According to Keith Smith of Spotrac, who spoke with a member of the front office at Summer League in Las Vegas, the Phoenix Suns have no intention of hitting a full reset, and the Kevin Durant trade was completed with the intention of retooling their roster around Devin Booker, rather than planning for the future. That's not good.
“When it became clear that was a direction we could do, we set a goal of not just going with a package of all young players and picks. We want to compete. We feel like getting Dillon (Brooks) and Jalen (Green), along with Khaman (Maluach) in that deal gives us a great balance of veterans, mid-career players and a young big man to help us get after it right away,” a Suns front office executive told Smith.
Unfortunately for Suns fans, that’s the wrong outlook.
Suns botched the Kevin Durant trade
On the surface, it makes sense for the Suns to retool instead of rebuild. They don’t own full control over their first-round picks until 2032, meaning tanking is effectively impossible, as they wouldn’t get to benefit from it in the draft.
Because of that, the Suns should theoretically try to be as competitive as possible. But that still doesn’t mean they handled the Durant trade well. In fact, they handled it wrong. Flat out wrong.
Rather than prioritizing a decent young piece in Jalen Green and a veteran wing in Dillon Brooks, the Suns should have doubled down on picks. But more specifically, they should have tried to get their own picks back, or added the picks of another team who could be bad in the next few years.
The Houston Rockets, the very team they made the Durant deal with, owns a couple of their first-round picks. Rather than pushing for Green, they should have tried to get their own selections back.
Or, if there was another team gunning for Durant, they should have taken the bet that they would be bad in a few years. They could have tried to get Milwaukee Bucks picks, Golden State Warriors picks, Sacramento Kings picks, or future LA Clippers picks—teams that may not be great a few seasons down the line.
And even when Durant made his list of preferred destinations public, they should have tried to get any first-round picks that could have panned out. They should have restocked their draft cabinet, at least a little bit.
Instead, they only got one first-rounder in the Durant deal: The No. 10 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, which turned into Khaman Maluach.
Since the Durant trade went down, the Suns have actually done a pretty good job of surrounding Booker with promising young talent. From Green to Maluach to Rasheer Fleming to Koby Brea to Mark Williams, Phoenix has an okay group in town.
But still, that’s not enough to compete in the West. And hearing that they weren’t even trying to prioritize getting high-value first-round picks in the Durant deal is an extreme disappointment.