The single biggest reason why the 2025-26 Phoenix Suns flipped the script from a team 10 games under .500 to a 45-win playoff team was its defense. Jordan Ott’s crew finished 10th in the league in defensive rating after the Suns ended up 28th in the category the season prior, but the defensive issues are back in force to begin 2026-27.
Through a 1-4 start to the new season, the Suns rank 30th (dead last) in defensive rating by allowing 124.5 points per 100 possessions, according to Basketball-Reference data.
Suns' opponents are shooting a lights-out 41.1 percent from 3-point range, which gives Phoenix the worst 3-point defense in basketball through those five games. Opponents are also shooting 47.8 percent from the field overall — only seven NBA defenses have been worse than the Suns by that measure.
‘It’s gone out the window.’ Game Theory Podcast rips Suns’ defense
In a segment called “Real or Fake,” The Athletic’s Sam Vecenie and NBA reporter Jovan Buha discussed the Suns’ defensive issues on Vecenie’s Game Theory Podcast.
“Bottom six (defense) is real for the year,” Buha said of the Suns early struggles. “Which is wild with how lovable last year’s Suns team was, and how hard they played, and that identity, I just feel like it’s gone out the window a bit with this new group.”
Buha points out that opponents are shooting a ludicrous 54 percent from beyond the arc against the Suns’ starters. Now, that figure is of course rooted in small sample size and isn’t sustainable for the Suns nor their opponents, but it really exemplifies just how far the defense has fallen compared to a season ago.
A number of Suns starters get blame for defensive woes
Looking under the hood, Buha calls out two key suspects in the starting lineup for the defensive decline in Phoenix.
“I just think this group doesn’t work,” Buha said. “They’re going to have to navigate this Jalen Green situation, where I think they should probably move him to the bench and diminish his role, but I don’t know how that’s going to go over with him.”
Even though it’s early, it’s been abundantly clear that the Suns must make changes to the starting lineup. The starting unit of Jalen Green, Devin Booker, Dillon Brooks, Miles Bridges and Khaman Maluach has been among the worst lineups in basketball by net rating early on when filtering for lineups that have played as many minutes together. The overlapping skill sets of players in that starting group don’t help matters.
But it’s not just Green, as Buha goes on to call out the face of the franchise, Devin Booker, for his decline on the defensive end this year.
He points out that Booker ranks last in defensive rating on the team when looking at on-court, off-court statistics. “He has not been the top-20 player we are accustomed to him being the last half-decade or so," Buha said.
Book made great strides in recent years (especially last season) on the defensive end of the court. Though it was one of his obvious warts when he entered the NBA, his time spent with Team USA basketball and experience in the NBA overall led to him becoming a much more serviceable defender.
Perhaps Booker can still be that, but the personnel around him now is not putting him in a position to succeed on that end of the floor.
And while Buha was quick to point out the defensive woes of Phoenix’s dueling-banjos backcourt, Vecenie added yet another suspect.
Vecenie said he believes the offense is “weirdly” the end of the court Phoenix should be more worried about compared to its 30th-ranked defense, but that “Miles Bridges has been (expletive) terrible on defense.”
Vecenie argued that the second efforts are not there from Bridges on that end of the floor, which gets exacerbated by the fact that Bridges is “not fast enough” to stay in front of guards on switches and “not long enough” to impact opponents in the paint.
In effect, Vecenie says Bridges is having to play in “no man’s land,” which is allowing opponents to space the floor against him and get open looks.
Both Vecenie and Buha agreed that they’d be “surprised” if this Suns squad is a play-in team. It’s difficult to argue with that assessment, given not only the defensive struggles early on, but also the offensive sputtering that still needs to be corrected.
As Buha tells it, “This has been maybe the saddest situation in the NBA relative to preseason expectations.”
It’s early, but how much longer is the “it’s early” excuse going to work before the Suns dig themselves too big a hole?
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