The Phoenix Suns have to forfeit the title they worked so hard to claim halfway through the season as the hardest-working team in the NBA, as their defensive form in the last 30 games has shown a major drop-off in that department, with Thursday’s 127-107 loss to the Charlotte Hornets the latest example.
To be clear, Phoenix played pretty hard on Thursday, at least before this one spiraled. There was far more energy to the game than the empty performances from Monday and Tuesday.
But the constant errors and lack of complete engagement on defense was ever-present once more. Charlotte, an elite shooting team, had no problem generating open 3s. The majority of the attempts were aided by a Suns defender making a mistake, whether it was botching communication on a switch, not matching up properly or falling asleep off the ball. Add on how many easy drives to the rim an opposing ball-handler can generate as teams target this Suns weakness further and it can be this ugly against an elite offensive team, even with better effort.
It showed early and often. Phoenix scored well enough in the first quarter for it not to matter, winning it 41-33 before the Hornets took the next two quarters 33-19 and 36-27 to trail by 15. Charlotte shot 52% from the field and 18-of-49 (37%) from 3.
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Look, some teams can do this. They can afford to snooze on defense a good amount. But the Suns are not good enough offensively to make up for that. They relied heavily on getting stops and generating turnovers to boost the offense into a great spot. Coaches and players have reiterated how vital that cycle is to this Suns team specifically.
As a reminder, the Suns were sixth in defensive rating through the end of January. Between then and prior to Thursday’s game, they were 17th. The drop-off for the offense uncoincidentally is from 13th to 19th.
Are the Suns willing to accept that is who they have to be again?
About 20-30 games in, you could sense that the players were at least slightly perturbed by the notion that the Suns were the “try-hard squad.” You can understand that. These are highly skilled and talented basketball players. To suggest they are only successful as a unit because they play harder than everyone else is in some ways an insult to who they are as players.
But does the tape and win-loss record since February (12-16) lie at this point?
Phoenix’s play in the last two months has suggested that the team, in the lightest way got too confident and in the heaviest way got a bit full of itself. The Suns players need to accept that they are indeed the try-hard squad. For them to be more than that, it begins with a non-negotiable of its once-signature energy being there every night, like it was for the first three months of the year.
And if the players don’t want to accept that or are incapable of that type of full-season effort, then they can feel free to toil around a 40-45 win range with no foundation to build off and turn into something more than a slightly decent basketball club, like the prospects that looked real before the All-Star break.
Nothing goes further than that if there is no reestablishment of the defense. Concerns and questions about how everything shapes together, from the perimeter balance offensively to the logjam at center, doesn’t really matter all that much right now.
For as much as there is a desire to confirm errors in how this team was shaped revealing itself late, that’s not what this is. This same roster in a similarly shorthanded state had no problem being great defensively, even with all the deficiencies like on-ball defense, size and so on.
Fans have started to become critical of head coach Jordan Ott’s rotation choices and the roster construction of an undersized team. But all you need to do is watch these games and see how many low-effort, high-quality looks opponents consistently generate on the Suns defense lately. You don’t even need a spiel on the defensive rating dropping or other definitive proof. Just watch the Suns defend and you’ll see it.
Size doesn’t matter much in the majority of these possessions. Case and point, Jordan Goodwin, Phoenix’s best on-ball defender by a substantial margin standing at 6-foot-3. If the Suns could play five of him, that would be a major improvement. He is clearly the engine of that identity and the only guy left on the team that consistently still brings it to the standard established 50 games in.
And it should be noted that Goodwin had to limp back to the locker room in the late third quarter with a left calf injury and didn’t return. He missed seven games from Feb. 22 through March 8 while dealing with a strain on the same calf.
Ott is searching for answers. He dove deep into small-ball on Tuesday, has tried sitting certain players like Jalen Green and Mark Williams late in games and far more other tinkering. But all he can do is try to keep preaching the same things that got through to his team in October that certainly are not right now.
This all comes with less than two weeks before the play-in tournament starts, and even that feels less important by the day given how we could end this season having no idea what this Suns team is or what to make of it. That possible reality getting realer by the day feels more important.
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