Suns enter another season with title upside, question of if it can be reached

PHOENIX — “Maximize” is your word of the season, Phoenix Suns fans.

New head coach Mike Budenholzer even said it during media day on Monday after the thought over here had come up.

“I’m excited about the talent, the skills that they bring to the table and trying to maximize them,” Budenholzer said of his team.

The roster has championship upside. And this is not reliant on Player X or Y breaking out via significant individual growth. If the Suns get median level contributions from their guys with the reasonable expectations coming into the season, they’ll be in good shape to have the capability of beating anyone in April, May and June.

It’s all about how the pieces fit together and mesh with an identifiable style of play that properly suits them. If the Suns get the most out of this by maximizing it, they will win a championship.

The issue for the Suns is they were nowhere in the stratosphere of doing so last season, as an at times ugly brand of basketball to watch predictably brought on a woeful end to the season.

The hope for the Suns is they use that failure as an example of a level to come nowhere close to reaching again.

Devin Booker, as always, is on it when it comes to the proper mindset.

“I think going out in the fashion that we did is something that you don’t want to just blow by and act like it never happened,” he said. “Something that we have to accept and use as motivation. I always say experience is the best teacher and when [we] have that terrible experience under our belt, [we] use it as motivation from here on out.”

More of the optimism sprouts from the fact that they brought just about everyone back. That continuity plus a new coaching staff will get this group much closer to its ceiling, a ceiling that wasn’t even in eye distance at any point of the 2023-24 campaign.

This should be the season when we really see Booker and Kevin Durant complement each other in a way that makes the other better. That process has never really gotten going previously. A lot of that comes down to, again, synchronizing first with the team’s identity once it is established before that evolves.

Media day is a tricky time of the season. You’ll hear plenty of aspirations and goals stated you won’t see fulfilled. There was plenty of talk from last year’s Suns about playing faster and getting up more 3s. As expected, that was a theme on Monday. Based on how last year went under Frank Vogel, the easiest way for that to actually happen this season is a proper connection between the top players and the coach.

Booker said the right things.

“I’m rallying behind him. … He wants to lead and we want to follow,” he said of Budenholzer.

Phoenix is a deep team. Well, in terms of the overall talent. Tyus Jones and Monte Morris form a strong game-manager duo at point guard. The depth of shooting and energy surrounding those two and Booker includes Grayson Allen and Royce O’Neale. It’s hard to get a read on what exactly Bradley Beal’s role will be but he will factor into that collective while flexing his 30-point-per-game muscles occasionally as well.

What Beal had to say was the primary takeaway on Monday. He sounds completely refreshed, and at the same time, incredibly eager to get back to a positive basketball experience. We know what it was like to watch this group play last year. Imagine what it was like inside of that.

Given how Beal had to assimilate to a new team and city for the first time while also going through injuries that kept resetting his progress of building cohesion on the floor, he is undoubtedly the player most ready to move on from last season. His wife asked him what his goals were this year, and he told her he is simply focused on having fun. That might sound cliche, but after all he has been through the previous couple of years, it’s the correct approach.

“I never really got my feet planted correctly and got to run with the team,” Beal said. “I always felt like I was playing catch-up and that whole process was frustrating. … In that, I’m kinda lost, right? I want to prove myself, I want to prove there’s a reason they traded for me.”

Beal went as far as using the term “ideology” for how the Suns went about course-correcting the roster with traditional point guards. While it puts Beal’s standing in a somewhat awkward position given he’s the third banana beyond the point guard, making him effectively the fourth option on the ball, he sounded stoked by the changes after so much of last year was predicated on how he and Booker worked as a backcourt.

“I can definitely go back to being the Brad we all have hoped,” Beal said.

Booker, Beal, Allen, O’Neale, Jones and Morris makes it six guys who deserve real minutes and four that ideally receive at least 30. Because all of them are under 6-foot-7, that is not going to happen. The juggling act for Budenholzer of those six will be a huge factor in the maximizing.

Turning that into a serious strength of the team to overcome the lack of a natural wing beyond Durant is pivotal, unless first-round pick Ryan Dunn surprises with an offensive game that is NBA ready. That will leave the door open for fellow guard-sized wing Josh Okogie, big-sized wing Bol Bol or “just get the shooter out there” wing Damion Lee to sneak in and snag the final rotation spot.

Jusuf Nurkic, Mason Plumlee and Oso Ighodaro is a center rotation with enough “do your job” gusto to hold up. If all three succeed within the smaller areas of the game they are asked to focus on the most, that’s good enough.

The weaknesses are, of course, there across this team. They can be exploited. But the strengths are strong enough to not only overcome that but be powerful enough to take down anyone else at its full capacity.

What capacity will this team be operating at in six months?

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