No, a package of non-All-Stars and low draft picks should not be enough to acquire one of the top three players in the NBA who is still in his prime.īut if Durant never gives his blessing to another team, and promises to be a locker room problem in Brooklyn if he’s not traded, the Nets may end up with no other choice.Īs it stands, the Suns can aggregate any players they want - except for Devin Booker and Deandre Ayton, because of their recently signed contracts - into a many-for-one trade for a star. It appears the Suns are so confident about Durant’s conviction of only being happy in the Valley of the Sun, and so sure that the Nets won’t get any better offers from teams who can’t get Durant’s blessing to acquire him, that the Suns are simply playing out the game and waiting for the Nets to finally blink.
Suns set up the bowling pins for a big summer, ready to knock them all down I wrote way back on June 1 how Suns GM James Jones had set up the team specifically to make almost the entire roster fungible this summer for a trade for a superstar, and here we are with one of the league’s top two or three players listing only the Suns on his trade demand list. Why are the Suns waiting around, you ask? Because Kevin freaking Durant!
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They are keeping their entire arsenal of expiring contracts, important role players and a full chest of draft picks untouched for the moment the Nets decide to fully engage in trade talks for their perennial MVP candidate. The Suns, meanwhile, are frozen in place, awaiting the potential for a blockbuster Kevin Durant trade. Over the next two months, team executives are hopping on planes for remote unplugged vacations, finally detaching from phones that are never out of reach the rest of the year. The dog days of a transactionless NBA offseason are upon us. The team that completely melted down against Dallas, emotionally and physically, is still together: boo!Īnd that’s the way it’s going to stay for a while. The team that won a franchise record 64 games and has the second-most playoff wins in the league the last two years is still together: yay! All the starters - Chris Paul, Devin Booker, Mikal Bridges, Jae Crowder, Ayton - are the same, and most of the backups too: Cameron Payne, Cameron Johnson, Dario Saric, Torrey Craig and Landry Shamet.
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Backup center JaVale McGee - who was benched in the middle of the Dallas series - left for Dallas, but injured incumbent Dario Saric is expected to re-take his place after recovery from a torn ACL in the 2021 Finals.Įveryone else is exactly the same, now that Deandre Ayton is back under contract. Rotation changes among the players who received 99% of the team’s playoff minutes? One. They’re third-string players for a reason.
Yes, the last few minimum-salary roster spots were swapped out but while the names have changed the performance likely won’t.
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Two months later, a period of time that included the annual NBA Draft and the first two weeks of free agency where a third of the league’s players changed teams, the Suns look. The wheels started wobbling before the end of the season, but sprung off completely in the Dallas series after the Suns took what seemed like a commanding 2-0 lead. As fellow writer Rod Argent noted this week, the Phoenix Suns still need to improve on a roster that crashed and burned in the 2022 Playoffs.
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