3 reasons Phoenix Suns’ season could end with a championship in 2024
By Luke Duffy
The Phoenix Suns will enter the 2023-24 season as one of the favorites to win what would be their first ever championship. Owner Mat Ishbia putting the organization in a great position to do so, having been extremely aggressive this offseason.
The addition of Bradley Beal being met with acclaim from fans and media members alike, although the future of center Deandre Ayton remains as murky as ever. Add Devin Booker and Kevin Durant to the mix, and it is clear this is a team that has plans on going all the way in the postseason.
In fact there are several reasons to genuinely believe that a first championship is exactly how this coming season is going to end.
New head coach Frank Vogel has already achieved this feat with the Los Angeles Lakers, and joins having worked with superstars of the highest order in LeBron James and Anthony Davis in the past. The fact he couldn’t make it work with Russell Westbrook, as we have since found out, has nothing to do with his abilities as a coach either.
Really then the Suns are set up to do well, with our regular season prediction of 54-28 seen as quite conservative by some. How exactly they will go about this task remains to be seen, but these three factors give them an edge over every other team in the league in trying to win it all.
3. They have two of the top 10 players in the league
It starts with simple math and that is the fact the Suns have Durant and Booker – two of the 10 best players in the entire league – on the same roster. There is not one other franchise that can also claim the same to be true, be it because of injury history, age, or both.
No matter what series the Suns go into, even if they don’t have the best player, they’ll have two of the top three. That counts for something, and really there are few better than Durant and Booker individually at this point as well. The latter having averaged a league best 33.7 points during the playoffs last season.
Related Story. Updated rest rules huge win for Suns and Durant. light
Obviously these two players alone mean that the Suns can bail themselves out of any failed offensive play, and they don’t even need to run that much to let both of these guys cook. Coach Vogel is hardly going to call a ton of isolation plays for either, but he could and the team would still score plenty of baskets, and that’s exactly the point here.
Adding Beal, a top 30 player, to the mix just seems unfair at this point. But this isn’t even about him. In a playoff series, or even the regular season, they will usually have the best player on the court. Sometimes the two best, and at worst two out of the top three. How is anybody else meant to compete with that?