You know the person that keeps rebuying into the poker game? The one everyone knows has zero chance of leaving with any money?
The Phoenix Suns have quintupled down on their short-term vision, trading their 2031 unprotected first-round pick to the Utah Jazz for three first rounders, per ESPN’s Shams Charania, the latest indication they have major moves in mind before the trade deadline in a little over two weeks.
It very well looks like the precursor to trading for disgruntled Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler, a move with its own issues.
The haul on Tuesday is purely for flexibility and has little to do with the actual value on the picks. The unprotected pick in 2031 holds a lot of weight, but only to teams in rebuilding situations like Utah. Thus, Phoenix acquires three firsts that offer more to teams outside of the gutter, like Miami.
The 2025 first is the lowest between Cleveland and Minnesota, and with the Cavaliers at 36-6, it will very likely be 29th or 30th. 2027 and 2029 adds Utah to those two teams, increasing the odds of that pick being in the 20s.
Who knows where in the world the Suns are at in 2031 but it is the best asset by far in the deal, a half-dollar for two nickels and a penny. That half-dollar could dwindle down to a quarter, dime or fellow nickel. It could also grow into a bill.
There’s another intentional wrinkle here. As Spotrac’s Keith Smith pointed out, Phoenix temporarily reestablished its first-round arsenal for 2025-30. This removes the boundaries of The Stepien Rule, which prevents team from trading draft picks in consecutive drafts. That opens up more possibilities in future trades, where Phoenix’s own picks (littered with swaps we’ll get to in a minute) can now be back on the board, given the rule’s spacing is maintained. Swaps can be negotiated off in later deals too.
The 2031 selection likely didn’t bring enough juice to a deal for Butler, and now instead, Phoenix can provide it by divvying it up.
There could be more to come. Some of the picks could get attached to Jusuf Nurkic’s contract to bring a more desirable player to the forefront of the deal’s parameters. Even more first-round picks could get wrangled up via dealing away Grayson Allen and/or Royce O’Neale.
A key tidbit to remember is Phoenix can only send a maximum of one player to each team in the deal. That makes it more difficult to add proper value to the trade via the players, so draft picks were always the way to go. The Suns brought in Matt Tellem from Brooklyn as assistant general manager for his propensity with complicated maneuvers such as multi-team trades and he’s surely cooked up dozens of permutations involving Butler the last couple of weeks.
To go back to the original trade on Tuesday, Phoenix is now showing an obsession with these gambles of trades involving only draft capital, as if it believes it is innovating a way to game the system.
It previously dealt additional first-round pick swaps, acquiring three second-round picks each from Memphis and Orlando by layering on additional swaps to the first-round picks in 2026, 2028 and 2030 that originally had just a swap with Washington on ’em from the Bradley Beal trade.
This has the chance to fail pretty spectacularly.
Phoenix’s return has already been completed. Three of the six second-round picks were used to get O’Neale, one was used to move up for Oso Ighodaro, one was lost in tampering for Drew Eubanks and the last was used to get off Cam Payne’s salary for tax reasons.
The O’Neale trade was a good one, as was the Ighodaro move. The other two lost picks speak for themselves. But major consequences loom for the swaps.
Phoenix will pick the lowest out of Orlando, Memphis and Washington in 2026. 2028 is between Brooklyn, New York and Washington while 2030 is the bottom selection of Washington or Memphis.
The Grizzlies and Magic are trending up, so that 2026 pick is almost assuredly in the 20s. New York is heavily invested in winning now and it would be a pretty brutal drop-off in three seasons to not be one of the better teams in the Eastern Conference. 2030 is too far away to speak on.
The win condition here for the Suns is obviously a championship. All of this was worth it if they reach that goal.
Beyond that, the only other way this swaps gambit works out is if none of those three draft positions land in the top-10 of the draft. Phoenix is already in desperate need of young talent to grow for the future and that will only intensify in the coming years. The odds of drafting a rotation player, let alone a serious pillar of your foundation, jump dramatically in that range of the draft. Even more so in the top-5 and top-3.
That’s just the swaps. The stakes are there for 2027 and 2029, as well as 2031 now. It’s out of the Suns’ hands for the next seven years.
Yes, including 2025 too. The Suns are currently in a play-in spot that would yield the 11th or 12th pick, holding 8% odds of jumping to the top-4 on lottery night. Just last year, teams placed ninth and 10th both jumped into the top-4.
Chances are good that at least one of those picks will come back to burn the Suns. Chances are half-decent that multiple will. There’s also the slim yet existing probability one of those is the No. 1 pick in the draft. If that happens, they sure as hell better hope it’s a talent like Zaccharie Risacher and not a talent like Victor Wembanyama.
Here’s the thing: That’s worth it sometimes. But everything Phoenix has told us on the court this year is that it is not.
A team built around Kevin Durant and Devin Booker continues to not work. What should be an incredibly joyous product to watch headlined by an iconic all-timer still near the height of his powers and the best player in franchise history is instead migraine inducing.
After these awful vibes last year, the Suns changed head coaches, added point guards and young bodies plus better depth to no change this season.
The same problems persist. Turnovers, on-ball defense, engagement off the ball, defensive rebounding, organization, effort, cohesion and so on. Cleveland deployed a zone on the Suns in Monday’s loss that completely stifled them, to which Durant said after Phoenix does not have zone-busting concepts in place. That was in game FORTY-TWO.
Consistency is a chore. Three quarters of it is a miracle, let alone even approaching four.
The principles set by the head coach have been abandoned at the same exact point as last year. Phoenix ranked eighth in 3-point attempts per game over its first 25 games and is now 29th across the last 17 contests. Since starting the year 9-2, it is 25th in defensive rating and only 12th in offensive rating.
Basketball-Reference gives the Suns a 6.6% chance to make the playoffs. Cleaning the Glass projects them to win 36 games. The eye test on the court has matched the models.
Is Butler going to improve those numbers? Probably. But how many guys in the league could realistically elevate it to the point of a championship? Remember, the names you’re thinking of are on a shortlist that the Suns have two guys on! Two of the best in the world! And they are on a middling team that currently struggles to put away the worst of the worst.
That’s the short term. With the age of Butler and Durant, the long term is even bleaker, even if Booker chose to stick it out. Instead of trying to work ahead on what is on pace to become the most tumultuous era of Suns basketball ever, they are just going to run this thing deep into the ground, completely unwilling to admit defeat.
When looking at just about everyone but the Suns ducking the second apron all while they embraced it with open arms, a question was poised of if Mat Ishbia’s boldness is a burden. That is more open to interpretation. Stubbornness is not.
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