A Suns Reality Check: Jusuf Nurkic Challenges, Realities, and the Path Forward

Well, that didn’t take very long, did it, Suns fans?

Week 1 of the NBA season is in the books for the Phoenix Suns, and despite a 3-1 record, a KD heater, displays of grit we never saw last season, the fifth-best defense, Dunn locking up All-Stars, putting up 38 threes per game on the sixth-best accuracy, and a head coach who runs an actual modern NBA offense, the Suns community seems disgruntled.

Do you hear that sound in the distance? That pounding you hear is the drumbeat of Suns Twitter demanding a Jusuf Nurkic trade immediately and without hesitation.

Has Jusuf Nurkic been bad so far? Yes. Is he the perfect fit on a Suns roster built to win now? Definitely not. Should he Suns front office explore options to improve the roster? Always.

I wrote the Bright Side Season Preview of Jusuf Nurkic and laid out the case of his pros and cons pretty thoroughly. I also wrote about how Suns fans should embrace this season and try to enjoy and appreciate this new chapter after a very frustrating season last year.

I’m not going to spend this article making a case for Nurkic or defending him. If you hate Nurk and want him off the Suns, that’s your prerogative. There will be plenty of debate about his rebounding, his lack of pre-season run, injuries, new systems, and that he is a worse center than former #1 pick Deandre Ayton (DUH!).

Instead, I want to give us a Suns Reality Check about the very real challenges of trading Jusuf Nurkic and why patience might not only be necessary; it may be our only option.

Let’s look at 6 Hard Truths to accept if you want the Suns to trade Jusuf Nurkic:

The Dreaded Second Apron

As most of us know (many Twitter GM’s still do not) there is this pesky new Collective Bargaining Agreement that placed severe restrictions on 2nd Apron Teams such as the Suns.

When it comes to trading Nurk there are 3 big barriers to getting a deal done:

1. You can’t take in a penny more in salary than you send out. Everyone who is pining for an upgrade at center, like Claxton, Poeltl, Vucevic, Turner, Capela, or Allen, can just let that thought leave their head. All of those players make more than Nurk, so the only way to acquire them would be to trade one of the Big 3. Not gonna happen.

2. You could get around this if you traded Grayson as well, but the 2nd Apron restrictions means we can’t aggregate players to take back more salary.

3. Now maybe an injury happens to a contender and they need insurance at the center position. Any other team that is over the second apron is not able to trade with the Suns without getting a third team involved. You want Bobby Portis from the Bucks? Sceond apron makes that very difficult to pull off.

Assets (or the lack thereof)

The Suns did a great job during the offseason of moving back in the draft to acquire more draft capital, but the cupboard is still relatively bare. The big chip we still have is our 2031 1st Round Pick, as well as a few seconds. The problem is that since we can’t aggregate players, we can’t do much to entice teams to take on Nurk’s remaining two years. Seconds aren’t going to convince a team to take him off our hands, and our last remaining first is a steep price to pay just to dump a salary.

We don’t even have the benefit of him being an expiring contract to make it more palatable. The Suns need either more seconds or future firsts with some different levels or protections. Just a reminder that Jae Crowder went for five seconds to the Bucks. Rui went for four to the Lakers. That’s the cost of acquiring a questionable role player. We’re trying to replace our starting center. That’s a steep price to pay.

It Takes Two to Tango

My favorite thing about fake trades is that no one asks themselves…“Why in the world would the other team do this?”.

At the nadir of the Deandre Ayton experience, I constantly talked about how the Suns needed to accept that in any DA trade, we were getting worse at center. All the dreams and schemes of the Twitterati culminated in Jusuf Nurkic. We switched out our very talented, very overpaid center, for a less talented, less overpaid center. We seem to have forgotten that fact, as people are thinking we’re going to get a better center for less money from a team. The reality is that if we trade Nurk for a center straight up, we are getting worse at center.

There are 10 centers that makes less than Nurk that could be targets for the Suns in a Nurk trade. The problem is that they are either lateral moves, make us worse, or the other team would have no real reason to do the trade. Several of these players will have interest from other teams and will likely outbid the Suns.

