Sorting through the massive 7-team trade that saw Kevin Durant go from the Phoenix Suns to the Houston Rockets is a gargantuan task.
If you did that, you would see that the No. 47 pick in this year's draft came to the Suns from that deal. In addition to Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks -- two players who started for the Suns this past season -- the Suns picked up a bunch of draft picks, including the Philadelphia 76ers' second-round pick this year.
Unsurprisingly, given their history, the Suns did not sit at 47 and wait to see who fell to them. Instead, they packaged that pick to move up to pick No. 30 at the very end of the first round, drafting Arizona forward Koa Peat.
Suns drafted Koa Peat
Peat is the ultimate winner, a player who excelled with Team USA at every level in addition to starting on a Final Four team at Arizona this season. He reads the game extremely quickly and is bursting with explosiveness. His lack of a 3-point shot is certainly concerning, and it pushed him all the way down the draft board, but at some point a player is too great a value to let slide.
It certainly doesn't hurt than Peat is a Tempe native who went to Arizona. Phoenix has a major hole at power forward, with Dillon Brooks playing down a position and Royce O'Neale an unwanted veteran presence in that spot. Drafting a player who can grow into the role makes a lot of sense.
That trade up was made possible by not merely accepting the lowball offers for Kevin Durant but extracting value on the margins. They could have merely added the No. 10 pick and the two wings in Green and Brooks, but they pushed Houston to include a bevy of second-round picks as well.
That set them up to move up both last year and this year. In 2025 it was Rasheer Fleming who landed in Phoenix after they traded up to the 31st pick. This year, they made their way to the 30th pick and took Koa Peat.
Suns did their best with the Durant trade
The Suns have mortgaged the future and still have a ways to go until they have fully paid out from the original Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal trades. They will be prevented from maximizing the first round, pushing them to find creative ways to add first-round talent.
They have now done so in two consecutive drafts thanks to the Kevin Durant trade. And Koa Peat could prove to be a difference-making starter for the Suns and help them take a step forward even without their own first-round picks.
Sift through the seven teams and 23 assets and you get a simple truth. The Suns may have horribly botched their moves to try and build a contender around Devin Booker and Kevin Durant, but when it came time to move on, they did so against a difficult market and came out with a large draft return that continues to deliver.
It doesn't make the pain from those failed years go away, but it certainly helps fans feel just a bit better.
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