3 goals for the Phoenix Suns’ Bradley Beal for the 2023-24 season

The Phoenix Suns went and got their business done early this offseason, turning Chris Paul and Landry Shamet into the much more appealing Bradley Beal. A three-time All-Star who has toiled away on an aimless Washington Wizards franchise for the duration of his career so far.

Now 30-years-old, Beal arrives in Phoenix with no signature playoff run to call his own, and a desire to help the organization to win their first ever championship. The Suns have constructed the league’s only “Big 4”, at a time when the recently revealed CBA should make it harder than ever to achieve this.

There is a lot of pressure on Beal to prove that he was the missing piece of this expensive championship puzzle, but he is going to have to take his game up a notch.

Beal of course will be expected to be the third option on a team featuring Devin Booker and Kevin Durant, and to the credit of Beal, he has said all of the right things regarding his place in the pecking order so far. Still, this isn’t going to be as simple as morphing into late career Ray Allen on the Miami Heat and taking open jumpers.

That’s a role more likely to be opened for this guy, meaning Beal is actually going to have to turn in the best season of his career, in what will be year 12 for him, if this deal is going to look like the master stroke that owner Mat Ishbia hopes that it will be.

This roster is now set and going nowhere, and the championship window of the franchise is as open as it will ever be. Here is how Beal can have the most positive impact possible, and entrench himself as a fan favorite from the off next season. Failure is not an option, but neither is mediocrity, which is why 2023-24 is incredibly important for Beal.

3 goals for the Phoenix Suns’ Bradley Beal for the 2023-24 season.

3. Average 30 points per game.

Beal was one of the best scorers in the league from 2019-2021, when he averaged over 30 points per game throughout that two year stretch, and was named an All-Star once during that period as well. In the two years that followed, his last two in the league, that number has been 23.2 points in both seasons.

Can we put this down to the Wizards just being a bad team? What about a malaise setting in with Beal, once he’d secured a ridiculous bag and the league’s only no-trade clause to boot? Whatever it was, it felt like Beal, when healthy, was sleepwalking through some games, effortlessly putting up 20 points per night.

The plus here if you’re the Suns is that Beal is able to score so many points automatically. This despite every season for the past five years, Beal played for a team that continued to regress in offensive rating. Never once between 2018-19 and last season did the Wizards go forwards, and they slipped from 15th in 18-19 (110.2) to 22nd last season (113.7).

There is a bit of “chicken or egg” theory to those numbers however, as it is unclear how often Beal was dragging a poor supporting cast to a league average offensive rating with his scoring ability, or when he was doing his own one man show and the team were suffering as a whole because of it.

Not that the Suns will care. They know he can score 30 points per game, there is ample evidence that Beal is capable. He will have never had better teammates with which to do this, and with Booker and Durant going to get most of the attention offensively, he will have to step up as that third option that really punishes opponents.

For those who say his usage is going to tumble massively, and it will, which makes this goal difficult, there is another way to look at this. Booker is surely going to become more of a playmaker, and will have the ball more in his hands to find Beal as often as possible. Playing alongside a center like Deandre Ayton (for now…), the two-man game options are exciting too.

3 goals for the Phoenix Suns’ Bradley Beal for the 2023-24 season.

2. Have the best defensive season of his career.

Defending at a high level was absolutely not why the Suns went and got Beal. But if they are serious about winning a championship, and with the depth issues glaring at this point on their roster, then the team are going to need players to step up in ways that they never have in the past.

Beal is, to put it lightly, not a good defender. He moves incredibly well offensively without the ball, but on the defensive end, that has never quite translated. Is he capable of staying in front of smaller and quicker guards because of how agile he is? Absolutely. But when bigger opponents walk him down, Beal isn’t doing a lot to stop them.

Durant can be elite defensively for large portions of games, and Booker is underrated in this area as well. But both of these guys can’t take their defensive game to another level all year long if the Suns want to embark on a deep playoff run. They are not asking for miracles from Beal, just a level of defensive intensity he has never shown before.

There is a reason his net rating in five out of his 11 years in the league has been negative, and it is because his exceptional scoring is undermined by how often the Wizards got scored on when Beal was on the court. The 2017-18 season was the last time he had a serviceable rating on that end, at 106.3.

That Scott Brooks led team wasn’t very good, but they did have the lumbering big Ian Mahinmi patrolling the paint. The importance of Ayton to how Beal develops with the Suns is once again evident then, as he will be able to mop up some of the mistakes and miscues that Beal is going to make.

Last year the Wizards had a defensive rating of 115.9 when Beal was on the court, and three out of his last four seasons have finished in and around that number. That just isn’t good enough if you want to win a championship. Every star in Phoenix is going to have to bring a lot more defensively next season, and for Beal it simply has to be the best year of his career to succeed.

3 goals for the Phoenix Suns’ Bradley Beal for the 2023-24 season.

1. Be named an All-Star for the fourth time.

Being named an All-Star once more may seem superficial, but it is the meaning behind that nod which is the most important aspect here. The last time Beal was an All-Star was back in 2020-21, and since then his popularity to fans has dwindled because he played for a team in Washington that nobody really cared about.

So to come out of that situation, and make it back to the All-Star game, all in year one, would represent a huge move in the right direction. It would also likely mean that Beal is shooting at or above the 37.2 percent from deep he has managed for his career to date, which would be massive to the Suns if they plan on winning it all.

Really though it is hard for teams to have three All-Stars in a season. We look back on the four that the 60 win Atlanta Hawks team managed in 2014-15 and cringe. Contending teams generally have two players make the midseason exhibition, so if Beal was to be there, one of two fantastic things will have happened (assuming as well that there are no injuries).

The first is that Beal is playing so well in his new role that he is undeniable. If the Suns are rolling and he’s putting up close to 30 again on some scorching nights from deep, then there will be no choice than to get him into the game. Especially if the Suns find themselves top of the Western Conference.

Or else Beal has leapfrogged one of Durant or Booker in production, or dare we even say popularity, and so replaces one of them for the game. That may sound like a negative, but imagine how well Beal would have to be playing, and how quickly he would have had to have settled, for that to be the case.

That would in turn create competition internally, each star pushing the other to greater heights. Most of all, it would be vindication that Beal is the player he’s always thought he was and is capable of being. He has been put into a situation where he can thrive, and showing that in year one with a return to the All-Star game would be a great way to begin this chapter of his career.