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Despite getting their current four-game road trip off to a disappointing start, the Phoenix Suns earned a convincing win over the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference with Monday’s 127-124 victory over the Chicago Bulls.
Despite what the final score indicated, it really wasn’t that close. DeMar DeRozan (38 points on 16-of-28 shooting) and Zach LaVine (32-8-6) got theirs to make up for Chicago’s numerous absences, but Devin Booker (38 points on 14-of-23 shooting) was the best player on the floor in an otherwise balanced Suns attack.
Because so many fun storylines emerged from this battle between two top seeds in their respective conferences (and because yours truly was in attendance at the United Center), let’s take a look at a few things that stood out from the night.
Late in the third quarter, Booker suddenly didn’t look so spry. Whether he tweaked something on a dunk or just turned awkwardly after being double-teamed was not immediately clear, but he limped to the bench at the end of the period and was seen on the bench with an ice pack wrapped around his right knee.
He wasn’t taken to the locker room or looked at too extensively by the training staff, which was a good sign. It appeared he might be done for the night, but Booker checked back in around the 8-minute mark and stayed in until there was about a minute left.
“He said he was fine,” Monty Williams said. “He and Mikal [Bridges] had a few tweaks, but they seem to be okay.”
Williams wasn’t sure about the play, but Book clarified.
“Yeah, it was just a little knee-to-knee,” he said. “It’s straight.”
Speaking of Book, did we mention that 16 of his game-high 38 points came in the opening period? If you’ve been following the Suns, you’re aware this is nothing new, even as the team tries to downplay it.
“I just think it happens within the scheme of what we’re doing,” Williams said when asked about Booker being more aggressive in the opening frame. “He’s not going to grab the ball and taking 10 dribbles to go shoot a shot that’s contested, that kind of thing.”
“Nah, it’s just good,” Chris Paul said when asked the same question. “It’s good for us to get out like that. Pushing the tempo, staying aggressive, getting us into the bonus, whatever it may be. I think everybody right now is in a good flow, and especially Book in that first quarter.”
Of the 25.5 points per game that Booker is averaging this season, a league-high 9.0 of them come in the first quarter. He’s shooting 49 percent from the field and 38.2 percent from 3 (up from his season averages of 44.9 percent shooting overall and 37.3 percent from deep), and of his +6.0 point differential, a whopping +2.3 of it comes in the opening frame.
Over the last 12 games, Booker has stepped it up a notch, averaging a league-best 12.8 points per game on 57.8 percent shooting from the floor and 37.8 percent from downtown.
“He’s Devin,” Williams explained. “When you see him knocking down shots like that in rhythm, we feed off of it. It’s one of those things where you’re watching it, and it’s in the flow. It’s not something forced, and that’s what I liked about it. We all know Book can score the ball.”
“Just playing within the offense,” Booker agreed. “I understand how our team is built, that there’s going to be opportunities to score at all times. I’ve been in the system for a minute now, and there’s no reason to force anything. We have too many talented players out there that are gonna cause help. You have Chris dissecting the defense, you have Mikal catching the ball and going, Jae [Crowder] is a playmaker out there too. So there’s no need to force.”
Especially when you’re lights out in those first quarters.
The baseline comparisons between this year’s Chicago Bulls and last year’s Phoenix Suns are easy to pinpoint.
Both teams took an unexpected leap up the standings from the year prior, when expectations were set somewhere around “good but not great playoff team.” Both franchises were under new management at the time, with fresh faces in the head coaching chair and behind the general manager’s desk. Both featured long-suffering, All-Star caliber shooting guards withering away on losing teams in an unfair blow to their reputation, and both had an older but respected star veteran come in and help shift the mindset back to a winning culture.
The Suns and Bulls aren’t really buying the similarities, though.
“I mean, to an extent, but the style of play is a little different,” Cam Johnson said. “The way they play is a little different. But they’re a good team. Bottom line is they’re a very good team, top of the East.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if you can necessarily compare yourself to anybody, I don’t know if that’s good because everybody’s a little different,” Bulls coach Billy Donovan said. “But I would say this: I do see a lot of similarities between Chris Paul and DeMar DeRozan in terms of the impact that Chris made when he came to Oklahoma City. It was a huge impact. I think DeMar’s made a huge impact here.”
Donovan mentioned a trip DeRozan took down to Champaign, Illinois, to take part in Bulls rookie Ayo Dosunmu’s jersey retirement at the University of Illinois, noting how much it reminded him of a time in OKC where Paul bought out an entire box for his teammates at a playoff game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Seattle Seahawks so they could all watch it on the road together.
“They go about it differently, but they’re very, very similar,” Donovan said. “I think both guys are students of the game. I think both guys love the game. I think both guys take time with younger players to invest in younger players to help them. I think they both have really, really great dispositions about themselves.”
