Role reductions are rarely welcomed by players earning top salaries. Carmelo Antonio literally Serious at the idea of coming off the bench when it was presented to him at his introductory press conference with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Russell Westbrook spent most of his first season with the Los Angeles Lakers fighting a possible benching and his second season reluctantly accepting it. It is an inevitable part of life in the NBA. Superstars, for the most part, have been superstars their entire lives. But they age. In the end, it makes sense for them to play less. They rarely take it well.
Bradley Beal is still getting used to the idea.
The Suns moved Beal, a three-time All-Star, to the bank for the first time on Monday. He called the move “a little difficult” after a 10-point win over the 76ers, but to his credit, he didn’t fight it.
“Coach made a decision,” Beal explained. “I’m not going to sit there and argue with him. I’m not going to sit here and be a distraction. I’m not going to sit here and be a jerk.” Far from it, Beal was not only a model citizen on Monday, but arguably Phoenix’s best player.
Coming off the bench for the first time since 2016, Beal scored 25 points on 10-of-14 shooting. Phoenix won his minutes by 14 points in the 109-99 victory, and lost his minutes on the bench by four points. In terms of shooting and playing time, Beal was still an integral part of Phoenix’s game plan on Monday. The only difference was that he came off the bench. It was a change that made a lot of intuitive sense.
It’s no secret that the Suns could try to trade Beal for Jimmy Butler right now. Beal’s no-trade clause will make that difficult even if the Suns can find a candidate for his contract (which has two years and more than $110 million left after this season). But the mere attempt is proof that the Suns know what we’re doing: Beal is a questionable fit at best with Devin Booker and Kevin Durant. There are obvious reasons for this. It’s hard to build a worthwhile defense with three top salaries that emphasize offense. It’s difficult for a single ball handler to be especially valuable on a roster where he shares the ball with many other star handlers, let alone the point guards who mattered this season. All three have had health problems.
But put more simply, Beal, Booker and Durant do mostly the same things. There are two types of offensive superstars: those who create leads and those who make difficult shots. In theory, a star can do both. Durant, in his prime, did it. A great team should have both, and Durant’s Warriors teams were a great example of one that did. Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson created leads. Defending them stretches defenses to such an extent that Golden State had an endless parade of easy layups once those defenses collapsed. Durant gave them a historic shooter to punish defenses when they didn’t.
Beal and Booker are not Curry and Thompson. They aren’t taking advantage of their remarkable ball skills to create looks for others, at least not to the extent that an advantage-creating star should. They do not collapse defenses or stretch them. They take shots that most players make at low percentages and hit them at reasonable percentages. Durant, at this stage, is pretty much the same. They do not amplify each other. There is not much value gained by playing them together.
Then Mike Budenholzer broke them up on Monday. It worked. Beal, the weakest of the three stars, came to punish worse bench lineups. It was cool when Booker and Durant were tired. They were still doing pretty much the same things, but at least they could do them at different times, and the players sharing the court with them could actually do different things, especially defending and rebounding.
This doesn’t magically fix the Suns. They’re still paying three players with similar skills roughly $150 million combined. That doesn’t leave much room for balance, and even if it did, the Suns don’t exactly have the draft capital to trade him. This is still an uneven list. Budenholzer is simply rolling out the least lopsided lineups he has at his disposal. Even if that doesn’t fix the Suns, it puts them in the best possible position to succeed given the limitations they still have.
