The Most Terrifying Part Of Losing Is Having Nothing To Gain

We currently find ourselves in the trenches, five games into the season, with the Phoenix Suns sitting at 1-4. And when you’re down in the trenches, you typically don’t have the luxury of looking at things from 30,000 feet. There’s too much happening around you, and the moment you start thinking too big or too far into the future, something changes that demands your immediate attention. Such is life. Ultimately, what defines quality strategy is the ability to balance the immediate challenges in front of you with the health and viability of your franchise over the long term.

But there’s a realization slowly creeping into the frontal lobes of our brains, something we’ve been actively trying to avoid thinking about because we know that once we accept it as reality, the outlook becomes increasingly frustrating and dystopian. Last year’s team saved us from these thoughts. This year’s team may not be able to. The Suns don’t own their own draft capital, and no matter what happens, sucking as a basketball team provides them absolutely no benefit.

The reality of professional sports is that teams ebb and flow. The advantage of possessing your own draft assets is that when an inevitable down season arrives, you have an opportunity to turn that adversity into something useful. Down seasons can happen for a multitude of reasons, with injuries often being the primary culprit. You struggle for a year, acquire a valuable asset through the draft, and get back to work. If you’re a perpetually bad team, the draft provides a pathway toward rebuilding your roster.

There’s no perfect formula for constructing a championship roster, or even one that’s consistently competitive. Throughout NBA history, organizations have employed numerous strategies with varying degrees of success. But as we look at the season ahead, we’re staring at a Suns team that appears disjointed and poorly constructed. The roster features expensive players with duplicative skill sets, an abundance of undersized contributors, and injuries that only complicate matters further.

Things can get really bad in Phoenix, really quickly. The most unsettling part? There’s no eject button.

You might believe that trading Devin Booker is ultimately the answer, but it’s not. Perhaps Booker is overvalued as an asset within the Phoenix market because of everything he’s meant to this organization and how long he’s been its centerpiece. His value on the trade market may ultimately produce a return that falls short of what Suns fans envision. If that return includes multiple first-round picks, there’s a very real possibility those selections end up being far less desirable than what Phoenix would need to meaningfully rebuild over the long term.

Booker is now 30, which isn’t what you would classify as “old”. At least, you wouldn’t have 10 years ago. Kirk Golderberry of The Ringer, however, recently delved into the decline in players over 30 and their impact on the game:

During the 2025-26 regular season, players 30 and older made up just 17.5 percent of the NBA. That’s the lowest share in at least 30 years. Meanwhile, for the seventh straight season, more than half the league (54.6 percent) was 25 or younger. In 1997-98, that number was just 36 percent.

Yeah, that wasn’t exactly my favorite read of the week. Nothing quite like being reminded that the guy who’s supposed to be in his prime and leading this team to victories is rapidly becoming antiquated in a league that increasingly values youth and durability over sustainability and longevity. Great. Fantastic. Love that for us.

I had someone suggest trading Devin Booker to the Detroit Pistons for Ausar Thompson and four first-round picks. As unlikely as that scenario might be, let’s play it out.

The Suns acquire Ausar Thompson, meaning they’re now building around Jalen Green, Thompson, Dillon Brooks, Miles Bridges, and Khaman Maluach. How many games is that team winning? My guess is they’re a .500 team at best. Let’s say, in a best-case scenario, Phoenix somehow ends up with the sixth seed in the Western Conference, although reality probably suggests they’re a Play-In team at best. Regardless, because the Suns don’t control their own draft pick, they’re handing that selection over to Houston. No, the Suns get the worst pick between Cleveland, Minnesota, and Utah. For thought exercise purposes, let’s say Phoenix receives the 25th overall selection.

But wait! You traded Devin Booker to Detroit for four first-round picks! Except now Booker is playing alongside Cade Cunningham and Jalen Duren, and suddenly the Pistons look fantastic because Booker is operating in a role that better suits him. Detroit hypothetically ends up with the 24th pick.

So Phoenix walks into next year’s draft holding the 24th and 25th overall selections. Cool. No high-end prospects. No obvious game changers. Instead, you’re selecting a pair of developmental projects, hoping they possess enough transferable skills to become viable rotation players three years down the road. You get a couple of Ryan Dunns.

Then it becomes rinse and repeat. Every year, the Suns are struggling to assemble a competitive roster, attempting to do so with Detroit’s draft capital while their own selections remain outside their control.

Why am I bringing this up five games into the season? Why am I looking at the bigger picture when I should be focusing on Portland tonight? I think it’s because the potential worst-case scenario is beginning to unfold before our eyes. And while the fan base desperately rushes to trade machines, searching for some magical combination of transactions that will fix everything, the reality is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. This is a very hard situation to fix.

