PHOENIX — The only way you have seen him is if you’ve kept watching while most have turned off the game.
No. 10 overall pick Khaman Maluach has logged 107 minutes as the Phoenix Suns head into the All-Star break 55 games into the season, all of which have occurred during garbage time. The nonexistence of his role is trending toward rare company, and it is concerning company to join.
But first, this could very well be just a unique circumstance based on a few different factors. And before we even get to those, this is in no way calling Maluach a bust or predicting him to be one.
That would be foolish and ridiculous to do before we see him in real minutes for a substantial amount of time. His lack of inclusion is just quite notable considering how vital he is to the Suns’ long-term prospects.
What is holding Khaman Maluach up?
To start, no one evaluating the 19-year-old Maluach in the draft expected him to come into training camp ready for serious NBA minutes. He grew up a soccer player and didn’t begin playing basketball until 2019.
Sometimes, prospects can overcome that lack of experience, but you see it with how Maluach moves around the floor. Even in settings like summer league and preseason that lack much cohesive structure, you saw it.
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Secondly, there have been slim openings for him to play. Mark Williams’ injury woes have subsided, while Oso Ighodaro has cemented himself as one of the better backup bigs in the league.
The early sign that Maluach was not ready came when Nick Richards consistently struggled in Jordan Ott’s three-center rotation to begin the season, forcing Ott to sit Richards by mid-December and stick to a duo. That, however, can be equally attributed to Ighodaro’s breakout.
In the future, however, Williams could also get injured and present a different element to this conversation. With Richards now gone, Maluach would surely be in contention for at least a dozen minutes a night as Ighodaro’s backup. That is unless Ott decided small-ball was the way go, which would also be an indictment on Maluach’s development.
And of course, this team is pretty good. The Suns are competitive just about every night and firmly in the mix for a top-six spot with tons of depth throughout the roster continuing to step up.
If this team was nine games under .500 instead of nine games over, odds are we would have seen at least a bit of Maluach by now.
With all that said, if Maluach was popping behind the scenes or even showing flashes worth major consideration of minutes, he’d be out there right now regardless of how good the Suns are or not.
They also need what he does. Even at his age, Maluach is a step up physically from Williams when it comes to having an even bigger and longer frame. Phoenix has needed more brute force on the interior, something he would provide.
What does Ott think of Maluach so far?
Here is what Ott said when asked where he has seen Maluach improve the most since the summer and how close he thinks Maluach is to contributing.
“Just his strength I think in general, knowing that it was going to be something that he had to really work at from day one and as a person that we want to develop, the ability to be available is super important, so I think, just that,” Ott said Feb. 5. “We talked about habits with him from day one, coming up with routines — and he’s taken steps. And that’s the most important piece because it transfers throughout his entire career.
“He’s in a good spot. Obviously the G League has helped some of that and we’re able to see how he functions on a NBA floor and he’s able to get reps. So he’s in a good spot. Obviously our team has had a lot of success this year with our bigs being healthy. That was a major step with Mark early, for him to be healthy. That has been a success with Mark and Khaman is going to continue to take steps. He’s 19 years old and he’s in a good place.”
When it comes to the person who made the pick, general manager Brian Gregory was not made available before or after the trade deadline and has not spoken since the season started.
How does Maluach’s playing time compare to other high picks?
To drop the hammer, Maluach’s lack of playing time for his draft position is nearly unprecedented.
Going back through the last 25 drafts and all of the top-10 picks, which would add up to 250 players, only eight others reached less than 200 minutes played in their rookie season, per Stathead (Again, Maluach is at 107 minutes with 27 games remaining). Four of those players were affected by injury.
The other four? Well, there are three big men, a consistent theme that revolves around this discussion.
Two of them, Phoenix’s own Jalen Smith in 2020 and Detroit’s Darko Milicic in 2003, played for contenders that made the NBA Finals. Another Detroit top-10 pick, combo forward Rodney White in 2001, only got 129 minutes for a 50-win Pistons squad.
The final name was the No. 10 pick in 2006, center Mouhamed Sene of the Seattle SuperSonics. He, like Maluach, bounced between the G League and NBA throughout the year.
Three of the four were busts, with Smith being the semi-exception, as he’s carved out a nice role in Chicago since last season.
