The best front offices operate with an expertise in foresight, seeing the long-term outlook of their franchise at least 18 months in advance with every move of mild importance.
This concept is why the Phoenix Suns should trade for Zion Williamson.
Now, I can see your brain scrambling a bit already. Springing this on my podcast co-host Kevin Zimmerman required him a few minutes to even wrap his head around the notion, and I broke his critical thinking skills for the rest of the podcast in the process. He didn’t have the benefit you did of reading this headline and immediately getting a grasp on how you would feel about this in the few seconds it took you to get to this sentence.
Hopefully, there is enough trust I have built up over a decade of being on the roller-coaster of watching this franchise with you to where you understand there is an overall point to this. I am not just click-baiting you, nor am I here to incite mass reactions. It’s to return to the thought of that concept of foresight.
There are a lot of branches on that thought tree, and it has just as much to do with the rationale of trading for a player like Williamson as it does for Williamson himself.
Suns need to get a year ahead this summer
The Suns, by all accounts, will be taking a gap year next season.
They are going to spend this summer focusing on retention, bringing back key free agents like Collin Gillespie and Jordan Goodwin, while seeing if it can finagle making Mark Williams a part of that plan too. Growth in their eyes is going to come from two different areas: development in real roles for second-year players Rasheer Fleming and Khaman Maluach, as well as better injury luck giving the trio of Devin Booker, Dillon Brooks and Jalen Green a chance to show their full potential.
More simply, Phoenix wants another year of further establishing continuity and team dynamics to build up more of a foundation.
There are positives to that for sure. It would also be foolish and make next year a waste of a season.
Continuity will lead into the eventual action of next summer, when the Suns presumably will look to make their big jump. But why wait? Don’t you already know what this is for the most part?
The problems and faults aren’t going anywhere. We already know the conclusions the Suns will arrive at evaluating their roster a year from now.
Phoenix’s roster is in the bottom-10 of the league in terms of talent. That is not going to change over the next calendar year if the team runs it back. What also won’t is the clear deficiencies of the players on the roster.
Even if Fleming and Maluach start, this team still isn’t big or athletic enough. Its offense will be weighed down by two bad on-ball decision-makers more inclined to score in Brooks and Green, forcing the player with the fifth-most points in the NBA over the last decade, Booker, to carry all of the playmaking responsibilities. As we saw in multiple postseason matchups, this makes it easy to eliminate him from games.
As much as it sends an odd chill up my spine to type this about him, Booker is not getting any younger. Yes, we are now at that portion of his career. We don’t know anymore how many seasons of elite play he has left, and we haven’t seen him at a top-15 level the last three seasons. That’s a level it felt like he had a lengthy lease on occupying.
Booker needs more premium talent next to him. This isn’t nearly enough.
Beyond some unforeseen massive bits of internal development for the younger players, we’re pretty much going on the same ride again, and if owner Mat Ishbia is indeed going to back up his claim of Booker winning a championship in Phoenix, he’s going to have to take a swing in 2027.
So why not take a swing before the swing?
The swing before the swing
Focus on what that idea means. It means being able to execute both. In essence, make a move this summer that shifts the dynamic enough to learn more about what will be necessary in a year’s time. And a swing this summer could be relatively cheap, keeping the Suns’ already quite punctured bag of trade chips in a healthy enough spot.
Long-time Suns Twitter member The Four Point Play laid out Phoenix’s compromised position succinctly, noting how the Suns will basically have to target some type of distressed assets and accept some of the roster imbalance due to the lack of ammunition they bring to trade talks.
Williamson would be as good a fit for that as anyone if New Orleans is done with the Zion business.
Lead decision-maker Joe Dumars, whose resume as a front-office leader has lost luster since the Detroit Pistons’ 2004 championship, said the Pelicans have no intention of trading Williamson. Dumars believes the Pelicans are not far away from a quick turnaround.
