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The Phoenix Suns had already locked up home-court advantage throughout the playoffs and tied the franchise’s single-season wins record before Tuesday’s showdown with the Los Angeles Lakers, but that didn’t prevent it from being memorable either.
In one fell swoop, the Suns set a new franchise record with 63 wins and officially eliminated the Los Angeles Lakers from play-in contention — not playoff contention, but even securing a spot in the play-in.
Considering the Lakers had a higher over/under win total than their Pacific Division rival, that most pundits picked LA to come out of the West and that this marks two straight years Phoenix has sent the 17-time champs packing, Tuesday’s win was the kind of extra-special moment that Suns fans have grown accustomed to over the last two years.
In light of a historic night, here are five observations from Phoenix’s 121-110 win over LA.
Finishing with a game-high 32 points, 7 rebounds and 4 assists, Devin Booker tormented the Lakers all night. He made 12 of his 22 shots, went 6-for-9 from 3-point range and was one rim-out away from hitting seven 3s in a regular-season game for the first time in his career. This, of course, ignores how he drilled eight 3s in last year’s closeout Game 6 against the Lakers.
Book once again relished the task of dominating LA in the Suns’ overwhelming third quarter that blew the game wide open. He dropped 16 points in the period, including 11 straight to help Phoenix open up a 22-point lead…and he loved every second of it.
In four meetings this year, Book torched the Lakers with 27.0 points, 6.3 assists and 5.8 rebounds per game on .500/.500/1.000 shooting splits with a +18.5 point differential. Including last year’s playoff series, those numbers jump to 28.6 points, 6.0 rebounds and 5.5 assists a night on .492/.464/.946 shooting splits with a plus/minus of +10.4.
It’s not just the scoring, though. Look at the disdain on such a nonchalant, flamboyant pass! This man hates the Lakers as much as Suns fans do, and every ounce of his play reflected it.
In the process, Booker expanded on his franchise lead for most 30-point games, giving him 140 such performances. The franchise’s all-time scoring leader, Walter Davis, is second on that list with 90. That’s a 50-game gap, and Booker is still only 25 years old!
More than that, it’s his growth as a leader and model Sun that has helped him evolve into the face of the franchise. It’s no longer by default, being surrounded by G League talent, but rather, it’s gestures like signing his game-worn jersey for broadcaster Al McCoy after win No. 63. He just gets it.
“I think he’s done it naturally,” coach Monty Williams said of Booker’s leadership. “I think Book is the kind of guy that doesn’t force it or try to be something that he’s not. I think he’s growing in leadership, he’s growing and learning what it’s like to be not just the face of a franchise, but the face of a winning franchise.”
It’s been the type of whirlwind year Suns fans could’ve only dreamed for Book in his early years, when he wasted away on 19-win teams and the only relevant Suns talking point was which team would eventually steal him away. But with three All-Star appearances, a Finals run, an Olympic gold medal and a likely All-NBA selection under his belt, Devin Booker is finally on basketball’s biggest stage where he belongs.
It’ll take more time, and will probably require a ring to get there, but Devin Booker will go down as the greatest Phoenix Sun of all time. And to think, it all started with a partnership that began before CP3 even showed up.
“When I came here, that was one of the main conversations I had was with Book at this place called The Sanctuary,” Williams said. ‘He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Coach, whatever you need, I’ll do it.’ And that was before he was looked at the way that he is now. That was the foundation for me, his commitment to the program and just partnering with us to build this thing.”
As the only player on the roster who’s been in Phoenix for more than four years, Booker is well aware of the long and difficult path it’s taken to get to this moment.
“I’ve been here seven years now,” he said at Tuesday’s shootaround. “I don’t wanna sound cliché, but we started from the bottom and now we’ve built our way to the top. It didn’t happen overnight, so being a part of the process was a lot of fun.”
But Booker isn’t the only one who’s witnessed the franchise’s growth firsthand. As rookies, Deandre Ayton and Mikal Bridges suffered through that 19-win campaign too. Four years later, they’ve gone from 63 losses to 63 wins, ushering in the third-fastest turnaround from NBA-worst to best in league history.
