No debates and no hope as Suns fans endured another season of letdowns.
We did it. We made it through another SunsRank, our annual tradition of ranking all 18 Phoenix Suns from best to worst. Every year, we start this exercise to capture where our expectations lie, and we close it out at season’s end to see how the story really unfolded.
There wasn’t much debate this year. No heated arguments about where players belonged. And I can take that one of two ways. Either the team underperformed so badly that there wasn’t enough talent to even spark a real conversation…or we were just exhausted. Tired of watching a group that got our hopes up, only to fall painfully short in a season we believed could end with a legitimate title run. Instead, it became a sobering reminder that expectations mean nothing without the right roster to back them up.
Preseason Ranks
So, where did we begin this season? Looking at how the Bright Side writing staff ranked each player, here was the starting point:
Wow. We had Tyus Jones ranked that high?
It’s a reminder of how expectations shape perception. Coming into the season, we believed a different brand of basketball was on the horizon, one built on pace, ball movement, and control. But as the year unfolded, the vision shifted, the execution faltered, and what we thought we’d see never fully materialized.
Final SunsRankings
And now, your final SunsRank for the 2024-25 season, with our writers’ picks and the results of the Bright Side Community’s voting over the past couple of weeks…
When you start to dissect this list, what’s the first thing you notice? Well, for starters, the writing team shrank as the season dragged on. And honestly, can you blame them? Covering the Suns during a season like that isn’t for the faint of heart. I’ve lived it, and I don’t know how Dave King managed it for a decade.
But beyond that, you start to spot some anomalies. A few eyebrow-raising picks, some surprising rankings. So it’s only fair we turn to the writers behind those choices and ask: what happened there? What led to those outliers? Time to get some answers
Matthew Lissy had Royce O’Neale ranked 10th while everyone else had him ranked 5th or 6th.
Lissy: Royce O’Neale was a player I hoped to man up the bigs on defense, and evolve his game a little more than how the season ended. By the time the last 20 games came and went, Royce let me down. He was more of a garbage-time catch-and-release player.
When big shots were needed, he failed to hit them. I projected a big year as Grayson Allen’s replacement, but Royce fell short of the Sixth Man I wanted him to be. Even with a career high in three-point % at 40%, his play was underwhelming.
Jake, host of the Suns Planet Podcast, ranked Ryan Dunn 6th, one of the lowest rankings from the Bright Side writing team.
Jake: I still think the Big Three are the best. Grayson Allen, while not as good as last year, was still a 43% sniper from three, and Big Meal O’Neale set a career high at nearly 41% from three.
Both Deebo and BMO are solid defenders. While I loved Dunn’s hustle and defense, he wasn’t blocking a lot of shots or getting a lot of steals. His three-point percentage was awful, and his free-throw percentage is the worst on the team.
But I have hope he can improve, but he is a higher ceiling Josh Okogie in my opinion.
Bruce Veliz was much higher on Cody Martin than anyone, ranking him 9th.
Bruce: I had him higher up as I felt in the small role he played, it was needed for the Suns team. If he was able to play longer for the team this year, I think he would have played himself to a solid role in the rotation due to his hustle and heart on the defensive end, something the Suns lack.
Holden Sherman had Collinn Gillespie ranked 13th. Why so low?
Holden: Gillespie’s impact was hindered by his lack of availability early on. While he was able to contribute down the stretch, the season was mostly unsalvageable at that point, and his impact was drastically different whether he was starting or coming off the bench.
Risers and Fallers
Then there were the risers this season. When we stacked the final rankings against the preseason list, there was no shortage of movement.
Ryan Dunn, for example, started the year ranked 11th and finished 4th, a jump of seven spots. And then there’s Collin Gillespie, who made the biggest leap, going from 17th all the way to 8th. Those moves alone say plenty about how this Suns season unfolded…and how thin this roster truly was.
These are rotational players, not starters. Yet between them, they combined to start 53 games for Phoenix and somehow ended up as two of the highest-rated players on the team.
It’s a testament to just how badly this roster was constructed. And you can feel it in the conversations around these guys. Suggest trading Ryan Dunn as a sweetener to move off a Bradley Beal deal, and people act like you’re asking them to part with Shawn Marion. The view of reality has been warped by the context of this season.
On the flip side, the biggest faller was Monte Morris, dropping six spots. We expected more from him, not necessarily because of his ability, but because we thought the coaching staff would actually use him. They didn’t. Tyus Jones, who logged far more minutes than Morris, fell too, sliding from 5th to 9th. Meanwhile, Mason Plumlee and Bol Bol each dropped three spots in the final SunsRank.
It all adds up to a pretty telling snapshot of a season that left the Suns — and those of us covering them — grasping for positives in a lineup where expectations rarely matched reality.
A huge thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s SunsRank.
We’ll circle back to it once the 2025-26 Phoenix Suns roster is set and run it back all over again. Because, as Forrest Gump once said, “You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.”
Please comment below with your thoughts on the final rankings. We’d love to hear where you agree, where you disagree, and what surprised you most.
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