If that’s legitimately the case, then we have nothing more to speak on here. The only way this makes sense for the Suns is if the price tag is cheap.
I am not here to pitch including Maluach, Fleming or the 2033 first-round pick in any type of big deal, let alone this one. I stand by what I wrote to begin the offseason, that Ishbia will have to be bold, just not too bold.
A “buy low” on this caliber of talent is within that realm.
To go back to Dumars’ notion of not trading Williamson, it defies logic. Williamson’s fit with 2025 lottery pick Derik Queen is horrendous, and New Orleans is committed to Queen since it gave up its unprotected pick this year for him, a selection that had a 29% chance of going top-4 before it landed eighth in Sunday’s draft lottery.
The Pelicans also have a decent amount going for themselves beyond Williamson. The core of Queen, Trey Murphy III, Jeremiah Fears, Dejounte Murray, Herb Jones and Yves Missi is at least something to build around. But the cement on that construction project can’t dry if Williamson is involved, a process his inconsistent availability forced the Pelicans to work around for seven years.
Shouldn’t they be ready to move on? Accept the loss on the failed experiment?
The comparison here is what happened with Trae Young.
The Atlanta Hawks were so ready to move on themselves that they took 10 cents on the dollar, which let the Washington Wizards acquire Young for basically nothing: C.J. McCollum (who no one wanted at the time) and Corey Kispert. A major difference is that Young has a player option in his contract this summer, so the Wizards now likely have to sign him to a contract extension. Phoenix would not have to do that, though.
Williamson has two years left on his contract for $86 million. The deal, however, is layered with non-guarantees based on thresholds, with weight checks and games played. Assuming Williamson passed his last weight check of the season, the $42.1 million for next year is now fully guaranteed. The $44.9 million for the 2027-28 season, however, will be contingent on those same thresholds getting reached through next season.
Williamson gets 20% of that $45 million if he passes the tests on the scales all year and then a 40% chunk if he plays 41 games before two more of 20% for 51 and 61 games, per The Athletic’s Will Guillory.
Essentially, if Williamson majorly struggles with injuries next year, like he has in four of his seven seasons, his team would only be on the books for $9 million in 2027-28 if he keeps his weight in check through that process.
But let’s say Williamson reaches over 60 games played for the third time in the last four years and he’s remained relatively healthy in consecutive seasons for the first time in his career. Then perhaps he’s had a breakthrough of sorts, and a long-term commitment (with some non-guarantees, of course) becomes more plausible.
That flexibility makes it helpful for the Suns to look at taking down three birds with one stone.
Why Zion Williamson would be worth the risk
Williamson took a back seat last season for New Orleans, hoisting a career-low 13 shots per game with a career-low 21 points and 5.2 rebounds a night. It was the first time through these seven years that when a healthy Williamson took the floor, he did not look like an automatic top-25 player.
The offense was no longer primarily designed to run through him. Fears, Murphy and Queen saw plenty of the ball, as did Murray when he returned from injury late in the year. Williamson’s assist and turnover numbers naturally dropped as a result.
Did we still see the old Zion? Maybe not to the highest of heights, but yes.
Williamson’s production was remarkably consistent through all this. When he finished the year playing in 52 of the Pelicans’ final 56 games, Williamson scored 20-plus in 34 of those contests.
Despite less of a primary on-ball role, Williamson replicated his usual free-throw numbers at 7.5 attempts per game.
The best shooting fouled percentages in the league, a.k.a. the percentage of a player’s shot attempts they are fouled on, from playmakers on the ball came via the likes of Deni Avdija at 22.3% and Giannis Antetokounmpo at 24%. Williamson ranked ahead of everyone at 24.6%.
His rim frequency of 69% remains laughably elite, as does 70% shooting there for someone who largely creates those opportunities on his own.
The highest rim frequency by a Suns ball-handler last year was Green at 29%.
