Analyst: Suns Have Most Red Flags

The Phoenix Suns have some things to figure out.

Nov 20, 2024; Phoenix, Arizona, USA; Phoenix Suns head coach Mike Budenholzer yells a referee during the fourth quarter of the game against the New York Knicks at Footprint Center. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images / Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

PHOENIX -- Man, has the Phoenix Suns' season turned quickly.

Such is life when two star players in Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal have both missed numerous games due to injury in the early stages of the 2024-25 season. What was once a 9-2 start for the Suns has now crumbled to a 9-7 current record.

Devin Booker's struggled on and off without his co-stars while role players haven't quite been able to fill bigger shoes under the first-year guidance of Mike Budenholzer.

“There's always going to be a couple plays where you're frustrated, but you know the group is good. I think overall, the competitive spirit, the things that we've leaned on, while we can always be better, we got a group that's competitive. We got a group that will stay together, it's the things that we talk about," said Budenholzer after Phoenix's fifth straight loss.

"Losing is hard, this league is hard, so we got to fight through it. We got to compete our way through it, but while there's things that  we need to work on and improve on, the competitiveness of our group has been in a good place when we were  winning. I would still say the same thing right now, while we're struggling, that the guys know how important competing is.”

Things simply are not going to plan for the Suns at the moment, and Bleacher Report's Grant Hughes says Phoenix has the most red flags out of any top team.

"This isn't so much an outright lack of faith in the Phoenix Suns as it is a statement that, among the teams with the best records in the early going, they're the one with the most red flags," wrote Hughes.

"Start with a negative point differential that says the Suns should have closer to seven wins, not nine, through their first 15 games. As you might suspect, Phoenix's tremendous play in the clutch has a lot to do with its success in the standings. The Suns have a 7-2 mark in clutch games and a plus-14.2 net rating in the last five minutes when the score is within five points. For a reminder of just how fickle and unsustainable clutch stats can be, note that these same Suns posted a minus-5.5 net rating in the clutch and were one of the very worst fourth-quarter teams in the league a year ago.

"Kevin Durant looked like a top-five MVP candidate and led the league in minutes per game right up until suffering a calf strain, and Phoenix gets outscored by 4.7 points per 100 possessions when he's off the floor. Any squad that needs its 36-year-old superstar to grind out such massive minute totals is flimsier than it looks.

"Phoenix should still be considered a playoff threat, but it won't hang around the West's elite for long."

It's still fairly early in the season, so it's hard to make judgements about the Suns - especially considering how strong they looked when all players were healthy.

Yet that was a major factor that held last year's rendition of the squad back - health. It felt like Phoenix's core players never got enough run time together in the regular season, and their untimely exit in the postseason proved that to be true to extents.

The regular season is still young, though we've seen massively different sides of what this Suns team can become.