The Suns surprised just about everyone (including me) by winning 45 games in 2025-26 despite losing their second-highest-paid player (Jalen Green) for most of the season. There are hopes, and even expectations, that the Suns will win even more with a year of continuity, fewer injuries, the addition of Miles Bridges, and development by young players Ryan Dunn, Khaman Maluach, Rasheer Fleming, and Koa Peat. Conversely, this optimism should be tempered with 5 reasons why the Suns could easily regress this upcoming season.
Poor roster balance
The Suns enter the season with Devin Booker, Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, Miles Bridges, and Mark Williams as the nominal starters. The problem is that two of them are shooting guards, two are small forwards, and none is a point guard or power forward.
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I have written about this before, but the Suns were at their best last year when they played Collin Gillespie next to Booker, and the Suns’ best season with Booker was when he was paired with Chris Paul. Conversely, the Suns were a much worse team when Jalen Green came back. They were also a much better team when they played a true power forward (Isaiah Livers or Rasheer Fleming) at that spot, even if neither of those players was exactly setting the world on fire with their box score statistics.
The Suns are going to be forced to choose between playing guys out of position and being a worse team for it or putting their highest paid players on the bench in order to avoid handing favorable mismatches to opponents. We saw last year that they’d rather be a worse team than let their star money ride the pine and sulk. I don’t expect this year to be different unless they reach the All-Star break and it has become clear the roster clearly isn’t working (and I think this is a strong possibility).
Three-point shooting percentages
The starting lineup of the Suns is terrible from three-point range. Keep in mind, the league average is 36%, and that Mark Williams has attempted a grand total of five three-pointers in his NBA career.
|
Player |
2025-26 3PT% |
|
Booker |
33.0% |
|
Green |
31.3% |
|
Brooks |
34.4% |
|
Bridges |
33.3% |
The results are likely to be disastrous. Without a three-point threat, defenses will sag, and none of the supposed “penetration” abilities of Green and Bridges will matter. It’s also worth noting that those abilities look pretty overrated when viewed through the lens of actual statistics and metrics. It’s difficult to understate the value of spacing as offensive magic.
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It’s why Channing Fry was either first or second on the team during the Nash-era in on-court/off-court per 48: spacing meant almost as much to the team as having Steve Nash on the court. There might be three-point shooters on the bench who are great like Luke Kennard and Collin Gillespie, but then you run into the same problem as issue number one: you’re paying guys a lot of money (looking at Green and Bridges again here) to park their butts on the bench in order to field a viable team.
The new tanking rules
This one has a simple explanation: the Suns were basically the worst team that was still trying to win games last year. Basically everyone else was tanking hard. The Suns were 24-7 against teams that were below .500, and 21-30 against teams above .500. They also tended to blow out lottery-bound opponents, like the 45-point win versus the Pacers in November of 2025. With the new NBA anti-tanking rules in place next season, a lot of those easy Suns wins are going away. That could easily shave five or six wins off their total.
Rebounding/size and roster composition
This is something of a corollary to number one, but one of the consequences of playing small forwards at the power forward position is a lack of rebounding and interior defense. The Suns were 8th-worst in the league in opponent field goal percentage by allowing 65.8% shooting inside five feet. They were the 10th-worst in the league in defensive rebounding percentage. Over the offseason, their solution was to replace one small forward playing power forward with another.
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It reminds me of the Suns’ decision to just throw Hedo Turkoglu (who spent his entire career as a small forward) at the power forward slot and hope for the best back in the 2010-2011 season. It was an unmitigated disaster. The Suns finished 40-42 in Nash’s last season with the team. Turkoglu got ragdolled every game, looked miserable, and promptly departed in free agency.
The only true power forward on the roster is Rasheer Fleming (Koa Peat is a tweener rookie who can’t shoot the three ball). They will be a lot better on the court when he plays, but those opportunities will be limited because every minute he plays takes away minutes from Brooks and Bridges.
Young player development
One of the assumptions is that the Suns’ young players will make a difference. However, there are significant barriers to this theory of improvement.
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We already know that Ryan Dunn has struggled to find minutes because his three-point shot never developed, and his other offensive skills aren’t coming along enough either. Koa Peat is a 19-year old tweener SF/PF whose three-point shot is also suspect, and is fighting for minutes with Brooks, Bridges, Dunn, Highsmith, and Fleming as a developing player on a team intent on winning now.
I’ve already discussed how Fleming probably should be starting, but won’t because the team is already paying almost $60 million a year to a pair of SFs who expect to start. (Side note: nothing is a morale killer quite like getting paid less and being kept off the good projects than being better than the under-qualified, over-paid rock-stars). So, again, poor roster construction is going to impede this part of team success as well.
Finally, Khaman Maluach looked like the best player in the summer league. But he’s also competing for minutes with Mark Williams and Oso Ighodaro. Maluach’s three-point shot means he could probably play alongside Oso if he slid to the PF spot, but again, this takes away minutes from Bridges and Brooks. Additionally, Ighodaro is the best defensive big on the team, with top-tier abilities to switch, pass, and slip screens. It is unclear how Man-man will get minutes outside of injuries or sitting players paid three times what he is making.
Conclusion
National media was not a fan of the Suns’ offseason, particularly the Miles Bridges trade, and it’s not hard to see why. They went from playing a $10 million per year small forward at power forward to a $ 25 million per year small forward to do the same thing, but with a much worse three-point percentage. The roster is a mess of duplicative shooting guards and small forwards. Their starting lineup can’t hit threes, and as a group they’re probably going to lose significantly more games to lottery teams than they did last year. If the Suns regress towards .500 or slightly below, it should not come as a complete shock.