As for the Booker-LaVine comparisons (and endless debates over who’s better), Donovan struck a chord that should sound familiar to Suns fans.
“He’s a great guy, he’s team-first guy, he wants to win, and I think the same thing can be said for Zach,” Donovan explained. “So really, I think the players and their personalities and who they are and their relationships create the culture, the chemistry and the connection. I think in order to be a really, really good team, you’ve gotta have those components.”
Williams, while praising the foundation that Donovan had laid out in his brief time in the Windy City, agreed that at the end of the day, it comes down to the players.
“That’s the thing that I think gets lost in any program is your players get better,” he said. “They’re talented, they work hard, they commit. I say this all the time, no coach comes into a gym and asks guys to not get back on defense. ‘Please, don’t contest shots, and you three, come late tomorrow.’ Like, no coach does that. The players commit and coaches are blessed to do what we do.”
Kudos to The Four Point Play’s David Nash on this one, since he’s been meticulously tracking Deandre Ayton’s progress on this front for awhile now, but it’s worth mentioning again: After Monday’s win over the Bulls, DA is shooting 65.3 percent on hook shots, per NBA.com.
That is absurd efficiency, and unglamorous as it might appear to the average viewer, that hook shot is rapidly becoming one of the Suns’ most reliable threats on offense.
“It’s a huge weapon for us, just catching it down there, finishing anyway,” Chris Paul said.
When the Bulls made their late push and pulled within single digits in the fourth, Phoenix stabilized with a Jae Crowder 3. Then, after another stop, Ayton patched up the wound for good with a quick right hook. A 9-point lead suddenly ballooned to 14, the Bulls needed a timeout, and the game was basically over, despite an improbable push from Chicago’s third string in the final minute.
“I thought the one that he got that made them call a timeout was one of those that gave us a bit of a buffer,” Williams said. “And then we came out of that timeout and executed for another, I think it was a foul on that particular play. It wasn’t anything that we choreographed and said, ‘We’re trying to get DA here.’ They were blitzing pick-and-roll, he was diving, and because we had shooters on the backside, he was able to create some offense for himself.”
The beautiful part about it is the Suns weren’t even necessarily scheming for it in this case. But given how dangerous it’s become — and how much it sounds like the coaching staff is trying to hammer home its importance to DA himself — don’t be surprised to see more hooks moving forward.
“I think everybody believes in that shot, and it kind of drives everybody nuts when he has a guy pinned down there and he fades away,” Williams said. “That’s the one where you’re like, ‘Dude, you got this jump hook that nobody’s stopping. You gotta ride that thing out until they do stop it.’”
Because he’s good at basketball, because he’s a wealthy trendsetter with a supermodel girlfriend, and because he’s a baby-faced assassin for a team that’s really stinking good, Devin Booker is bound to draw the ire of opposing fanbases. That’s just how it is.
But on the road, Booker seems to relish the opportunity to play in front of hostile crowds. For his career, he averages more points on the road (24.3 per game) than at home (22.1 per game). This season is no different, with Book vaulting himself into a different stratosphere away from the friendly confines of the Footprint Center:
Facing a packed house at the United Center Monday night, Booker once again seemed to enjoy silencing court-side shit-talkers, including one who made a rude (and highly inaccurate) dig about his girlfriend, Kendal Jenner.
Book’s response, on the very next play? Burying a baseline jumper right before the first-quarter buzzer.
“We’re some road warriors, we get hype on the road,” Booker said. “I think we know we have to lean on each other even more when we touch the road. We might have a couple family members here, but it’s majority just us as a team. So we feed off our own energy, and we do have a couple assholes on this team that, when you hear something like that, it gets us going a little bit.”
Booker helps set the tone as one of the Suns’ leaders, but that road warrior mentality extends up and down the roster. Phoenix’s 21-5 road record is just a hair behind their 22-5 home record, and it’s also better than every other NBA’s team’s home record except for the Golden State Warriors.
The Bulls deciding to bring the Toronto Raptors mascot beef up again was just the icing on the cake.
For his part, Booker said he didn’t see Benny the Bull bring out the inflatable T-Rex. When asked whether the joke had run its course yet, he answered with the type of grin that only a certified road killer would wear after dropping 38 on an opposing team while being heckled every step of the way.
“I mean, y’all tell me,” he said. “Everybody else keeps the joke going. It’s my job to go out there and do what I did tonight.”
Bless Devin Booker for being one of those aforementioned “assholes” he described, but it’s also good to know that Mikal Bridges is not one of them:
JaVale McGee had himself a nice night with 16 points, 8 rebounds and 3 blocks in 23 minutes off the bench, but it was his wide-open 3-pointer that had the opposing fans groaning the loudest.
His attempt to keep a straight face while describing the play was too good to leave out.
Shooters shoot, indeed.
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