Suns’ bench sparks rout of Clippers behind 22 3-pointers

PHOENIX — Hot shooting and a tidal wave from the bench got the Phoenix Suns back on track Tuesday with a 133-108 win over the Los Angeles Clippers.

By the midway point of the third quarter, the Suns were a scorching 17-of-31 (55%) from 3-point range and up 30. A handful of those were off the dribble and decently contested. It was their night.

On the other end, Phoenix (4-6) did a solid job of cutting off sources of creation for L.A. (2-8) beyond point guard Darius Garland. Garland had his moments breaking down the defense, but no one else was really able to get the gears spinning to force the Suns into multiple recovery situations as a team defense. That was aided by a good defensive rebounding performance, with the Clippers starters only amounting to one offensive rebound after Phoenix entered the night last in that overall category.

While there were a few breakdowns here and there, along with low totals in the defensive playmaking of four steals and one block, it was nothing detrimental enough to allow the Clippers to find momentum.

“The pressure,” Devin Booker said of what he liked the most from the defense. “Upping the pressure, just following the gameplan and doing what we talked about, as simple as it sounds.”

There wasn’t a ton of life to the start of this game but the Suns were lit by a spark from the bench, before the second half got out of hand.

After Phoenix managed only one assist in the first 6.5 minutes, the bench erupted, scoring 36 of its 81 points in the first half, making up for 10 of the Suns’ 11 3s in the half. The returning Jordan Goodwin had five of them.

“He always knows the right spacing to be in, he makes teams pay for overcrowding and he had some pretty good looks at it and he knocked ’em down,” Devin Booker said of Goodwin.

The starters found a bit more success to begin the second half, and once the pull-up 3s started dropping for Booker and Jalen Green, that was all she wrote.

Booker was 6-of-14 for 17 points with three rebounds, five assists and four turnovers. Green added 13 on 5-of-7 shooting with five rebounds, one assist and three turnovers.

Goodwin finished with 18 points and Collin Gillespie added a dozen with eight assists and a turnover while it was 14 points for Luke Kennard.

This was the Suns’ first game of the season against an opponent you’d safely assume is in the bottom-10 of the standings. While that portion of the league will look a little different without as much tanking, bad teams are still bad. And the Suns smoked bad teams last year.

They were 23-4 against the bottom-10 squads, a .852 wining percentage that was the fifth-best in the NBA. And Phoenix has the benefit of sharing a division with two of them. They get the Sacramento Kings on the schedule four times, just like the Clippers.

As long as the Suns take care of these types of squads while, as Booker put it on Saturday, they get through the “figuring-it-out stage,” they’ll be A-OK.

Brandon Ingram (right heel surgery), Yanic Konan Niederhauser (right Lisfranc surgery), Bradley Beal (right knee injury management) and Jordan Miller (left rotator cuff surgery) were out for the Clippers. They’ve got an intriguing roster on paper full of useful players but you can see the lack of belief in themselves as a unit, or desire to get through their own “figuring-it-out stage.”

Suns’ Devin Booker climbing up scoring list

Booker passed Julius Erving on the all-time scoring leaderboard, with 18,371 points now placing him 79th. Next up just 10 points away is Tracy McGrady. Pretty crazy stuff considering he just turned 30 years old and he’s passing names like that.

“Wow. It’s an honor,” Booker said. “Obviously those are two guys I have a high respect for, legends of the game. I don’t know what to say. I want to keep going and it’s something I can look back on once I’m out of the league and appreciate but for now I just want to keep building.”

By moving ahead of Erving, Booker is now 12th when you condense the list to one-franchise players.

“I think it’s going to become more rare and rare as the years go by, so to be homegrown here as an 18-year-old kid and being able to put the organization back on the map and now we’re working to get it back there again,” Booker said. “It’s a journey that I enjoy and I love.”

The next five ranked ahead of him on that list are Isiah Thomas (18,822), John Stockton (19,711), David Robinson (20,790), Larry Bird (21,791) and Jerry West (25,192). The last six are Reggie Miller (25,279), John Havlicek (26,395), Tim Duncan (26,496), Stephen Curry (26,803), Dirk Nowitzki (31,560) and Kobe Bryant (33,643).

A pace of 25 points per game and 60 games a season for the next five years would have him on the edge of the top-five and 26K. Depending on how much longer Curry goes, that’s not far off from the top-3 on that list and top-25 overall.

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