Evaluating The Phoenix Suns Heading Into All-Star Weekend

Alex Len And Eric Bledsoe Are The Future

After last night’s loss to the Rockets in which James Harden scored 20 of his 40 points in the fourth quarter, Hornacek noted, “We just don’t have the James Harden to take over the game,” which brings us to an interesting quandary.

With the young guns on the back-burner for now, the key issue at hand is trying to figure out who comprises this team’s core for the long-term. We can talk about how promising players like Eric Bledsoe, Alex Len, Goran Dragic, Markieff Morris and Marcus Morris are until we’re blue in the face, but this franchise — the fourth winningest franchise in the NBA — has its sights set on a championship.

General manager Ryan McDonough has done an excellent job of stockpiling assets. He fleeced the Los Angeles Clippers in the Eric Bledsoe trade and has put together a young roster with enough talent to compete now and enough promise to compete over the next 4-5 years as well.

But there’s a difference between competing and contending. As of right now, the Suns can compete with anyone, but they also can’t afford to take a single night off like some of the West’s more talented, veteran teams. Is this current core good enough to contend for a title in the future?

At this point in time, we can really only identify two players as essentials to this team’s core moving forward (excluding the younger, seldom used players, since those sample sizes are too small to draw any conclusions from). Those two players are Eric Bledsoe and Alex Len.

Since Dec. 15, when Len moved into the starting lineup, the Suns are 16-9 in games in which he’s played (we’re excluding the nine minutes he played against the Portland Trail Blazers since he was injured in that one). At only 21 years old, he’s shown the potential to be a game-changing shot blocker, rebounder and stretch-five.

As for the 25-year-old Bledsoe, the Suns locked him into his summer mega-deal and he’s leading the team in scoring (17.2 PPG), assists (5.9 APG) and steals (1.7 SPG). Even if the Suns wanted to trade him, that contract would be hard to move even with Bledsoe playing at a borderline All-Star level.

For now, those are the only two players we can say with near 100 percent certainty are a part of this team’s core. The Morris twins have shown incredible progress, but they still need to work on their rebounding and defense.

Their increasingly high trade value makes them expendable if the perfect deal comes along as well, though a bit more maturation (and a bit fewer technical fouls) would make them more intrinsic to this team’s long-term future.

Goran Dragic is a fan favorite and is still the face of the franchise, but him re-signing with the Suns in free agency this summer is not guaranteed by any means. Isaiah Thomas is young, but his team-friendly contract makes him movable if the right deal emerges.

P.J. Tucker is one of the team’s older players, Brandan Wright is a free agent this summer and Miles Plumlee and Gerald Green may not have long-term futures in Phoenix. There are tons of movable assets on this team, and McDonough should capitalize on the right deal for a superstar if he finds one.

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