Dillon Brooks and Jalen Green joined the Suns in an offseason trade that sent Kevin Durant to Houston. Despite serious injuries to both players, they helped remake the team. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
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PHOENIX -- The Suns were swept out of the first round of the NBA playoffs by the defending champion Thunder on Monday night at the Mortgage Matchup Center, but there’s nothing for them to hang their heads about. By any stretch of the imagination, this was a successful season coming off last year’s debacle.
“We have a good group, and nobody expected us to be in this position,” guard Grayson Allen said in the hours before the Suns dropped a 131-122, Game 4 decision to Oklahoma City. “During the regular season we realized what we had. Expectations grew about what we could accomplish. But we’re not happy with saying we just got into the playoffs.”
Kudos to majority owner Mat Ishbia for rebuilding the entire Suns basketball operations and roster on the fly. That came on the heels of his restructuring the WNBA Mercury into a fast-paced product that was quickly wiped out of the playoffs in 2024 at the end of the Diana Taurasi-Britteny Griner era to a team that surprisingly made the finals in 2025.
Like the Suns, the Mercury went four and out against a much better Las Vegas squad that won the WNBA title for the third time in the past four seasons. But the resurgence of the Mercury was evident. Ishbia opened a state-of-the-art practice facility for the women and restocked the team.
“They went out and got great players in the offseason,” Aces coach Becky Hammon said at the time. “When you do that, other players want to come over and join them. They also did a nice job getting overseas talent. And there’s the investment of the ownership group. You want to come into a practice facility like they have. You want to be treated well like they do. You want that kind of care. Phoenix has stepped forward and done all that.”
The Thunder far eclipse the current Suns, and the verdict is still out on whether they will repeat. There’s three more tough playoff rounds to go for OKC, including another likely trip to the NBA Finals.
The Suns couldn’t stop star guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who had a Game 3 for the ages with 42 points on 87% shooting in all areas. He made 26 of 30 shots overall, missing only one from two-point range, two from beyond the three-point stripe and a single free throw.
"Really?” Shai said when told those numbers. “I should have shot more.”
The Suns tried to defend him and at times it got pretty physical. But you’re not a league MVP without some sort of chops. Dillon Brooks, a friend of SGA and a fellow Canadian citizen from Ontario, said not to worry, "I’ve got him in Game 4."
Jordan Ott, at the end of his first season as Suns’ coach, thought that was pretty rich.
“You know, Dillon is as competitive as anyone," Ott said. "He’s got a little friendship there. We’ve liked some of the looks we’ve given [SGA]. It’s a little different over time. There’s not one guy that’s ever going to guard him. We’ll change the matchups, try to take the ball out of his hands and Dillon is certainly part of it.”
All that didn’t work very much better in Game 4, either, as Shai scored a much more pedestrian 31 points, on 10-for-17 shooting from the field and 9-for-11 from the free-throw line.
“We have mutual respect,” SGA said afterward on national TV about Brooks, his Team Canada teammate. “He’s the ultimate competitor.”
Be that as it may, the Suns have now dropped 10 consecutive playoff games dating back to Game 4 of a six-game series loss to Denver in the second round of the 2023 postseason. That was two coaches ago and a whole rash of player turnover. Devin Booker is the only one remaining from the 2022-23 team.
Ott is the fourth coach in the Ishbia era, following Monty Williams, Frank Vogel, and Mike Budenholzer – the Suns are still paying Vogel and Budenholzer. Ott’s a slam dunk to be the first coach retained by Ishbia since he purchased the franchise from Robert Sarver for a value of $4 billion on Feb. 6, 2023.
Considering serious injuries to Allen, Brooks, Booker, Jalen Green, Mark Williams and Jordan Goodwin, Ott did a magnificent job keeping the team in focus and in contention. The Suns played hard under some tough conditions all season.
Of the current roster, Booker, Brooks, and Green are the only sure returnees for next season. Everything else is fluid. Green and Brooks were the key elements of the trade that sent Kevin Durant to Houston. Brooks, with his hard-nosed hockey enforcer style of play, emerged as a leader of the team along with Booker.
“We’ve just got to keep it going,” Ott said. “We’re right there.”
The Suns went from 36 wins and out of the playoffs during the Budenholzer chaos to 46 wins, including a play-in game victory over Golden State, under Ott.
Gone was the team that finished the 2024-25 season with nine losses in their last 10 games.
“We’ve built a foundation, since the hire from Day 1,” Booker said referring to life under Ott. “We’ve been 100% locked in. We’ve been aligned. We’ve been on the same page. This is the first step forward. This is the building block. There’s some stability and chemistry. That’s been much needed around here."
Last year, rumors about Bradley Beal and Durant being shipped out were rampant at that trade deadline, and when both star players remained they were not very happy about it. The Suns collapsed late in the 2024-25 season and Budenholzer was fired almost immediately after a final game 11-point loss at Sacramento with four years and $40 million remaining on his five-year contract.
Long-time general manager James Jones was moved aside and took an executive position in the league office, replaced by Brian Gregory, who lacked NBA GM experience. They hired Ott with a nine-year background as an NBA assistant coach, but none as a head coach.
During the offseason, Durant was traded and they bought out Beal’s contract. The entire team was in rebuild mode. Only six players from last season’s squad were on the 14-man playoff roster. Like the Mercury, it meshed.
“I have a high amount of respect for the job they’ve done this year,” said Thunder coach Mark Daigneault, who himself coached in the G-League for five seasons for OKC before his ascent to the Thunder job in 2019. “They’ve obviously had a great season. They retooled the team. They changed the coach. But they were able to get their floor raised very quickly.
“They have the marks of a strong foundation. You can’t be anything without a strong foundation, and they’ve done a great job building that.”
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