Suns cannot afford to miss out on valuable playoff lessons

The Bubble Suns have a special place in Phoenix history. They were also granted a gift that very few recognized in real time.

By just missing out on the playoffs in a bio-secure facility at Disney World, the Bubble Suns departed Orlando with an 8-0 record. Their legacy and purity were untainted by defeat. They posted the longest winning streak we had seen in a decade. We were spared the embarrassment of a superior opponent exposing their warts and flaws in the post-COVID postseason.

In the end, nothing could ruin the magic or mythology of their collective experience, allowing the team to lure Chris Paul and surge to the NBA Finals in the following season.

The 2025-26 Suns are a different story.

With 45 wins, the current Suns are clearly one of the best success stories in an otherwise atrocious NBA regular season. They blew away expectations and massacred the dismal national narrative. Just like the Bubble Suns, they laid down a runway for better things to come.

Except the current Suns are no longer playing with house money. They host the Trail Blazers Tuesday at Mortgage Matchup Center. If they lose, they get another chance against a different team on Friday. They have two home games to punch a ticket to the NBA playoffs, and if they fail, the disappointment will be profound. The stigma will be real. Despite shattering the preseason over/under for victories (30.5), their breakthrough season will be broken. The season will be recast as failure, a collapse, a cruel tease.

Bottom line: the Suns badly need to survive and advance from the play-in tournament. They need the maturation and growth factors that come with a best-of-seven playoff series, where matchups and post-game adjustments test a team’s range, resilience and acumen; where the sport grinds to a halt, the physicality increases dramatically and the referees are prone to swallow their whistles.

The Suns are a team that has grown somewhat fragile over the past two months. Dillon Brooks has been a fabulous addition, but his volatility comes with red flags. Devin Booker is among the best players in franchise history and yet he too easily gets derailed by officials and whistles he does not receive. The heat of the postseason will test them both.

If the Suns beat the Blazers, they’ll face the 62-win Spurs in the postseason. If they need a second opportunity to advance, they’ll encounter the 64-win Thunder. In either series, they will be hard-pressed to win a single game.

That said, the Suns excelled at punching up over the first three months of the regular season. They were 28-15 from November to the end of January. In an essay for The Players’ Tribune, Brooks compared the Suns to the monster under your bed, the team that made you stare at your shoelaces, the team nobody wanted to play.

It was true for a while, and not so much over the past two months. But that’s not the point.

This is what matters:

By facing one of the Western Conference’s best teams in a playoff series, the Suns will learn very quickly where they are most vulnerable, what they need to fix and who they need to acquire entering the 2026-27 season. It will provide great information in their ongoing evaluation/negotiations with center Mark Williams, illuminating his importance to the team moving forward. It will be a chance for Jalen Green to wash away his dreadful postseason performance with the Rockets a year ago. It will be an invaluable learning experience for the youngest players on the roster, to experience what it feels like when trying to climb a perilous ladder in the NBA playoffs.

It’s ironic how the Bubble Suns came away unscathed in 2020 despite missing the playoffs while the team that won the championship (the Lakers) were slapped with an asterisk for the bizarre conditions and the 141-day layoff due to COVID. The Suns won’t be so lucky in 2026.

They are a team that was left for dead, a team that shocked the basketball world by posting a winning record despite all the doom and gloom. Now they need one more victory to seal the deal. Or they risk ruining one of the most surprising regular seasons we’ve ever witnessed.

Reach Bickley at dbickley@arizonasports.com. Listen to Bickley & Marotta weekdays from 6 a.m. – 10 a.m. on Arizona Sports 98.7.

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