The Suns doubled down on their win-now bet. Here's how Beal can make it work
It's a shame when NBA players' reputations - and the value ascribed to them - get completely consumed by the size of their contracts. But such is the reality of playing in a salary-capped league, in which every dollar a player makes is a dollar that can't be spent elsewhere. That reality is hitting particularly hard in light of the draconian penalties coming for lavish spenders in the league's new collective bargaining agreement.
It's the reason Bradley Beal - a not-yet-30-year-old three-time All-Star who's just two years removed from averaging 31 points a game - is viewed as a negative asset on a deal that'll pay him $208 million over the next four years and includes the NBA's only active no-trade clause. It's why the Phoenix Suns were able to acquire Beal for the modest price of a 38-year-old Chris Paul, a one-dimensional role player in Landry Shamet, a bunch of second-round picks, and a couple of first-round swaps that likely won't come into effect. And it's why that trade isn't the slam dunk it might appear to be for Phoenix in a vacuum.
The Suns are poised to be a "second apron" team for the next several years, which will significantly hamper their ability to fill out the roster around Beal, Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, and Deandre Ayton (or whoever Ayton gets traded for). No taxpayer mid-level exception signees, no buyout additions who were making more than the full MLE before being bought out, no trades (starting next offseason) in which they aggregate players or take back more salary than they send out, and for now, not a single tradeable draft pick in the quiver.
But let's strip away the salary implications for a minute and just talk about Beal, the player. Because now that the Suns have doubled down on the win-now bet they made in acquiring Durant last season, it's Beal's fit in Phoenix that'll determine whether the gamble pays off. And despite his trade value being inextricably tied to the anvil that is his contract, he's still an excellent player who should help make his new team extremely difficult to beat.
Any time you assemble three star shot-creators on the same team, there are going to be valid concerns about redundancy and diminishing returns. But those concerns are mitigated to a large extent in Phoenix because of the off-ball utility of all three players. Booker and Durant are two of the most dangerous off-ball scorers in the league. That's probably Beal's most underrated skill, and it's one he hasn't gotten to showcase in Washington over the last few years because of the dearth of on-ball creation around him. He has a terrific off-ball motor and keeps moving in a way that can salvage dying possessions.
Beal is also a much better spot-up shooter than he is a pull-up shooter, and his declining 3-point percentages over the last half-decade reflect the fact that he's had to sacrifice the former for the latter while soaking up a ton of ball-handling reps. Those reps have been beneficial in helping him hone his playmaking and mid-range craft, both of which will still come in handy with the Suns. But he's undoubtedly going to spend a lot less time with the ball in his hands, and that's not a bad thing. Last season, he shot 33% on threes off the dribble and 40% off the catch.
On top of raising his percentages, playing off-ball more should also boost Beal's 3-point volume. It's typically easier for players to find their way to clean perimeter looks when they're spotting up or flying off of weak-side pindowns than it is when they're orchestrating primary pick-and-roll actions. Defenses are primarily concerned with defending central actions, less so with stifling off-ball activity, and the goal is often to funnel those actions into the space between the 3-point line and the rim. That's why, with a few notable exceptions, lead creators tend to have high mid-range rates. Beal is a good case in point, as his last three seasons represented the three lowest 3-point attempt rates of his career, bottoming out with last season's 23%. His high of 39% came in 2016-17, during John Wall's peak.
This is pertinent for a Suns team that had shot-profile issues before and after the Durant trade; Phoenix ranked dead last in the playoffs in both 3-point and rim frequency. Beal is a mid-range merchant in his own right (and a damn good one, coming off a season in which he hit 49% of his long twos), but he's at least shown the ability to be a high-volume 3-point shooter. More importantly than that, he's also shown that he can get to the basket a ton. Last season, 31% of Beal's shots came at the rim, and he hit an astonishing 72% of those shots, per Cleaning the Glass. Paul, by comparison, took 5% of his shots at the rim and converted 46% of them.
Because Durant also never gets to the rim anymore, it behooved the Suns to add someone who could puncture defenses in a way Paul couldn't. And that's why, despite moving down two spots in the pecking order, Beal's on-ball chops will still very much be relied upon in Phoenix. He'll just deploy them in a more balanced ecosystem in which three guys can toggle between initiating and finishing, creating advantages and capitalizing on them.
Beal can get downhill via off-ball actions - cuts, curls, closeout attacks - but he mostly does so as one of the league's most relentless and powerful drivers. He finished eighth last season with 15.9 drives per game, three more than the Suns got from Booker, their team leader. Beal is a patient prober with nasty hesitation moves (which work like gangbusters because of how bankable his mid-range step-back is), and his explosive finishing steps allow him to create unexpected separation at the tail end of those drives.