Perhaps it’s because I’m seeing the suggestions people are putting out there, and while I understand the strategy behind many of these proposed deals, I ultimately find myself asking one question. How the hell did we get here?

To me, the answer is simple: Bradley Beal.

I know plenty of people will argue that acquiring Kevin Durant was the beginning of the downfall of the Phoenix Suns, and I don’t completely disagree. That move was a step in the wrong direction, one that could ultimately take this organization a decade to recover from. The Suns had what makes teams successful in today’s NBA: youth, connectivity, chemistry, and a veteran presence to stabilize it all. It’s reminiscent of the Seven Seconds or Less Suns, a team that was ahead of its time. By the time the rest of the league caught up to that philosophy, Phoenix had already moved on to something different, never fully capitalizing on the strategy it helped pioneer.

Through that lens, I can accept the argument that Durant’s acquisition was the root cause of where we find ourselves today. As for the extracurricular drama he brought to the organization, and the notion that his presence was ultimately more detrimental than productive, I politely disagree. Sure, there were extracurriculars with Kevin Durant. Nobody knows that better than I do. But he was also an elite scorer, someone you could rely on at virtually any moment to get you a bucket. It was the moves made around him that ultimately sunk this team, and none was more damaging than acquiring Bradley Beal.

The Suns acquired a depreciating asset whose skill set was largely duplicative of Devin Booker’s, sacrificed the remainder of their available draft capital to do so, and inherited a no-trade clause that made an already difficult situation even worse. Ultimately, they had to buy Beal out and stretch the financial consequences across multiple seasons.

Think about this team right now and how differently you might view it with an additional $19.3 million in payroll flexibility. Need a point guard? How about another big man who can actually rebound? That money could help address those issues, but it’s unavailable because the Suns waived Bradley Beal. And the ancillary draft capital that could facilitate additional transactions? That’s gone, too, because they shipped it away to acquire Bradley fucking Beal.

That’s the deal we’re going to continue paying for through 2030. That’s the transaction whose consequences continue to suffocate this franchise, even after the player himself is long gone. And that’s the draft capital we sacrificed, capital that could have been used to facilitate the very transactions this team so desperately needs today.

The reality of what the Phoenix Suns might become if they aren’t a competitive basketball team is something we accepted at the beginning of last season. The thought process at the time was that eventually we’d trade Grayson Allen and Royce O’Neale, Dillon Brooks was a throw-in from the Kevin Durant trade, and Jalen Green had enough upside to warrant seeing what he could become. Expectations were low as we prepared for this dommsdat scenario to play out. Phoenix surprised us, however, winning 45 games.

The team did eventually trade Grayson Allen and Royce O’Neale, and in return acquired Miles Bridges, who thus far has probably been the most consistent player on the team. But we also surrendered our 2033 first-round pick to make it happen. Why? Nobody fucking knows. Because the Suns “expect to be good”, right? They operate as though they’ll never need a contingency plan, and when circumstances inevitably demand one, they’re screwed.

Jalen Green has upside. He has athleticism. And he absolutely does not fit on this team. If he were making $16 million a year, perhaps I wouldn’t think much of it. But he’s making $36.3 million this season and another $36 million next year, with a player option he’s almost certainly going to exercise because he’s unlikely to command that kind of money on the open market. So the Suns are left holding the bag. Again.

When was the last time the Suns made a trade and actually won it? When was the last time you looked back three years after a transaction and thought, you know what, “Slam dunk for Phoenix”? The Barkley trade? KJ?

That’s why I’m feeling so much doom and gloom right now. That’s where the frustration comes from. The reality we managed to put off last season because the team overperformed is beginning to show signs of coming to fruition this year. Now another year has passed, Devin Booker’s trade value isn’t getting any higher, and even if it were, it wouldn’t change the fundamental problem. This franchise simply cannot benefit from being a losing basketball team.

I’m writing this because I see all the solutions people are desperately trying to come up with to save the Suns, and every time another proposal surfaces, I find myself asking the same questions: How? Why? Is Dejounte Murray going to be the guy who saves this franchise? Domantas Sabonis? Are those really the answers to the problems we’re facing? No.

The fact that we’ve reached the point of entertaining those possibilities only five games into the season says plenty about the long-term outlook of this organization. And perhaps that’s what I’m really doing here. Trying to mentally prepare myself for a reality we’ve spent the past year hoping we’d never have to confront.

The Suns can improve their execution, find better lineup combinations, and perhaps salvage something from this season. But none of that changes the underlying reality. This organization has sacrificed its flexibility, its financial resources, and its ability to benefit from failure. Five games into the season, we’re already contemplating the consequences of decisions made years ago. The Suns aren’t necessarily doomed to lose. They’re trapped in a situation where losing doesn’t help them win tomorrow.