The Oklahoma City Thunder do frighten me a little. I hope any Wolves fans reading this will forgive me, but it’s difficult for me to believe in the durability of that defense in the postseason when both Rudy Gobert and Karl Anthony Towns have proven so vulnerable to teams capable of playing small ball effectively. But their offense is in fact worse than NBA average on a possession-adjusted ’s their #1 defense carrying the water. ![]() The guy getting all the press is Anthony Edwards, who is indeed having a big season and beginning to insert himself into the conversation of top shooting guards in the NBA. Nikola Jokic remains, on any given night, the best player in the NBA. The Nuggets are a formidable opponent, to be sure. That’s a small sample size, but it’s also not even the true power of the Suns if they could ever get all their cylinders firing at once. The Suns with the closest thing to their full power-lineup that they’ve been able to muster this season (Durant, Booker, Eric Gordon, Jusuf Nurkic, and Grayson Allen) is blowing everyone away, a +25 in their roughly 70 minutes together on the floor this season. That might seem like a hot take to any non-Suns fans, especially fans of the conference-leading Minnesota Timberwolves (how weird is that to say?) and defending NBA Champion Denver Nuggets. The Suns are probably the best team in the conference when they are healthy. The remainder will be largely subjective because that’s more fun. This has been the objective section of the analysis. 30, the Suns are in 5th place in the West.which is pretty much where one might expect a team with the #3 offense and the #10 defense in the conference. ![]() Free throws surrendered per 100(fewest ranking higher) : 10thīy the good old-fashioned standings, as I write this Nov.Points allowed per 100 possessions: 10th.So far, here is where the Suns rank in the Western Conference in a variety of important categories: That’s a great sign, even if it is very frustrating that the trio of Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal haven’t had the opportunity to really showcase what they’re capable of together.īut arguably what really matters isn’t how good the Suns are in a vacuum, it’s how well they stack up against the other teams standing in their ways of the NBA Finals, the winning of which is squarely the goal for this franchise after a well-chronicled series of trades designed to maximize the Suns’ win-now chances. The Phoenix Suns are a winning team, my friends, despite having spent almost no time this season as a healthy complete unit.
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