Suns may have made wrong player the scapegoat for disaster season

The NBA Playoffs might be in full swing, but much is still being made of the Phoenix Suns and their dreadful 36-46 season. A record made even worse by the fact they somehow started the season 8-1, and which has already seen head coach Mike Budenholzer lose his job. If the rumors are to be believed - and there's plenty of them right now - more change is coming to The Valley.

Kevin Durant is likely on the way out, while a new and intriguing trade idea for Bradley Beal might also just have presented itself. Devin Booker is still hanging out in Phoenix since the season ended - a great sign for his future with the franchise - but beyond that, owner Mat Ishbia has to sift through the wreckage and put a competitive roster together for next season.

Jusuf Nurkic may have been the wrong scapegoat for horror season.

If you cast your mind back to the trade deadline, the Suns were finally able to rid themselves of limited big man Jusuf Nurkic. It cost them breaking up their remaining valuable first round pick into three less attractive firsts to get it done, but Nurkic was sent packing to the Charlotte Hornets. This was also done as a cost-saving measure, which we will see the true impact of this summer.

Taking the cap sheet implications out of the equation for a minute though, and was Nurkic made the poster boy for a terrible season that wasn't really his fault? The belief was that ditching him for a more mobile big in Nick Richards would make the team better - but rather than give the team more bounce - most nights Richards looked like the backup he himself had been with the Hornets.

We still don't know the full details of why Nurkic was forced to sit on the bench and receive DNPs before being traded, but it certainly involved previous head coach Mike Budenholzer. The organization opting to back their coach over the player - but with Budenholzer now gone and having also failed to gel with the likes of Booker and Beal - perhaps the team backed the wrong horse here.

It's not like Nurkic was an indispensable piece of their group, but let us not forget that previous head coach Frank Vogel had the Suns as an able to cobble together an above average defensive efficiency with Nurkic at the center (12th, 113.7). On top of that, he also played more games (76) than any of Durant (75) Booker (68) or Bradley Beal (53).

This season he was around for the hot start, while he started in 23-of-25 games that he played in Phoenix before being moved. The Suns gave up 116.2 points while he was on the court which is obviously not good, and yet is somehow better than the 117.7 they managed throughout the course of the season.

Perhaps the bigger problem here was Budenholzer trying to turn Nurkic into Brook Lopez 2.0, with Nurkic averaging a career high 2.4 attempts from deep while with the Suns. That might even have led to the friction between head coach and player - but when you consider he took less than one attempt from 3-point range in seven full seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers - it was never going to work.

It made sense in 2025 to try this out - but when it was clear Nurkic wasn't going to be able to turn into a stretch five - he slid out of the rotation fast. In hindsight - to pin a lot of their woes on Nurkic to the point of trading him - doesn't look like the smartest call by the franchise. He was part of the problem for sure, but there's a lot more to fix in Phoenix before they can contend again.