Williamson attacks with developed feel as a playmaker, where he has spent some time in the past as the Pelicans’ point guard. His assist-to-usage ratios have always been between great and excellent, unlike Brooks and Green, who are terrible in that metric.
Williamson’s defense over the years has bounced between very good to poor, oftentimes in relation to his health, role and success on the team. It’s not much of a swing factor either way.
The days of Williamson tearing his own shoes and achieving impossible athletic feats on a nightly basis are almost certainly over after the injuries he’s been through, but there’s still no one like him when it comes to a combination of size, strength and speed. We will see next year if Williamson’s regression was more about his role and getting accustomed to how often he played, or if this is more of the player he is now.
Regardless, what he was last season would still help the Suns in multiple ways. The best downhill threat Booker has played with in his career is either Green, Kelly Oubre Jr. or Cam Payne, so to go from that to one of the best in the league would be quite the new luxury to explore.
Williamson would join Booker as the only other blue-chip talent on the roster. Phoenix will have to be creative in order to acquire one to go alongside Booker within the next three years, such as a buy-low option like this if Williamson’s price is indeed attainable.
What the Suns theoretically give up in this exercise would also naturally help rebalance the roster.
The potential trade package for Zion
The base would be solving the ball-handling dilemma by including either Brooks or Green in the deal.
Brooks should be a non-starter unless New Orleans is offering more Phoenix’s way. He’s proven himself this year to be a productive and efficient scorer, all while his intangibles bump his impact on winning. Brooks would assuredly take a contract extension offer if he were dealt, so he could take yet another turn as a culture driver for a group in the bayou that definitely needs one.
The Pelicans do not have a first-round pick this year but have all their future firsts, including a juicy 2027 selection that has a swap with Milwaukee.
A salary combination of Brooks and Grayson Allen matches nicely with Williamson, so would that be worth it for Phoenix to get an extra first-round pick? Probably not, unless the Suns aren’t interested in re-signing Brooks (we know they are) while seeing benefits in getting off Allen’s long-term money.
New Orleans having interest in Green would help move the needle and create the type of trade where even if Williamson didn’t work out in Phoenix, the Suns wouldn’t lose much by taking a chance on him.
The Pelicans would bring in Green to be the third guard behind Fears and Murray, providing ancillary scoring in the way they hoped Jordan Poole would (and did not). That’s not the tidiest of fits, but they’d at least get the opposite of Williamson in terms of reliability. Green’s hamstring woes last season were an anomaly after he missed just six games in his three previous seasons.
To find more and make salaries work, we’ll include the Phoenix’s Royce O’Neale and New Orleans’ Jordan Hawkins.
O’Neale is a playoff-caliber wing, which would complete the Pelicans’ forward rotation behind Murphy, Jones and Saddiq Bey. He’d provide some much, much-needed shooting and savvy off-ball play offensively. Lineup versatility would take a step up, unlocking more possibilities for how to use Murphy and Jones with O’Neale as a spacer.
Hawkins is a sunk cost for New Orleans, a bust thus far at No. 14 overall in 2023. He didn’t earn playing time under interim head coach James Borrego.
Is that enough? If not, can the 2027 first-round pick the Suns own that all but likely lands in the 20s be enough to get the deal over the finish line? Would they also have to loop in someone like Ryan Dunn? If Mark Williams is back, does that mean Oso Ighodaro is expendable?
Those are the questions where a snag from Phoenix’s perspective could come to root. Again, if the Pelicans aren’t selling low, it defeats the purpose of the deal. The point is finding a trade where the Suns don’t have to give up too much, so the possibility of that bigger swing in 2027 maintains viability.
Maybe Williamson isn’t the best example. But the best way for the Suns to attack this summer is by finding a way to clean up their offensive shape, get bigger/more athletic and find premium talent. Whether that’s this type of move or another one, waiting a year to make it isn’t going to do the Suns any good.
They need to have some foresight and act now.
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