With limited preseason opportunities for the Phoenix Suns to find cohesion as a team, their three biggest stars sat out of game 3, missing a chance to build familiarity with both their new system and each other.
The Phoenix Suns rested Ricky Rubio, Deandre Ayton, and Devin Booker in Saturday night’s preseason game against the Portland Trail Blazers.
“Rested” is a generous term. The more accurate way to put it would be, “Voluntarily sat them out.”
It is not uncommon for teams to sit their stars during preseason games. The regular season consists of 82 grueling battles, so most teams understandably preserve their best players’ bodies whenever possible.
But the Phoenix Suns are not most teams.
They are coming off a 19-win season, they have a new head coach, a new system, and a bus load of new players. Electing not to play their top guys blatantly dismisses an opportunity to improve.
The pregame post suggested the Suns needed to work on figuring out both how to play in Monty Williams’ new “0.5” system and learn to play with each other.
Both of those are tough to do from the bench.
The best way to learn is by doing, and basketball is no exception. Practices and scrimmages are fine, but there is nothing like a live-action game to expedite the learning process.
The Suns, in an already too-short preseason schedule, had four opportunities to take advantage of playing in a new system full of fresh faces in a competitive game that didn’t count against their record.
Instead, they kindly passed on one of those chances like it was the vegetable casserole dish at a buffet.
The NFL is notorious for severely restricting playing time for all starters during their preseason games due to risk of injury. The big difference here is that football requires full body armor to play and basketball does not.
Sure, there is injury risk playing basketball, but it is exponentially safer than football. Sitting out players because the team is afraid they are going to garner some kind of newfound discomfort is just simply overly cautious.
In this case, the risk is worth the reward.
One could argue resting the team’s big three gives other players opportunities to shine. It is true Coach Williams wanted to solidify his 10-man rotation by the end of the third preseason game, so diverting minutes to these guys helped this cause, but at what expense?
With all due respect to Cheick Diallo and company, playing an extra 10 minutes a piece in one preseason game wasn’t going to be what makes or breaks their chances to crack the top 10.
That playing time could have gone to the three guys who the Suns expect to lead this team and help them take the next step toward success.
To be fair, it isn’t as if playing Rubio, Ayton, and Booker 10 to 15 minutes in one preseason game was going to add several tally marks to the win column.
In fact, the Suns, sans their studs, beat the Portland Trail Blazers, who notably played Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum over 30 minutes each.
Maybe that means the Suns don’t need the likes of Rubio, Ayton, and Booker to win games.
Just joking.
It means the preseason doesn’t mean much.
But it is because it doesn’t mean much that the Suns should have taken the opportunity to build that ever-so-important team chemistry, instead of giving Jared Harper extra run.
Look for the Suns to reinsert their headliners in preseason game 4 against the Denver Nuggets back home in Phoenix on Monday.