PHOENIX — It has been a revealing shorthanded stint for the Phoenix Suns, with certain injuries apparently impactful enough to destroy their solid foundation.
A 97-81 loss to the Boston Celtics on Tuesday had the team that could step up through any circumstance once again M.I.A.
Devin Booker (right groin strain), Dillon Brooks (left hand fracture) and Jordan Goodwin (left calf strain) remained out. Those absences for the second straight game had the Suns looking like one of the worst teams in the league when they had gone a long way in establishing they were one of its better ones. They have now lost seven of their last 10 games.
Tuesday was not some type of large uphill task. The Celtics are great, now 38-19. But without Jaylen Brown (right quad contusion) and Jayson Tatum (right Achilles), the amount of talent in each rotation was just about equal, if not in the Suns’ favor. This was going to come down to who functioned better as a team, a draw Phoenix would take every night.
But it wasn’t close.
After a 26-21 Suns first quarter that got opened up by the second unit to an 11-point lead, Phoenix’s offense suffered another painful death.
As the starters trickled back in, the Suns scored five points in the final 6:40 of the first half and then a total of 11 points in the third quarter. That adds up to 16 points in 18:40. Boston went from down 11 to up 23 entering the fourth quarter.
Is Booker this important? Does he deserve MVP votes? You would have thought this was the case coming into the year but we had previously seen the Suns compete and compete well without Booker. They were 5-7 in games he missed prior to the All-Star break, and three of those losses were close. The four blowouts were against Oklahoma City twice, Houston and the Clippers.
Is his absence just now greatly magnified when he’s joined by Brooks in street clothes? That appears to be the case, but then again, the Suns fought like hell through a mess of a win on Saturday. Where did that team go so fast?
The Celtics, just as small as the Suns, grabbed 22 offensive rebounds to Phoenix’s nine.
“Just a frustrating part, because that’s what we do — they came in and stole our own mojo in our own building,” head coach Jordan Ott said.
“We gotta win it,” Ott added on the possession game. “There’s not going to be a game without Book, without Dillon that we cannot win the possession game. We have to win it. We have been like that all season with those guys, and without them, we have to win it.”
Beyond health, the Suns’ success over the rest of the season rests on how much Jalen Green can do for the offense and what Mark Williams does defensively. If both guys do their jobs on those ends well, Phoenix can still make a push for the six-seed once Booker gets back. If one of them does and the other doesn’t, they’ll tread water. If each of the two continue their play from the last week, the Suns are indeed in the trouble they look to be at the moment.
Green shot 5-of-18 for 13 points with three rebounds, one assist and one turnover. He is now shooting 36.9% in 11 games as a Sun.
Phoenix sure better hope that Green is still not 100%, because the players he has not been able to create separation against on downhill drives have been a major red flag. It’s not just him getting premium defensive assignments. Even Baylor Scheierman and Payton Pritchard contained him some on Tuesday. And when he was getting to the basket, Green was making the wrong decision, often shooting right into a rim protector’s path.
Green said after Sunday’s loss he felt like he was getting close to feeling like himself but is not quite there yet. Green’s lack of getting a defender’s hip to turn the corner has led to him settling for jumpers even more than he normally does, and the quality of each possession gets completely tanked when that happens.
Ott did not sound concerned when asked what he sees impacting Green’s inability to create space.
“Probably a little bit of all of the above,” Ott said. “I don’t think we’re getting great screens, I don’t think he has much of an advantage at times. I do think some of the physicality on drives is changing as the season progresses. And then I think a little bit is he’s just returning back to form. We knew some of this would happen. I’m sure he wants to speed it up as fast as possible but all of this is pretty normal.”
Williams had two points, five rebounds, an assist, two turnovers and two blocks in 18 minutes.
Williams’ regression has developed from Ighodaro having to close games to more dramatic measures becoming necessary, such as cutting down on Williams’ minutes even further or starting Ighodaro. You wonder when Ott will pull the trigger on those. It does not take an expert to see the Suns play better on both ends when Ighodaro is in.
To repurpose the numbers from Sunday, since Dec. 20 in a 31-game sample coming into Tuesday, the Suns’ defensive rating goes from 115.5 when Williams is in to 105.7 when he’s out, per NBA Stats. That split before Dec. 20, a 27-game sample, was 110.1 for when Williams was on and 114.7 when he was off. It’s dangerous to use those numbers as an all-indicative decider on if he’s been good or bad on a specific end of the floor but they at least confirm what the eye test has said for a solid two months.
Williams’ drop coverage simply hasn’t been good enough, nor his presence as a rim protector and rebounder. His best trait has been using his length to get deflections, but beyond that, teams are consistently attacking him in the paint with success. Beyond his poor metrics as a rim protector, for how much Williams attempts to block shots and takes on challenges at the rim, he now has only 10 blocks in his last 16 games. He is averaging 0.9 a game.
Phoenix doesn’t get much out of Williams offensively, with his type of skillset requiring playmakers that constantly get downhill and use his gravity as a lob threat. Williams is also not nearly the screener that Ighodaro is, and at this point hasn’t grown a two-man game chemistry with any ball-handlers in the way Ighodaro has. Williams could and has at times gotten more post touches, a part of his game that is not refined at this point, but that’s just forcing a way to get him the ball.
The complex part of the situation, of course, is Williams played his 54th game of the season on Tuesday, 10 more than his previous career high. Perhaps that is the biggest contributing factor to his decline. But if it is, all it does is prove Williams cannot sustain a full season, whether he’s healthy or not.
It’s a tricky dynamic for Ott to navigate the remainder of the season, and it might be time to at least extend back to a three-center rotation and see what he’s got in rookie Khaman Maluach. Either that or explore small-ball for the first time all year.
Derrick White finished with 22 points, eight rebounds and eight assists for Boston.
The lone positive for Phoenix was a strong Ryan Dunn game of 10 points, six rebounds and two assists in 25 minutes. He needed one.
Grayson Allen did not shoot it well at all, going 2-of-12 from the field and 1-of-9 on 3s. He did at least get to the line, where he was 9-of-10 to get to 14 points.
Official timelines were announced for both Brooks and Goodwin. Re-evaluation will be in 4 to 6 weeks for Brooks and 1 to 2 weeks for Goodwin. That seems ambitious for Goodwin given the multiweek type of injury calf strains tend to be, but maybe it was a light one.
