The Suns are 1-5 through six games. They just lost to a Portland team that's 5-0 on the road, and Devin Booker fouled out for the second straight game in a night that took him 13-for-13 from the free throw line just to scrape together 33 points. None of that means the season's lost, but it does mean the people running this roster never gave it a real chance to be anything else.
Look at what's actually broken. Through the first several games of the season, Phoenix is surrendering the second-highest opponent three-point percentage in the league, and the Suns are running a scoring margin and a rebounding margin that are both solidly negative. That's a team with no interior presence getting picked apart in exactly the way everyone could see coming with Mark Williams missing from the middle of the roster. Jordan Ott said it himself after the Portland loss: "I think we are missing Mark." Give him credit for that. He's the only person in the building willing to say the obvious thing out loud.
Booker did the same thing in his own way. "Stop fouling, finish possessions, get rebounds," he said afterward. "It has been the same story the whole season. We've done it in spots, but we haven't been able to put together 48 minutes." That's a 30-year-old All-Star diagnosing his own team's disease in three sentences, two nights after fouling out of a different game for the same reason he fouled out of this one. A roster with functional rim protection doesn't put its franchise guard in that spot twice in a row. This is about who's standing next to him on the floor.
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RatingThe people who should be hearing about this are the ones who built the roster and the ones who keep insisting it doesn't need rebuilding. Owner Mat Ishbia has said, flatly, "Devin Booker is not getting traded. Devin Booker's our franchise player... we're gonna win a championship here with Devin Booker, and I'm excited to do it." He's also said he'd "ride into a fire with Devin Booker, and I'll do it proudly." Fine sentiment. Six games into a season where his team can't rebound or defend the arc, it's also starting to sound like a man refusing to look at what he paid for. You don't get to declare you're building a champion and let your supporting cast get out-boarded and out-shot by a Portland team that's still figuring out what it is. Pick one.
The case for patience says this is still early, that a team this banged up up front deserves more than a handful of games before anyone writes it off. But patience only works as a plan if the front office is building toward something specific, and nobody in Phoenix has said what that is. Brian Gregory surrounded Booker with reclamation projects and oft-injured pieces instead of a stable young core on a timeline, then watched the one guy who was supposed to anchor the defense go down, and the whole thing fell apart exactly the way that construction suggested it would. Waiting on development only works if there's an actual young core developing. Right now there's a 30-year-old All-Star absorbing fouls and free throws while the roster around him gets torched in the paint.
RTGThis loss to Portland is a preview of what's coming. The defense won't fix itself, and Mark Williams isn't walking back onto the floor tomorrow. Ownership keeps repeating a slogan while the roster problem goes unaddressed. Until Ishbia and Gregory stop pretending the current group is a contender in waiting and start actually building toward one, nights like this one against Portland are just Tuesday.