“Me and Mikal looking at each other, four years ago, bro, we was at the bottom pit of the barrel,” Ayton said. “We almost thought we wasn’t a part of the league. For a minute, I thought we was paying people to play us my rookie year, the way how we was losing. But we here, man.”
Williams said people approach him all the time and tell him the Suns are “their baby.” Booker has always wanted to build a winner in Phoenix, and for Ayton’s part, he wishes he could see a “Transformation Tuesday” of how the franchise and the city have evolved in that time.
“It’s just that type of passion and that grit and all the things we went through,” Ayton said. “To be here today and say we got 63 wins is truly a blessing. You just gotta embrace stuff like that and be very grateful, ’cause this is an amazing team.”
As mentioned in our Coach of the Year writeup for Monty Williams, the Suns are only the third team in NBA history to improve by 10+ wins in three straight seasons. After putting in the work and adding legitimate talent around the young core, Tuesday’s win was just another fruit of all that labor.
“I keep telling you, that’s how life go,” Ayton said. “What goes around, comes around. That’s how it is, and it was Phoenix’s turn to come around.”
The Suns still have three games to go, and the bigger objective isn’t done by any means. Only 26 teams in NBA history have won at least 63 times in an 82-game season, and 15 of them went on to win it all.
That means it’d be nothing short of traumatic if this Suns team doesn’t walk away from their upcoming playoff run with 16 wins. But as much as this group knows what the ultimate goal is, there’s a reason Williams keeps the focus on “doing the next right thing.” You can’t skip steps to win a championship, and with such a long, uphill climb ahead, taking a minute to appreciate the little things makes the journey more enjoyable.
“We talk about it all the time, you gotta celebrate everything,” Chris Paul said. “All this stuff doesn’t happen overnight.”
As easy as it’d be to take credit for the Suns’ record-setting night, Williams praised his players, the coaching staff, ownership, general manager James Jones, equipment manager Jay Gaspar and team travel coordinator Denise Romero for everything they do to help the organization be successful.
“I’m grateful for the guys that I get to coach and work with, but I’m also grateful that God blessed me to be able to come here and be the coach of the Phoenix Suns, ’cause we had no idea,” Williams said. “When I came down the escalator to my press conference, I didn’t know what to expect. I just knew I had a lot of work to do, but in that working, in that process, I’ve been with some really good people, and I’m glad to celebrate this with them.”
It’s not just talk for Williams and the Suns either; it was the head coach’s idea to present the game ball for that historic 63rd win to Gaspar, who’s been with Phoenix for 34 years but wasn’t able to join the team at All-Star Weekend as part of the coaching staff due to budget and personnel restrictions.
That “shared success is the best success” mentality trickles down throughout the roster.
“The last five seconds in the game, all I could do is just tell everybody how much I appreciate them,” Ayton said. “I was just telling everybody thank you, especially putting up with me. We did this. And there’s a lot more to go, but on this team, we celebrate everything. That was a joyful moment to really embrace everything.”
“That’s the difference in Monty, and I don’t know, how everybody else operate,” Paul added. “Everybody on our team, everybody’s just always thoughtful, and it’s always about the next guy. And that’s what makes our team special.”
On such a joyous night, it’d be easy to forget that coming into the evening, the Suns were not playing their best basketball. In fact, they were coming off back-to-back losses for just the fourth time this season, and both came against opponents so shorthanded that half the fanbase needed a reminder there was no need to panic.
Even so, Williams and the team had mentioned how they needed to find their joy again. Setting a new franchise record and eliminating your biggest rival certainly helps, but in spite of a rough first quarter, Phoenix started having fun and playing to its high standards long before the clock hit zero.
“Over the course of a season, you’re a team, so many games, things happen,” Paul said. “So I think being back here at home in front of our crowd, we just got back to the way we playing. We can live with losses all the time, but as long as we play the right way and play with the right joy, we live with the results.”
At halftime, Ayton said Paul told the group they were working on themselves, not trying to beat any opponent. He said they still had another 30% to give and asked how bad they wanted it. What followed was total dominance.
