14 players the Phoenix Suns signed past their prime
By Luke Duffy
The Phoenix Suns are going to enter the 2023-24 season as one of the few, true contenders in the NBA to win a championship. They have achieved this by pairing Devin Booker and Kevin Durant, with a new All-Star teammate in Bradley Beal, as well as Deandre Ayton.
The Suns also did a great job of signing players on minimum deals who, for the most part, are not ring chasing. Individuals such as Bol Bol, Keita Bates-Diop and Chris Eubanks still have a lot to prove in the league, and will be looking to use this platform to get paid in future.
Eric Gordon may be past his best and looking to win it all, but he is one of only a few players on this roster who you can say that about.
That hasn’t always been the case though, and like every organization in the league, the Suns are as guilty as anybody in investing in players who were past their best. The hope being that they could squeeze the last bit of high level play out of said player, with the prospect of selling a few jerseys surely lurking in there as a reason for adding them as well.
Even worse than this, are the players that the Suns truly believed could continue to be real contributors, before quickly realizing they were saddled with a dud. Shout out to A.C. Green, who you won’t find on this list (even though he should be here), but has the unfortunate distinction of finding himself in another recent, all-time worst compilation.
14. Kurt Rambis
An easy place to start here is with the grit and hustle of Kurt Rambis. Best known for those spectacles that were worn during the “Showtime” era of the Los Angeles Lakers dynasty, by the time Rambis got to the Suns, he was 31-years-old.
By today’s standards that is still young, especially when you consider Beal has been signed this offseason at 30 with the hopes he can have a huge impact for years to come. But Rambis is certainly not Beal, and the NBA of the late 80s and early 90s was an altogether different sport.
It is not that Rambis was overly bad during his 153 regular season games with the Suns (67 starts). It is just he gave more of the same that he’d shown on the Lakers, but was now older and playing for a group where the dirty work didn’t translate into fast break buckets by the likes of Magic Johnson and James Worthy.
By no means the worst offender on this list, Rambis would average 4.2 points and 5.1 rebounds in The Valley, and much like in Los Angeles, there were plenty of Suns fans who were big fans of what he did. Those averages aren’t even that much worse than what Rambis produced for the Lakers, and yet it just didn’t feel the same. Still, he did last four seasons with the team.