This is what happens when you spend $159 million on shooting guards.
Phoenix Suns fans have been repeatedly told that they should withhold judgment of the Suns’ rebuild until after Durant is traded, the draft, and free agency. Well, all three have gone by, and the Suns have a full roster of 15 players under contract. We’re not hearing any rumors that movement is imminent on any player but perhaps Nick Richards, and any trade involving him seems unlikely to change my analysis much.
So, let’s look at the Suns roster as it’s likely to look heading into opening day, and what it means. The table below shows the Suns players under contract by what their most natural position is, and how much they make in millions in parentheses afterwards.
What should immediately jump out at you is that there’s precisely one PG on the team, and he’s a vet minimum player. You can also see that there are 4 or 5 guys who are natural shooting guards on the team (depending on whether Koby Brea is more of a 2 or 3), and the team is spending a lot of money on those shooting guards. The graph below shows the dollar values spent on each position (as shown in the table above), in millions of dollars.
To put this all-in context, the Suns are spending $158.9 million on players whose most natural position is shooting guard. To put it in perspective, the 2025-26 NBA salary cap is set at $154.647 million. This represents a 10% increase from the previous season. The luxury tax threshold is $187.9 million, with the first apron at $195.9 million and the second apron at $207.8 million.
The TL;DR is that the Suns are spending all of their salary cap, plus a bit, on shooting guards. 72.5% of all the money the Suns spend on players is being spent on shooting guards.
This is gross roster mismanagement of ludicrous proportions. When they traded Durant away, they only made this problem worse by taking two players who play the positions of least need (SG, SF). Jalen Green was a terrible player to trade for based on his salary and position, long before you even consider how he will fit playing with Booker.
Every bit of evidence over the past two seasons suggests that this is a really bad idea if you’re planning on winning.
The Suns were 3-17 without KD, and were 1-5 when Booker and Beal played without Durant together. I find the argument that Jalen Green will be completely different because he’s more athletic than Beal completely unpersuasive. Sure, you might get a few more passes to a cutting Green, but Beal was a far more efficient shooter, and it doesn’t alter the dynamic that it forces Booker to play out of position.
This roster imbalance creates a team that is far less than the sum of its parts. As a reducto ad absurdum argument, imagine if you had a team of 15 Devin Booker clones vs. the 2020-21 Suns team that went to the NBA Finals. Sure, the team of clones would be (by far) the most talented on paper, but they’d get obliterated by a team that actually has a balanced roster.
The same is true with this current Suns roster.
Grayson Allen is a great shooting guard. But he does you very little good getting pummeled by larger players at SF or riding the pine so that the other seven players who are shooting guards or small forwards can get playing time. Playing Booker at point guard fails to use him efficiently as well, because he’s not a point guard.
Building an NBA roster is about efficiency and fit, and this roster, as constructed, fails miserably at both.
The ideal solution would be to trade away Beal, Allen, O’Neale, and Richards for a combination of second apron tax relief and players who aren’t shooting guards. With a decent roster, Booker starting at shooting guard, and Green coming off the bench as a microwave sixth man, you can squint and see the Suns as a potential 9th or 10th seed in the playoffs if Fleming, Williams, and Hayes-Davis really pan out.
But, that’s far easier said than done, mostly because no one wants any of them except perhaps Richards for his expiring $5 million contract. O’Neale is regarded as a little overpaid, Allen is significantly overpaid (and under contract too long), and Beal’s is widely seen as the worst contract in the NBA.
Gerald Bourget at PHNX explores trades for all of them, and it helps you get a sense of how ridiculously difficult rebalancing this roster will be.
But it gets worse.
The Suns don’t own any of their first-round draft picks until 2032.
Which means that no matter how awful the team is, they don’t get a high draft pick out of it. Plus, if they don’t get under the second apron before the end of the 2026-27 season, that 2032 pick gets pushed to the very end of the first round, as punishment for exceeding the 2nd apron 3 times in a 5-year period. Essentially, the Suns are under the gun to unload Beal’s bloated contract (or Allen and O’Neale), and they get nothing in return for finding out the hard way that Booker and Green don’t make for a successful backcourt.
So, how would I evaluate the Suns’ offseason? They did great drafting the best player available, and I really like Nigel Hayes-Davis. But none of that changes the bigger picture: the Suns whiffed horribly on the Durant trade, and created a roster that’s both completely unbalanced, seems like a coin-flip away from giving us the worst record in franchise history, and is unfixable because no one would trade for the players making the roster completely unbalanced. As a result, the team is only going to get worse as teams use the Suns’ own high-lottery picks to get better.
Thus, as a result of the poor fit of the players in the KD trade compounding existing problems, and the failure to obtain a viable starting point guard, I’m giving the Suns an F for the offseason. If they’d gotten a point guard in return I could give it a better grade, but as it is the team looks poised for a 15-20 win season, without even a high lottery pick to show for it.
The only way this changes is if the Suns manage to turn O’Neale, Allen, or Beal into a starting caliber PG and get under the 2nd apron, but that seems increasingly unlikely.
Welcome to Hell, Suns fans.
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