In short, Beal is a legitimate three-level scorer, whereas Paul, by the end of last season, was basically a one-level scorer; he couldn't get to the cup or beat anyone off the bounce and often went ignored behind the 3-point line. He had skills that compensated for those limitations, of course, but the skills Beal brings to the table are probably more valuable to this Suns team at this critical juncture.
The Wizards posted a 116.6 offensive rating with Beal on the floor last season, roughly equivalent to the Denver Nuggets' fifth-ranked regular-season mark. That was with Kristaps Porzingis and Kyle Kuzma as his team's second- and third-best offensive players. He's about to join a Booker-Durant tandem that produced a 121.7 on-court rating in eight regular-season games and held relatively steady at 119.2 in the playoffs.
Booker and Durant finished fifth and sixth, respectively, in points per game via off-ball screens. Beal tied for 12th. For whatever overlap might exist (especially between Booker and Beal), this is a complementary trio of offensive players who'll space the floor for one another, screen for each other, and peel away help defenders with their weak-side movement and gravity. In high-stakes games, the Suns will have at least two of them on the floor basically at all times. Their offense is going to be an absolute bear.
If we're talking about what the Suns could have done instead, it's important to consider what's happened to Durant in the last two postseasons. He had one elite creator next to him in both instances, but that wasn't enough to insulate him from physical defenses that loaded help toward him, shrunk his operating space in the middle of the floor, and threw him completely out of rhythm. There was an argument for the Suns to turn Paul's salary slot (or Ayton's, if they brought Paul back) into multiple rotation pieces in order to bolster their depth and defense, but it's hard to imagine them doing that while taking the requisite amount of offensive responsibility off of the soon-to-be 35-year-old Durant's plate. At this stage, he shouldn't be playing 41 high-usage minutes a game, as he did in Phoenix's second-round loss to Denver.
Even if there isn't much supplemental offensive firepower around the core trio, having Beal in the mix should prevent Durant from seeing this level of defensive attention:
Make no mistake, depth and defense are major points of concern, especially given the team's limited avenues to addressing those weaknesses.
The Suns are flimsy on the interior, which means their perimeter defense needs to be airtight, and Beal has been, to put it charitably, a lackluster perimeter defender for several years now. For as good as the Wizards have been offensively with him on the floor, they've been as bad or worse defensively. It's been easy to chalk that up to his offensive workload and lack of motivation while playing out the string on subpar Wizards teams. We're about to find out how genuine those excuses were.
Booker has leveled up defensively, but you still don't want him to be your primary perimeter stopper. Much like last season, Phoenix will need to accept some offensive concessions in order to play defensive specialists like Josh Okogie, Torrey Craig, and Ish Wainright - though it's unclear how many of those guys will be back, given the team's new financial constraints.
It really helps that the Suns were able to pull Jordan Goodwin into the deal since he's making pennies for the next two seasons and contributes enough on both ends - plays rugged defense, pushes the pace, cuts hard, makes creative passes on the move - to be a rotation mainstay. But Phoenix still has a distinct lack of two-way balance on the margins of the roster. It won't be easy to find that using only minimum-salary slots. It's also hard to envision an Ayton trade that doesn't leave the Suns woefully undersized and ill-equipped to defend the rim and rebound, considering those were already issues with the 7-footer manning the middle.
The already shaky depth is going to be further strained when one or more of the big three hits the shelf for significant time. Beal has missed 74 games over the last two years, Durant has missed an average of 33 games a season since returning from his torn Achilles three years ago, and Booker missed 29 last season.
Still, it's not like bringing back Paul (who gets injured literally every postseason) at a lower salary figure would've made these problems much easier to solve, at least not without creating equivalent problems elsewhere. Sure, having access to the mid-level would've been nice, but getting Beal feels like the biggest present-day upgrade the Suns could've made under the circumstances. And while there's undoubtedly a lot of pain coming their way once their competitive window closes, they didn't have much more to lose, given how many of their chips they'd already shoved into the pot.
Bottom line: If Phoenix (which has never hoisted a championship banner) wins even one title with this group, all the moves that led to it will be validated, no matter how much unpleasantness ensues. And if Beal helps the franchise claim that elusive first ring, no one is going to remember what percentage of the cap he occupied while doing it.
His arrival doesn't ensure that outcome or even make it probable for the Suns, but it nudges the needle in the right direction.