Devin Booker’s largest challenge of career comes this season

PHOENIX — “We’re just going to have to see.”

That was Devin Booker’s answer to the biggest question of the Phoenix Suns season, all with a pause before that was later followed by a smile, a smile indicating that’s the best he’s got right now until the ball goes up in the air on Oct. 21.

Booker will start that season opener in Portland with Miles Bridges, Dillon Brooks and Jalen Green, three players that contribute the best offensively as a scorer first. Booker, one of the league’s best scorers over the past decade, will likely be tasked with channeling the best of his playmaking skills, skills that are advanced but still not utilized in a way that has him at his best. Brooks is not a playmaker, while Bridges and Green are hit-and-miss in that regard, so that calls upon Booker to be the orchestrator of the show.

Ever since he arrived in the Valley 11 years ago, Booker has always said he is going to make the right play. You’ve heard him say it a whole lot by now. With all of those pieces together, how does he still remain an elite scorer with all the playmaking responsibilities he is going to have?

“We’re just going to have to see.”

This now becomes the largest challenge of Booker’s career. Last year was in a lot of ways too, the first time where he was definitively the top dog on the team and its unquestioned leader. But he takes that on again this year, plus an on-court dynamic that is simply only going to work if he can do his best Steve Nash impression of maximizing his teammates to make everyone better.

Booker is not Nash. No one is. But even if he accomplishes some version of that, how is he maximizing himself in the process?

It was well documented how Booker attempted 15.8 shots per game in the first-round sweep against the Oklahoma City Thunder, a figure that ranked third on the team and a whole five attempts less than Green and Brooks.

In theory, when it comes to what a defense is trying to take away at the expense of leaving something else open, Booker was making the right play. That theory, though, is not perfect. Sometimes, the right play is Booker shooting the damn ball, and it certainly is the right play to have him taking the most shots in a playoff series.

Wednesday was the second day of training camp, and after plenty of questions about it last year plus a few more already during the week, head coach Jordan Ott grew frustrated at an ask of Booker’s scoring aggression and if he wants to see more of it.

“I’m not going to go down that path,” Ott said. “If you continue to ask me — if the ball is going to be in his hands, he’s going to playmake. If there’s two on the ball, he can’t shoot. It’s really hard to shoot with two or three guys on you.”

When it comes to what it means to “maximize” Booker, here’s what Ott said.

“Everything, everything we do we gotta emphasize to get the superpowers out of your group,” he said. “When we’re on offense, your star player has a bunch of superpowers that you try to bring out. At times, he’ll be our primary playmaker bringing it across. At times, we’ll run him off an action to get him the ball. It continues to go back to how we can create an advantage. Ideally you don’t need any advantage because you have it from the time you get the ball, but when the defense is set in 5-on-5, you need something to start it.”

Booker has had to adapt like this in the past, most notably with his previous trio alongside Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal, a pair that had far more playmaking pop to it than this one.

He was asked what he has learned when it comes to setting up scorers and himself at the same time.

“It’s a balance that changes game to game,” Booker said. “I said at media day I want to shoot more, but if they continue throwing three people at you then you have to get off it. I just said that from a mindset standpoint. I want to assert myself by scoring the ball more and that’s obviously going to open up easier opportunities for my teammates.”

Immediate issues that will spawn in that go beyond that. This quartet has no shooting.

Since 2018, there have been 104 players to take at least 2,000 3-pointers over that time. Bridges’ three-point percentage is 97th (33.8%) out of those 104 players. Green’s is 95th (33.9%), Booker’s is 91st (34.8%) and Brooks’ is 85th (35.3%). The catch-and-shoot numbers for all four have at times been reliable, particularly Booker’s, but the off-the-dribble woes will give defenses so much breathing room when it comes to how lax they can take it on the perimeter.

The sport is still in many ways a pick-and-roll ballgame, so the most common action in the league will let the opposing perimeter defender go under screens and for opposing anchoring bigs to play comfortably further back in the paint. And if teams want to keep trapping Booker, the rotations are easier when the defense isn’t worried about leaving a shooter in the corner.

This sounds like a simple, unsolvable problem. But it is. Ott will figure out counters, and then he’s going to need counters to the league’s counters for his counters. That is how every season works for every offense, no matter its strengths and weaknesses.

One hint to drop at the start of camp so far was Ott saying Green will be on the ball more. Booker being at his best with Chris Paul and Ricky Rubio doesn’t have as much to do with his inability to do what they do when it comes to putting pressure on defenses. It’s that it frees him up to play off the ball, working through all the intricate off-ball movement his idol Rip Hamilton perfected that Booker is no slouch at, either.

We are five years into Green’s career and have a pretty good idea that splitting floor general duties is asking too much out of him with his inconsistent decision-making. Ironically, Green has been working with Nash of all people in the summer, focusing on some of those pressure points where Green has to make the right read (and sooner).

An optimistic spin on how the dynamics worked last year was the circumstances gave Booker an opportunity to work with each of Green and Brooks as a pair.

“Yeah that’s true, you get to learn a lot like that, but having the trifecta out there is even better,” he said.

The returns last year were bad.

Prior to Green’s first of a few scattered returns from injury, the numbers weren’t all that great when Booker was paired with Brooks. Up to Jan. 19 across 929 minutes in 33 games (the Suns were 22-11 in), the Suns outscored teams by a mere 2.2 points per 100 possessions when their two best players shared the floor, per NBA Stats.

When Brooks got hurt and Green was back in business, a 15-game sample size for Booker and Green yielded a 2.8 net rating. Like the Brooks number, it could be worse, but when your two top offensive threats share the floor as a 45-win team, it should be much better.

And for the brief five regular season games the trio got together at the end of the year, it was a -0.6 net rating. It would not be fair to use the postseason figures against Oklahoma City.

Bridges’ arrival only complicates this further. He is more well-rounded than Brooks and Green, a capable dribbler and driver, but not to a point where this balancing act will be aided by his presence.

The timing of all this in the context of Booker’s career is strange. This is Year 12. Four years ago, he ascended from the murky mix outside the top-10 hierarchy of the game’s best to definitively inside it. Three years ago, he certified that even further while showing signs over a blistering postseason that he had a superstar leap still left to take.

Then the next three years happened, and if Booker’s play has gone in any direction, it’s backwards. A year of it was easy to blame on extenuating factors. Two years of it was an eyebrow raise but an ask of the trust he developed through a whole decade. Three years of it took away that trust, and now has Booker in a position where he has to prove if his best is in fact not behind him (all at just the soon age of 30).

This upcoming year will tell us what the latest chapter is, either with a trend continuing or a far more enjoyable resurgence as we firmly enter the back-nine of Booker’s career.

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