PHOENIX — The Phoenix Suns sealed the fate of their miserable 2024-25 season with lopsided home losses to Golden State and Oklahoma City this week, eliminating them from playoff contention with two games left to play.
Despite Spotrac ranking the Suns at No. 1 in the NBA with a season-ending payroll and tax bill of a whopping $366.6 million, they failed to even qualify for the play-in round in the Western Conference. Considering their big three of Devin Booker, Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal earn $150.6 million, the team is one of the most disappointing in recent NBA history.
“Just no winning habits,” Booker said Tuesday night after his team lost by 38 points to the Warriors on national TV. A 13-point loss to the Thunder the next night brought their losing streak to eight, with all the defeats coming by double-digits.
“I don’t feel good about any of it,” Booker said.
Tuesday’s loss wasn’t their worst of the season. The Houston Rockets beat them by 39 at home on March 30.
Embarrassed?
“Oh, for sure,” Beal said. “Losing by 30 or 40? We might as well not show up.”
The question is what to do about a downturn without a single fix. Suns owner Mat Ishbia‘s problems go beyond his lineup; they also include his head coach, Mike Budenholzer, who took over a club that won 49 games last season under Frank Vogel and is currently at 35-45.
Budenholzer said after the debacle was complete Wednesday night that he hasn’t spoken yet to the owner about his future. “It’s raw,” he said. “We just lost. It’s been a tough season. There’s been no conversations.”
Pragmatically, Budenholzer has four years to go on his $50 million contract, and Ishbia is already paying off the final four years of Vogel’s five-year, $31 million deal after his firing last year. He also jettisoned Monty Williams two years ago.
In this era of multibillionaire NBA owners, eating the contract of a coach is not intolerable, said Golden State’s Steve Kerr, who, with San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich sitting out to tend to his health this season, is the de facto longest-tenured active coach in the league.
“We are more expendable,” Kerr said. “There’s so much money in the business now. I don’t think a lot of owners are that concerned with firing a guy and paying him off to go away. This is a business that we chose, and we all love it, but it’s not the most stable profession, that’s for sure.”
Budenholzer’s communication with some players—or lack thereof—became an episodic soap opera throughout the season. He went the month of January without talking to two of them: Beal and Jusuf Nurkić. He openly battled on the court with Booker and Durant, who once slapped the coach’s hand away during a time out.
“We’re competitive individuals,” Durant said at the time. “We both want to see things done the right way.”
There were plenty of ominous signs that a collapse was coming, including a lack of on-court leadership that “goes back to last season,” Beal said in an interview.
Because of NBA salary cap rules, the Suns are above the second apron and can’t easily move any of the big three without receiving players earning similar money in return. The contracts for the trio all go up next season.
The often-injured Beal, who has played in only 105 games in his two Suns seasons because of injury, is almost unmovable. He has two seasons remaining on his contract at $53.7 million and a player option of $57.1 million. Plus, he has a blanket no-trade clause he refused to wave at the last deadline. Beyond that, Beal’s agent is Mark Bartelstein, the father of Suns chief executive Josh Bartelstein.
Durant, who will turn 37 before next season begins, has one year to go on his contract at $54.7 million. He’s missed 20 games this season, the last five with a left ankle sprain. Considering the circumstances, he’s done for the season and was in street clothes during Wednesday’s game, when the Suns blew a 15-point lead to the Thunder, who demolished their opponents, 43-26, during the third quarter.
Booker has made it clear he’s not going anywhere. He’s the face of the franchise, wants to finish his career here, and has three seasons to go on his max contract worth $171.2 million, $53.1 million for next season.
Considering all of that, the Suns already have $218.7 million committed to players for next season, $30.8 million above the cap. They need a complete restructuring, Beal agreed.
“I think we let things bother us in games,” he said. “When we hit adversity, instead of working our way out of it, we dug a bigger hole and got into a funk. It’s tough because we’d show signs of getting out of it. There are moments where we compete, but there are moments when we don’t compete, too.”
That inconsistency harkens back to an apparent coaching problem that manifested itself before the trade deadline.
Beal, despite the no-trade clause, was the constant focus of rumors in January, when Budenholzer dropped him from the starting rotation to the bench. At the same time, the coach stopped playing big man Nurkić. In hockey parlance he was a healthy scratch for a month and didn’t play a minute in 15 consecutive games.
Nurkić said at the time he had no relationship with Budenholzer and hadn’t talked to him in two months.
Beal said it would have been nice if Budenholzer had explained his benching to him. “He still hasn’t explained it to me,” Beal said back then. “He just told me I was coming off the bench.”
Nurkić was traded to Charlotte, and Beal was never asked to wave his no-trade clause. Durant sat out the three key games through the Feb. 6 trade deadline for no announced reason. Beal missed four.
Near the deadline, rumors of a Durant return to Golden State also surfaced. When Durant nixed that, the Suns were forced to stand pat.
The damage, it seems, was done. The Suns were 25-25 at the deadline and are 10-20 since then with virtually the same roster, give or take a few fringe players.
Budenholzer scrambled his rotations as hope faded down the stretch: less court time for veteran point guard Tyus Jones, more for undrafted second-year pro Collin Gillespie; a return to favor for Ryan Dunn; an ill-fated gambit to start fan-favorite Bol Bol. Now Bol is back on the end of the bench.
Regardless of who took the floor, the Suns played from night to night with inconsistent energy levels, even from quarter to quarter within the same game, until flaming out completely the past few weeks.
In a postgame media session on Wednesday night, Booker blamed himself, but the team around him quit.
“I don’t think I shot the ball well this year,” said Booker, whose scoring dipped despite a shooting percentage roughly within career norms. “I needed to figure out ways how to win games at all costs and try to power my will on the other team and my team at the same time. Being a leader, using my voice more.
“Pretty much everything has just fallen short.”
The results speak for themselves.
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