It's like jumping the shark level comedy. Guy has been a Top-30 player and hasn't yet had his 30th birthday, was run out there on one leg last year and one arm the prior so is "declining" after starting this year playing as well as ever coming off wrist surgery. Gets acquired for Landry Shamet and Paul's corpse...and people are worried about what will happen in 3 years lol. Waiting for someone to call him "selfish" to confirm that they've never seen a Wizards game.
I liked Beal in Miami, less so with PHX. Not a great fit. Hollinger does a decent job summing it up below
They better win now or the NBA will have to eventually create the
Ishbia/ARod Rule (that will replace the Stepien Rule) to save the owners from themselves.
https://theathletic.com/4621136/2023/06/19/bradley-beal-trade-hollinger/?source=pulsenewsletter&campaign=7070525
From
the Athletic (a worthwhile subscription)
He is still a
good player, but he is paid like a great one. Between blah defense, injuries and his weirdly disappearing 3-ball, it is a real stretch to rank Beal among the league’s 25 best players. That contract, however, pays him like a superstar until he’s 33, with a $57 million gulp in 2026-27. That’s going to be a difficult number to ever deal if things don’t go well.
All of that discussion views the Beal trade in a vacuum. But of course, the Suns do not play in a vacuum. (Though it may seem like it at the rate their future draft picks are disappearing.) Beal, instead, now plays on the same team as
Devin Booker … who might be the single most similar player to Beal in the entire league, except Booker is younger and slightly better at pretty much everything.
Inevitably, the presence of Booker (not to mention Durant) will push Beal into something he hasn’t been in a long time, a mostly off-ball spacer who may be looking at a Chris Bosh-to-Miami type decline in his touches. There is only one basketball; the math won’t allow for anything else.
The upside hope is that Beal’s shot profile becomes dramatically more 3-heavy, and more accurate, in Phoenix. It’s not a pipe dream, not when Beal was so reliant on self-created shots in Washington and had much higher 3-point percentages when he had prime John Wall as a set-up man. But it’s not a given, either, and the Suns certainly didn’t address a weakness here.
The Suns will trot out lineups with both Beal and Booker starting, naturally, but that either forces Booker to be a full-time point guard or one of those two to be a full-time wing stopper. LOL on the second one, so look for the Suns to bring back
Torrey Craig or look for cheap wing defenders elsewhere to fortify the rotation.
This takes us to the other big-picture takeaway from the Beal trade. Phoenix used perhaps its last realistic trade chip to take a step back defensively and add another offensive player … a perfectly natural reaction to losing a second-round playoff series where the other team averaged 1.22 points per possession and its best player scored 34.5 points per game on 59 percent shooting.
One of the columns I never quite got around to pushing out during the NBA Finals was how, at some level, it was difficult to imitate the
Nuggets’ model of success given how idiosyncratic a player
Nikola Jokić is. However, the one thing I thought teams would
surely copy was the Nuggets’ model of arming themselves with a slew of big wing defenders and essentially taking away opponents’ ability to hunt mismatches along the perimeter.
Especially for a team like Phoenix, which lacked an elite rim protector or pick-and-roll switch specialist, this seemed like the surest way to guarantee decent-to-good defensive outcomes.
Well, the Suns started out with that model and then burned it to the ground to get Durant and Beal. While they didn’t lose any wing defenders in this trade, they lost their ability to add any, which seems just as bad given how asset-starved they are. You wonder if trading Paul for two half-decent wings making $15 million each would have ended up with a better final product for the Suns. (The Suns did at least salvage some cheap production by getting Goodwin in the trade, a rotation-caliber player on a minimum contract.)
There still is a chance for Phoenix to salvage its cap sheet by making a similar one-for-two type move with center
Deandre Ayton. However, the odds of that seem slim unless he has a breakout year, as the league doesn’t place a huge value on centers in general and in particular on centers making $30 million a year. It’s hard to see that changing with this trade likely to result in Ayton touching the ball, what, four times a game?
In perhaps the ultimate irony, a Suns team that for years suffered under one of the league’s cheapest owners will now be penalized for the profligacy of the new one. In the absence of a dramatic Ayton transaction this offseason, the Suns are looking at being into the second tax apron for at least the next three years, resulting in a “jailed” future draft pick situation and virtually no flexibility to add players beyond minimum contracts.