1. Zach Collins — Younger and cheaper, why would Spurs do it?
2. Isiah Stewart — Lateral move
3. Mitchell Robinson — Gigantic injury risk, bad finisher
4. Jalen Duren — Lottery pick averaging a double double. Keep dreaming
5. Daniel Gafford — Keep dreaming
6. Kelly Olynyk — Small, defensive liability, – backwards move
7. Jonas Valanciunas — Lateral move
8. Goga Bitadze — Young and cheap, why would Orlando do it?
9. Ivica Zubac – Keep Dreaming
10. Naz Reid – Keep Dreaming
11. Walker Kessler — Danny Ainge extortion prices means another team gets him
12. Robert Williams — Giant injury risk, likely outbid by another team
13. Mark Williams — Young and cheap. Fits with their youth movement. Why would they?

Fit on the Suns

The two biggest holes on the Suns roster going into this season were wing depth and size. If Nurk is traded, we will be leaving a 290-pound hole in our front line, making our most glaring weakness even weaker. Nurk led the league in rebound rate last season, gobbling up 23% of misses while he was on the court. We still got beat up on the boards by larger teams.

Plumlee has looked good, but he rebounds about 10% less for his career. That’s a lot to make up for on a team that already lacks legitimate frontcourt size when it comes to securing the ball. The only center we could target that’s even close is Jonas Valanciunas, but that is the very definition of a lateral move. Washington doesn’t want to pay more for the same player, and it wouldn’t be worth the first-rounder they would demand.

The best way to maximize the value of Nurk in a trade is to let Nurk play through it. If the Suns trade him right now, his value won’t ever be lower. The bottom line about Nurk is he matches us great against some centers and terribly against others. No one goes up against Jokic like him, but no one cooks him quite like AD. It is what it is, but thank goodness we have options behind him now with Plumlee, Oso, and our 5 out lineups.

The League Year

Y’all. The season isfour games old. No one even knows what they have yet. If you want Nurk traded, that’s fine, but you can write that angry tweet and save it in drafts until January because no one is making trades until after Christmas. New coaches are figuring out their team, new contracts mean a number of players aren’t trade eligible, and no one wants to trade when they’re settling into the season.

For perspective, last year, there were only a handful of trades that happened before the deadline:

• November 1st — James Harden deal – everyone knew it was coming and had to happen, making it an outlier.
• December 30th — O.G. Anunoby
• January 17th — Pascal Siakam
• January 23rd — Terry Rozier

The bottom line, is that no one is getting traded until late December unless someone makes a trade demand. We’re likely riding with Nurk into the new year whether we like it or not. Strap in.

The Path Forward

The most likely scenario is that we have to use Grayson Allen to pull off an upgrade at center and that Nurk gets moved in a separate deal. If the Suns pursue this avenue, they’ll need to line up several moves, have everything fall within the new cap rules, and likely give up the remaining trade assets that they have. That would likely not happen until January at the earliest.

In the meantime, the Suns best path forward is to get Nurk healthy and get him acclimated to Bud’s system. Coach has shown that he’s not afraid to treat Nurk like a role player and play centers based on matchups and situations. The Suns roster has his back, and he has been one of the best teammates on the Suns since he came to Phoenix.

The Big 3 have chemistry with him, and it has been 4 games. Nurk does specific things very well, but his role on this team is going to look very different. You can see he is trying too hard to replicate what he was asked to do last year, and the adjustment is causing him to make mistakes. (Booker has been going through a similar process, second-guessing his mid-range shots)

Patience is a virtue, and take comfort in the fact that these decisions are out of your control. Enjoy the season. Be thrilled when Nurk plays well, breathe a sigh of relief when they win despite his bad games, and accept that he will indeed cost us a few games. Every rotation player does over the course of a season.

It’s entirely possible you will get your wish, and Jusuf Nurkic will get traded before the deadline. Just know: it’s not simple, it won’t happen now, we might get worse, it will likely cost us one or both of our best-remaining assets, and the vast majority of players we want are not possible or realistic trade targets.

For now, let’s appreciate that he helped us win 49 games in a last year, we’re winning despite his poor play to start, and he will absolutely contribute to regular season wins in the meantime. You could also, I don’t know…try rooting for the guy. He’s a great teammate, works hard, and is accountable. He deserves more than 4 games after the effort he gave us last year under Vogel.

Whatever you do, don’t @ the man.

Go Suns!