With the Phoenix Suns having confirmed their preseason slate of games (and it has all worked out perfectly), attentions can now turn to the best way to use these tune-ups.
Specifically how head coach Jordan Ott has the unique opportunity to treat the five warm-ups as an extension of the team’s Summer League play and give the younger players who already look to have made improvements more run.
Suns should look to start trio of youngsters across five games
Although coach Ott will need to use these games to try some lineups he hopes will carry the team throughout the regular season, he should also consider starting center Khaman Maluach in a couple of games. The Suns rightly still want to bring him along slowly, but this would function both as a small reward for his Summer League showing and to see if he’s able to give them more during the regular season.
The early signs have already been encouraging, and making Mark Williams sweat a little for his own starting berth would be no bad thing. Bringing him back on a three-year, $38 million deal does not guarantee he will become a starter, and if Maluach can dominate for small stretches of these games it will only hammer that point home more.
There’s a case to be made to also give Rasheer Fleming a start somewhere in here as well. For completely different reasons though, dropping Miles Bridges into the starting lineup right away might rub a lot of fans up the wrong way, whereas Fleming is a sophomore who also showed glimpses both at Summer League but even going back to the series versus the Oklahoma City Thunder.
He also has a unique offensive skill set that the Suns will hope helps them win games over the course of a long season.
Rookie Koa Peat won’t start and he shouldn’t, but expect him to receive more minutes per game than he will during the regular season. The Aaron Gordon comparisons are exciting, and you just know he’s going to take a preseason game as seriously as anybody. If he can prove he’s capable of playing 12 minutes a night and gobbling up rebounds on both ends, his first campaign is going to be a massive success.
Improvement for Phoenix is going to have to come from within this season, and in this trio of youngsters they have the chance to use preseason to see if they can form a large part of a second unit that point guard Collin Gillespie can expertly run. There’s sneaky good depth on this roster, the time to give it some reps will be the early goings of preseason play.
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