The lack of even a hard look in a moderate role over a few weeks for a top-10 pick is just so rare. Again, from a pool of 250 top-10 picks, just 20 failed to crack 500 minutes. That’s 8%, all while including the handful of first-year campaigns affected mostly by injury.
Did any of those 20 pan out to be good, reliable NBA players? After again filtering out guys who got hurt, the only hit is former Los Angeles Lakers center Andrew Bynum, who went on to have a pretty eclectic career of his own.
Bynum set the NBA record at the time for the youngest player to get in a game, and later went on to have some decently productive yet injury-riddled seasons in his early 20s that included a Second Team All-NBA nod in his seventh season before his career got derailed.
The rest, like Suns 2013 No. 5 overall pick Alex Len, went on to bounce around the league for a while or busted out real fast. Names like Joel Przybilla, Chris Wilcox and Mike Sweetney.
Another good point to bring up is that we know the adage long spoken on by coaches: big men take longer to develop. Maluach’s overall basketball makeup would have him raw at any position, so there is extra difficulty for him playing center.
Were there any other top-10 picks at center brought along slowly that went on to have success?
If we bump the minute threshold up to 1,000, which involves totals for rookies that would equate to roughly 14 minutes per game in 70 appearances, there are 17 bigs that pop up, according to Stathead. Jakob Poeltl in Toronto clears in 626 minutes — he’s a good defensive big and not much else.
Enes Freedom (formerly Kanter) qualifies at 874 minutes, but only because it was a lockout-shortened season, and even then, he had his extreme peaks and valleys. The other 15 did not work out, like Thon Maker, James Wiseman and Hasheem Thabeet.
So when it comes once more to the concept of precedent, it is grim. It’s also important not act like everyone that got serious reps as a rookie was good. There are plenty of failed draft picks in that grouping as well.
If there’s anything to take away from Maluach’s lack of involvement and what history tells us about it, it’s that he would have to be an outlier in order to go from where his rookie season began to developing into the player the Suns expected him to be when they selected him. He could be that outlier.
It’s hard not to glance at the back-half of the 2025 lottery, too, though, and wonder if there were too many other hits there as well.
While understanding we are indeed in real life and not just a world revolving around probability-based outcomes, the reality is drafts only net so many winners in certain ranges. You’re not going to see five All-Stars go in five straight picks, and you’re lucky to see it happen for two or three.
Odds are that the back half of the lottery will normally have a few real dudes, with the rest not living up to the positioning.
Look at 2022. Atlanta’s Dyson Daniels (8th) was First Team All-Defense before having a nightmare offensive season this year, Jeremy Sochan (9th) just got waived, Johnny Davis (10th) is out of the league, Ousmane Dieng (11th) was a throw-in at the deadline, Oklahoma City’s Jalen Williams (12th) is All-NBA, Detroit’s Jalen Duren (13th) could be All-NBA this season and Brooklyn’s Ochai Agbaji (14th) was a deadline tax dump.
There’s the 2020 roller-coaster going from Obi Toppin (sure!) to Deni Avdija (awesome!) to Smith (ugh!) to Devin Vassell (sure!) to Tyrese Haliburton (even more awesome!) to Kira Lewis Jr. (ugh!) to Aaron Nesmith (sure!).
So how does 2025 look so far? Memphis’ Cedric Coward (11th) is in the running for Rookie of the Year, New Orleans’ Derik Queen (13th) has popped with production and other names have come around with solid minutes like Brooklyn’s Egor Demin (8th) and Toronto’s Collin Murray-Boyles (9th).
So then it’s a wait-and-see for Maluach, Chicago’s Noa Essengue (12th) and San Antonio’s Carter Bryant (14th).
To make it as clear at the top as on the bottom, we’ve got a whole lot of legitimate playing time to watch before making any sort of declarations on Maluach. But even with all the surprises the Suns have given us, new ceilings do not open up without the development of their young players.
That is still as important as it was six months ago when the near-consensus was 30-35 wins.
Unless a trade materializes or it gets incredibly fortunate with some swap situations, Phoenix will not pick in the lottery for the next three years at least, and it only has a middling second-round pick coming up this June. No more elite young talent is coming in as building blocks anytime soon.
Maluach was it. So the growth of him and Rasheer Fleming, along with Williams and Jalen Green, defines a lot of Phoenix’s trajectory going forward from plucky try-hard squad to actual contender.
We’ll figure out how to position that flight path better once Maluach gets on the floor.
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