The Suns play the Nuggets on Wednesday. It’s also a significant day for wing Grayson Allen.
Allen becomes eligible for a four-year, $75MM extension, since the Suns own his Bird rights. If he doesn’t sign an extension, he’ll be an unrestricted free agent. If he signed for that number with a starting salary of $16.4MM, Phoenix’s luxury tax bill would jump another $65-70MM, Duane Rankin of the Arizona Republic notes.
“I try not to think about it too much,” Allen said about a potential offer. “One, because it’s not a done deal until it’s signed. You don’t want to count it, start counting stuff too early before it happens. Another part of is it’s March and we’ve got 11, 10 games left. We’re getting at a time where you don’t want to have stuff like that on your mind cause it’s an individual goal for me and right now, it’s the Suns and team stuff. I don’t want to think about that kind of stuff too much.”
We have more on the Suns:
- Not only did they lose to San Antonio on Monday, they came out of it with a couple of new injuries, ESPN’s Andrew Lopez tweets. Bradley Beal left with a sprained right ring finger late and could not return. X-rays were negative. Jusuf Nurkic left the game earlier with a sprained right ankle. Neither one practiced on Tuesday, according to Rankin (Twitter links). They’re listed as questionable for Wednesday’s game, Gerald Bourguet of GoPhnx.com tweets.
- They had defeated the Spurs by 25 two days earlier and San Antonio didn’t have Victor Wembanyama in the lineup during the rematch. Yet the Spurs were able to pull out a two-point win against a team fighting for playoff position. “It’s disappointment,” Beal told Lopez and other reporters. “We came in here and laid an egg. We thought it was going to be easy with no Wemby. Just got our (butt) kicked. They came out aggressive, just like Coach (Frank Vogel) told us they would, and we didn’t respond. Well, we did, but we didn’t withstand their punches.”
- Their final 10 opponents have a combined winning percentage of .648, Lopez notes. According to ESPN, it’s the toughest final 10-game stretch since the 2015/16 Grizzlies. However, Vogel said that shouldn’t impact how they finish. “We like our chances against anybody,” he said. “We don’t worry about the schedule.”