Will Suns admit failure or keep pushing with Jimmy Butler?

A real thing that has happened in the last 24 hours in Phoenix Suns land is that Bradley Beal told reporters he holds “the cards,” referring to his no-trade clause, all while ESPN’s Brain Windhorst goes on the most watched daily sports programming to declare Phoenix is “absolutely” trying to trade Beal and says his benching is an attempt to displease the guard enough to waive that no-trade clause.

This is happening! In the middle of a basketball season! The likely blaze of glory end to this era of Suns basketball that only makes the flames feel closer and closer!

The cause and effect here is Jimmy Butler’s availability. The Miami Heat star wants to get paid and thus, shenanigans have ensued.

He’s asked for a trade and Miami has suspended him in an ugly public exit. With how much time the league has had to survey this over the last few weeks, Phoenix is the only team that wants to pay Butler what he wants, per Windhorst.

The issue with a Butler trade is finding a team crazy enough to call one last Hail Mary that Butler is also OK with re-signing for. Arizona Sports’ John Gambadoro reported on Monday that the Memphis Grizzlies and Milwaukee Bucks are having discussions to trade for Butler. A day later, Chris Haynes reports Butler doesn’t want to go Memphis and The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor reports Milwaukee is believed to be another team that got a no-go from Butler.

Which takes us back to the Suns, who Sports Illustrated’s Chris Mannix reports are the team all of Butler’s desires come back to. Which, you know, makes sense. Because like Windhorst said, the Suns will give him the money he wants.

Uh, why?

Swatting away this initial news like a fly was easy enough because Beal was never going to waive his no-trade clause for the majority of other leaguewide situations, and more importantly, no team would be willing to take on the remaining two-and-a-half seasons of his contract.

Unless they are incentivized.

But when linking together pieces of reporting, it’s clear the Suns want to keep this ride going. Again, as to why, I have no idea.

This team built around Devin Booker and Kevin Durant has not worked. A new head coach and system with point guards plus a far better supporting cast has actually yielded worse results than last season. Depending on your perspective, we are either within sight of a conclusion that this just isn’t going to work out, are about to cross that finish line or already have.

Butler is not going to fix it. As someone who is a big-time fan of the player Butler is, adding the crash-and-burn pattern of his history to this current Suns situation would be like deep frying an atomic bomb in volcanic acid. He also turns 36 before next season and hasn’t played over 65 games in eight seasons.

But it looks like Phoenix doesn’t want to give up on this.

So how would it do so? Going along with Windhorst’s reporting that the primary motivation with the lineup change was to get Beal to waive his no-trade clause, let’s dilly-dally off into the speculation zone and say that works.

Beal would go to Detroit, or more accurately, a team going nowhere anytime soon that would be motivated to eat long-term money for assets.

Now the price really comes forward, both for Butler and getting off Beal. Because Miami has motivation from a roster flexibility perspective to just let Butler walk. New NBA mechanics and trends will always find a way to make something much more valuable than it once was. Protected picks made unprotected picks all the craze. Now the aprons have made roster flexibility, something very few teams have right now, all the craze.

It’s the 2031 unprotected first-round pick. It’s all the second-round picks left, three of them. It probably can’t stop there. Oh, look at how well rookies Ryan Dunn and Oso Ighodaro are playing. Yep, maybe one of them gets thrown in. Whatever Phoenix can scrap together, it would have to include. Maybe it goes as far as Grayson Allen or Royce O’Neale getting in a three- or four-team deal.

All of this is before getting to a detail you keep forgetting about. The heavy second apron restrictions are coming.

If Suns owner Mat Ishbia is indeed bold enough to extend both Butler and Durant, the latter of which Gambadoro has reported both parties were interested in at the time of negotiations last August, that means we are about to enter the territory of first-round picks getting frozen. Those picks then get moved back to the end of the first round. They can get unfrozen in other ways, but that creates more problems!

And that’s why all of this simply might come down to Ishbia admitting that he was wrong. Admitting that these headline-grabbing moves in his heroic entrance to ownership is not the fairytale ending that is destined to follow. Admitting that being the contrarians with the second apron was ill-advised.

Assuming we are not getting a nine-run comeback in the bottom of the ninth here from this current Suns team, all of that would come with either retooling or rebuilding the roster by the start of next season. Ishbia has already done a lot right for this franchise, as fans with a handful of two-dollar dogs have attested to. But this has suddenly turned into a fascinating moment to see the means he is willing to go to.

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