win the possession battle, and even deeper into the weeds, squeeze as much out of each possession by the potential points it can yield by getting up the best shot, which most of the time is going to be a 3-pointer.
But it’s not that diluted. The Suns, in fact, wish it was.
If you’ll welcome just a slightly longer stay in those weeds, that “points per possession” metric you might hear uttered from time to time does come up in two other pockets these Suns have to get much better at, and it’s the most two efficient shots in basketball.
Phoenix is 27th in free-throw rate and 24th in opposing free-throw rate, a troubling combination that can fully eliminate all the hard work done in those other categories.
“Yeah that’s not a good margin, that’s not the good one,” Ott said Thursday. “We’re not going to be a low foul team. We’re going to defend to the legal limit (and) we know that comes at a cost. … You don’t ever want to go into a game with a negative margin in the free-throw game but we’re going to continue to try to find ways to get into the paint, for us to get to the free-throw line and I think we have done a better job of taking away some of the free throws the other way.”
Some of that improvement comes from headache-inducing errors like fouling jump shooters or letting the opponent get in the bonus too early, tying directly into the theme of how all of these are “controllables.”
The other issue is shots at the rim. Like the low free-throw rate, this is just something from our vantage point to accept with the roster construction that it’ll be rough all year. The Suns sit 29th (23.3%) in rim rate, nearly 10% below the league average (31.6%). Jalen Green’s absence pretty much all season has not helped there, and neither does every other ball-handler on the team owning a resume lacking in any serious type of volume at the basket.
To go back to that controllables term, there are elements the Suns can control, though. Ott likes how often they drive the ball still to at least put pressure on that rim.
Phoenix’s pace numbers have also been just OK and Ott doesn’t want “just OK.” There are spreadsheets all over league offices that show the smaller the number on the shot clock is, the lower the probability is of a shot going in. Attack those defenses while they aren’t set, or give yourself a chance to run multiple actions in a given possession, and you’ve got a better opportunity to score.
Look, all of this might be mumbo-jumbo to you, and honestly, couldn’t agree more in some ways with your sentiment. You know what isn’t going anywhere? Getting a stop. The Suns are seventh in half-court defense and that’s the most important statistic of this article. You know what else isn’t going anywhere? Putting the biscuit in the basket. If Booker has the middy going, screw the pull-up 3. Run that clock down to get into the bag.
But this is part of what basketball has become, and you better get out in front of it if you’re an NBA team. Ott certainly is.