Can The Suns Be Great With Bradley Beal?
Can The Suns Be Great With Bradley Beal?
The ex-Wizard needs to shake his "good stats, bad team" reputation.
A lot of folks online have been killing the Washington Wizards for getting so little in return for the trade that sent Bradley Beal to the Phoenix Suns, and it’s definitely a bitter pill to swallow whenever a team trades away a franchise face for pennies on the dollar. As Ben Golliver of the Washington Post points out, though, the Wizards had barely any leverage because of the full no-trade clause they put in Beal’s contract — and, as Marc Stein noted before the trade, they also had urgency to get a deal done ahead of the draft to have more flexibility heading into what looks like a full-scale rebuild.
Anyway, that’s enough about Washington. I’m far more interested in Beal’s new team via this trade, because the Phoenix Suns have been kind of a fascinating trainwreck ever since they got blown out at home by Dallas in that Game 7 last postseason. A team that had a perennial Coach of the Year candidate (Monty Williams), a tremendous lead scorer (Devin Booker) and plenty of interesting, young supporting talent decided to mortgage some of that base in a deal for Kevin Durant, then lost to the eventual-champion Denver Nuggets in another humiliating elimination-game loss at home, fired Williams and now have traded for Beal’s contract, which is generally regarded among the worst in the NBA and doesn’t expire until after he almost certainly picks up his $57 million (yes that’s right) player option for the 2026-27 season.
And yet, the Suns remain among the favorites to win the 2023-24 NBA title — a placement that’s hard to argue against on pure talent, at least. Beal averaged more than 30 points per game as recently as two seasons ago, and poured in 23.2 a night last season when he was healthy. The guy is elite at the most elemental aspect of basketball, which is putting the ball in the hoop. It’s just a question as to whether the rest of his game is good enough to be what the Suns need to make a deep playoff run, or if his empty-calorie numbers on a bad Wizards team these past few years make him an overrated addition for a team with big championship aspirations.
Beal has been a player that made his teams significantly better at times. Hard as it is to remember after 5 straight years of Washington finishing with between 25 and 35 wins, the Wizards were nearly a 50-win team in 2016-17 with Beal, John Wall and Otto Porter Jr. leading the way. You could say that few cores from that era have aged worse over the intervening years, and I wouldn’t argue. But the Wizards also came within a Game 7 of going to the Eastern Conference finals that season. They were a +5.7 points/100 possessions team with Beal on the court, a mark that was 12.3 points/100 higher than when Beal was on the bench. His ability to create tons of good shots inside the arc and out, while holding his own defensively on the wing, made the then-23-year-old a rising star.
It’s been hard to find that same fit in the years since, mostly because the roster around Beal in Washington deteriorated. Beal himself has played to a version of that 2016-17 form most of those seasons, albeit with varying levels of health, but his team has been negative with him on the court all but one year since 2018-19 (oddly enough, the exception was 2022-23) despite him consistently elevating their play most years.
A team like the Suns needs something different: a player who can elevate a star-laden core, adapting his game to whatever role the team needs.
Beal’s scoring won’t be as necessary with Durant and Booker — both of whom averaged more points per 100 possessions — taking on the bulk of the scoring load when they share the court together. (And that’s without even considering Deandre Ayton, who may or may not be a Sun next season but scored 28.9 points/100 as well last year.) Perhaps you can make the argument that Phoenix torpedoed so much of its depth from the 2021 Finals squad that they will actually need to stagger Beal’s minutes often just to make sure there’s scoring on the court with the second unit. But more likely, Beal will need to shed the best-player-on-a-bad-team mode he’s been in for years.
The bad news is that most — though not all — of the players like Beal failed to make a heavy postseason dent over the course of their careers. Using the percentile-based similarity method I spoke of on this podcast (the wonderful Pod Of Fame with my friend
), the most similar players to Beal with at least 10 NBA seasons played were:Otis Birdsong - 35 career playoff games. Made 1 conference final (1981).
Walter Davis - 78 career playoff games. Made 3 conference finals, 2 as a starter (played 8.5 MPG for the 1991 Blazers).
Mitch Richmond - 23 career playoff games. Made 0 conference finals as a rotation player (played only 2 games for the 2002 champion Lakers).
Kemba Walker - 31 career playoff games. Made 1 conference final (2020).
Jason Richardson - 37 career playoff games. Made 1 conference final (2010).
For most of these guys, the formula of being a high-usage guard with middling efficiency, moderate assists, subpar defense and no rebounding failed to translate to much in the way of postseason success. (Richmond, for example, spent a decade averaging 22 PPG on terrible Kings and Wizards teams with exactly 1 playoff win to show for it.) This isn’t overly surprising, either; just off of pure anecdotal experience, Beal’s archetype seems to need a more specific set of supporting players to maximize efficiency in a lineup than other archetypes.
And speaking of supporting casts, there’s the age-old question of whether Beal even levels up the Suns’ star power enough to win a championship anyway.
My old boss Nate Silver had a great exploration of this concept once upon a time, looking at the history of championship teams based on how good their stars were according to what he called “Consensus Plus-Minus” (or CPM) — a mix of the various different advanced-value systems floating about in the NBA ether. For the purposes of this story, and because the fate of our beloved RAPTOR is unknown at the moment1, I have recreated a version of CPM (which subscribers can find data on here) to use for this and other projects over the summer.
Beal had a +2.2 CPM last season, which would make him the third-best player on the Suns’ depth chart — behind Durant (+5.8) and Booker (+4.7) — and ahead of Josh Okogie (+1.6). (Ayton is fifth at -0.7; the advanced metrics didn’t really love him last year, due in large part to his horrible on/off plus/minus.) Is that mix of talent usually good enough to win an NBA title? Here’s a comparison between CPMs for the Suns’ Top 4 players and the historical distribution for the Top 4 players on the average and 25th-percentile NBA champion since 1977:
While Beal is much closer to the bottom tier of third bananas on a championship team than the average, he’s not the biggest thing separating the Suns from matching the cores of past champs here. Perhaps surprisingly, Durant’s CPM was actually worse than the 25th-percentile championship No. 1 last year, mostly weighed down by the +5.5 mark he produced in Brooklyn before elevating to a +6.9 in 8 games with Phoenix. That post-trade CPM is exactly in line with the average champion’s leader, but it’s a much smaller sample for a guy who’ll be 35 next year and struggles to stay healthy.
The rest of Phoenix’s core looks championship-ready, provided Okogie returns. (If not, Ayton would carry a cap hit of $32.5 million while sitting well below the worst No. 4 on any modern title team — that honor belonging to John Paxson of the 1991 Bulls.) As a matter of fact, Booker would be much better than the average No. 2 on a champion, and would even beat out five No. 1s.
All of this might undersell the Suns, too, as Beal was capable of a +3.4 CPM — a borderline No. 2 performance for a championship team — as recently as the 2020-21 season. And Beal’s true value could emerge in a new situation with a different role, something we’ve seen plenty of times when a player finds a better fit and more motivation.
But whatever happens, this is may be one of the final bets on a superteam model that could be on its last legs, between recent high-profile flops and a new CBA aimed at dissuading owners from going far above the luxury-tax threshold. So the Suns had better hope Beal can deliver on his talented reputation before time runs out on this new Big 3 in the desert.
Filed under: NBA
I’m not saying I know anything about it either way. I just know it is in the hands of groups I am no longer connected to, with no one on board to actively manage it at the moment. Perhaps that will change!