Suns outmatched by Celtics in loss on road

Ain’t much to it when you’re a bad team, you don’t have Kevin Durant (left ankle sprain) and you’re playing the now-57-20 Boston Celtics on the road.

The Phoenix Suns lost on Friday afternoon 123-103.

Across the first 10 minutes, the Suns were able to keep this around a one-possession game before Boston ended the opening quarter on an 8-0 run to lead by nine. The advantage quickly grew to 20 a few minutes later. Phoenix got up enough 3s to match the Celtics in what they do and limited turnovers to prevent a blowout from developing, but never got the deficit down to single digits in a way that would have made Boston press beyond cruise control.

So in a way, it was a blowout.

Devin Booker led the way with 37 points on 15-of-29 shooting with five rebounds, six assists and two turnovers.

He did not get much help.

Bradley Beal returned for the Suns after an eight-game absence due to a left hamstring strain. He very much looked the part of someone who had missed over three weeks as a team’s season continued to spiral. His energy, especially defensively, was solid. But on offense, he had zero rhythm and finished 0-for-7 from the field with one point, four rebounds, five assists, three steals and a block in 30 minutes.

With Beal back, the Suns started him alongside Booker, Ryan Dunn, Royce O’Neale and Oso Ighodaro. That moved Collin Gillespie to the bench, where he played 13 minutes, while Ighodaro starting over Nick Richards was likely matchup-based after how much Richards struggled on defense against Boston in Phoenix a week prior.

Boston stifled a lot of Phoenix’s offense by playing off certain players to clog up space elsewhere, most notably Ighodaro.

At this stage, Ighodaro scores on open attempts at the rim and floaters. He is not one to attack the basket with someone occupying it, nor will he take a jumper. That makes it easy to help off him as a big, and those floaters are the types of shots great defenses are OK with giving up anyway. If Ighodaro wants to grow into a starting-caliber center, some type of development to change his ability to score will have to come.

This limited Phoenix to just 26 points early in the second quarter, a point at which the Celtics would lead by 20. The Suns missed nine of their first 10 shots from 5-14 feet over that span, per Cleaning the Glass.

Ighodaro, to his credit, was knocking those shots down and scored 12 points in 32 minutes.

Boston’s Jaylen Brown had 31 points in 28 minutes while Jayson Tatum added 23 points, eight rebounds and eight assists.

The loss now has Phoenix at a 35-42 record, two back in the loss column of the 10th-seeded Sacramento Kings (37-40), who won in Charlotte on Friday after a disastrous loss to the Washington Wizards on Wednesday. The Dallas Mavericks (38-39) were in action on Friday evening, and with them getting much healthier, look poised to solidify the No. 9 slot.

The Suns just need to be within one game of the Kings for the season finale on April 13 in Sacramento. The tiebreaker dynamics work out to where if Phoenix just wins that game, it will win the tiebreaker. The Kings have just as difficult of a schedule left in the season’s remaining nine days as the Suns, with the question of which contenders choose to deploy rest that will swing how tough those contests are.

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