“That hard-nosed talk, talking to each other, communicating, it was there,” Ayton said. “It was life behind what we all was saying to each other. We knew the last couple games we played, we weren’t ourselves. We sat down and got together and spoke on things, and that’s what brothers do. We talked it out and we went back on that battlefield playing for each other.”
The biggest key? The defensive end. After giving up 117 points to the Oklahoma City Thunder and 122 to the Memphis Grizzlies, Phoenix held LA to 110, which was inflated by garbage time. They also limited the Lakers to 7 offensive rebounds after letting Memphis (16) and OKC (12) abuse them.
When the Suns get stops and push the tempo, good things follow.
“That’s typically where the joy comes from, when we get stops and convert and we can force a team to call a timeout — especially on our home floor, it’s a special place,” Williams explained. “I think when we go into the timeout, our guys are looking at the play that I may draw, but they’re thinking about getting a stop. We understand how defense can be something that generates a lot of energy for the fans and for our team.”
(UPDATE: Or, you know, never mind.)
Now that the Suns have secured that pesky 63rd win and have nothing tangential to play for, it stands to reason they’d rest guys for these final three games, right?
Don’t be so sure.
“The resting thing is something that I’m not quite sure if there’s a huge benefit because of the position we’re in in the play-in tournament,” Williams reasoned. “You get almost a week off, and so at some point, there’s going to be some deconditioning for the top seeds. So I don’t think there’s a necessary benefit to resting guys right now. I think if you rest guys too early, it could be a detriment.”
Phoenix’s last regular-season game is on Sunday, April 10. Their first playoff game will either be Saturday, April 16 or Sunday, April 17. The Suns have had discussions involving the coaching staff, medical team and the players themselves to make these decisions together. For now, the emphasis seems to be on keeping guys in rhythm.
“Yeah, I mean, you want to keep your reps up, you want to keep the intensity high,” Booker said. “Because we know right when the playoffs hit, it’s a whole ‘nother level that teams go to, and it’s a whole different ballgame.”
Booker called it “tough” to stand by and watch his team lose in OKC. He believes last year’s Finals run helped him know what to expect from the playoff grind, and with guys like Paul and Cam Johnson recently returning from injuries, these last few games give them chance to get reps in with the playoff rotation — the kind of reps you can’t manufacture in a workout or practice.
“It’s kind of hard to emulate a game whether you’re doing a hard workout or not,” Booker said. “But I feel like I know what to expect. My wind’s all the way there, I’ve played 70 games this season, so I’m ready to go.”
Johnson, who’s shot 8-for-31 from the floor and 5-for-21 from 3-point range in three games since returning from injury, is making the most of this time to shake off the rust. A wrist injury last season forced him to jump back in the mix right as the playoffs began, but this year, he’ll get to build his way back up to it.
“It helps a ton,” Johnson said. “Last year was cool because you go into the playoffs not knowing what to expect, so you just go all out. I remember last year, I missed the last couple of games going into playoffs too, so right now I’m glad I got a little bit of time to try to get my rhythm back — not in the way that I wanted to get it back, obviously, but getting it back nonetheless, getting my legs back, all that.”
Even if the missed shots are not how Johnson prefers to rediscover his groove, Williams still sees it as good progress.
“I think it’s huge, and I think it’s necessary for him to have days like the other day [in OKC] to realize that we still love him,” Williams said. “Food is still edible, and playing works, and you wake up the next day and do it again. I’m not a doom and gloom guy when someone like Cam is missing shots. His body of work says that it’s going to come.”
Johnson identified conditioning as the key, admitting he felt “smoked” in the Thunder game after playing 32 minutes. But he may already be turning the corner after the Lakers win, when he put up 12 points off the bench, going 3-for-7 from long range.
If that’s the case, and given the Suns’ desire to keep their rhythm intact with an upcoming week off, don’t be surprised if this group chooses not to rest anyone until the very last game — and maybe not even then.
“We try to win every game, that’s our nature,” Williams said. “We have a bunch of sore losers in our locker room, and I’m sure that our guys want to establish themselves as the standard by increasing the win total. But we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We got a game tomorrow, that’s our focus right now.”
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