Tracking 40, Week 9: The Phoenix Suns are not a good basketball team

Crap. I was hoping they were. But they simply are not.

The Phoenix Suns are in a rough spot, and I don’t mean the kind you can brush off with a few wins. They’re not just losing basketball games; they’re losing their identity. Or embracing it, perhaps. It’s an identity of bad injury-prone bad basketball. The most expensive roster in NBA history is being dismantled by teams that shouldn’t even be able to share the court with them. Worse yet, it’s happening at home. The Fortress in the Valley? More like a revolving door.

Sure, they’ve embraced the NBA’s three-point revolution. Long live the deep ball, right? But in their pursuit of perimeter supremacy, they’ve sacrificed something fundamental: defense. And with that, they’ve lost something even more intangible: personality.

Now, personality doesn’t win games. You don’t need flair to snag W’s. But damn, doesn’t it feel like teams with character — the ones that play with swagger, energy, and a sense of unity — are just better? Look around the league: the teams that care show it. They celebrate together, pick each other up, and exude the kind of chemistry that makes even a bad night entertaining.

The Suns? They’re joyless. Lifeless. Gone are the days of Devin Booker pounding his chest after a dagger jumper or Mikal Bridges flashing his signature three-point celebration while grinning ear-to-ear. Nobody’s letting out primal screams after a block or dazzling us with fast-break dunks. Outside of Kevin Durant, who still has occasional flashes of that fire, it’s all business. And business is bad.

Effort, hustle, grit. These are the things that don’t show up in the box score but win games. And the Suns are woefully lacking in all of them. What we’re left with is an uninspired, mentally fragile team that’s more designed to shoot the lights out than grind it out. But when the shots don’t fall? They crumble.

Look, I feel bad for Kevin Durant. One of the greatest to ever do it, wasting the twilight of his career on a team that doesn’t have a winner’s DNA. I feel bad for Jusuf Nurkic, too. A guy who actually plays with effort but gets shredded nightly for his physical limitations. Suns fans know what it’s like to have an athletic center who doesn’t give a damn, right? Now they have the inverse: a guy who gives a damn but lacks the tools.

So yeah, let the Suns hoist threes until the cows come home. But when you can’t stop a team from scoring 133 points — or from grabbing a season-high 13 steals — what’s the point? The Suns aren’t just losing games. They’re losing their way, and the worst part? They don’t seem to care.

Week 9 Record: 0-2

Indiana Pacers, L, 120-111

• Suns 3PAr: 36.6%
• Suns 3PT%: 30.0%

The Pacers didn’t just outplay the Suns. They flat-out outworked them. From tip-off to the final buzzer, Indiana set the tone, dictating pace and scrapping for every loose ball while Phoenix, stumbling through the night, looked more like the tired team on the second leg of a back-to-back. When you’re bricking threes at a 30% clip — your third-worst performance of the season — it’s a recipe for disaster. The Suns weren’t just in the backseat; they were strapped into a car seat, helplessly watching the Pacers steer the game wherever they pleased.

And then there was Devin Booker. The guy who’s supposed to be the engine of this team went down midway through the game. Groin tweak. Again. You could feel the air get sucked out of the arena. It’s becoming an all-too-familiar script: Booker limps off, and everyone collectively holds their breath, knowing the team’s already fragile foundation is about to crack further. How long will he be out this time? Who knows. But it doesn’t feel like something that gets fixed with a little ice and some rest.

The bigger problem, though, was Phoenix’s sloppiness with the ball. Sixteen turnovers. That’s not just bad; it’s systemic. The Suns have hit this mark or worse in 10 games this season and, unsurprisingly, they’re 2-8 in those games. It’s a brutal stat that screams a lack of focus, poor execution, and, frankly, a team that isn’t dialed in.

Detroit Pistons, L, 133-125

• Suns 3PAr: 37.2%
• Suns 3PT%: 48.3%

Right from the jump, the Suns were flat. No fight. No fire. Just another night where they let an opposing team casually stroll through the door and drop 30 on them in the first quarter. But this time? It was the Detroit Pistons — the Pistons — a team ranked 24th in offensive efficiency. And they weren’t just getting by. Oh no, they dropped 41 points in the first quarter. 41. The most they’ve scored in any quarter all season. That’s not just bad defense, that’s a full-blown surrender.

It’s starting to feel like the Suns are treating their off-days as nothing more than a few extra hours for shooting drills, maybe some light stretching, and then just a few empty words from players and coaches. Words that hold zero weight, like promises made in the heat of the moment that are long forgotten once the buzzer sounds. The effort? It’s missing. The urgency? Nowhere to be found.

How long can you keep talking about improvement when your actions don’t back it up? At this point, the Suns are just going through the motions, pretending like something’s changing when it’s all the same old mess. A team that’s supposed to contend has turned into a punching bag for even the most anemic offenses in the league. And until someone wakes up and realizes that words don’t win basketball games, this is the same story with a different number on the scoreboard.

“There’s probably lots of things,” Coach Mike Budenholzer said after the game. “bBut it’s an area where we got to improve, where we got to be better. It’s leading to a lot of baskets. It’s making it hard on our defense. So, it’s kind of a double effect, obviously, not getting shots on goal and then really putting our defense in a tough spot. So, we got to get better with the turnovers.”

Empty words. Going through the motions. Duh, you need to fix it. Be like Nike. Just do it.

Week 9: 36.9% 3PAr, 39.0 3PT%

This was the Suns’ first sub-40% three-point rate shooting on the season.

I don’t blame the Suns’ lack of attempts or their recent losses. Their 39% shooting from deep this past week was their third-best mark of the season. That’s solid. Really solid. And this column, for better or worse, has been all about tracking the Suns’ three-point rate and accuracy, trying to divine some sort of meaning from the numbers. But what are we learning? That it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter if you rain threes like a biblical plague if you let opposing teams dictate the pace, exploit your lack of effort, and turn their weaknesses into strengths because you don’t have the guts to stop them. The Suns are clinging to the mantra that the best defense is a great offense. Sure, they’ve got a great offense. They’re seventh in the league in offensive rating. But defense? They’re a pitiful 26th.

That’s not just bad. That’s abominable.

You can’t out-shoot your way out of bad habits. You can’t hide your defensive apathy behind a barrage of threes. And you damn sure can’t win consistently if you let teams carve you up on the margins, exploiting the little things that championship-caliber teams handle with ease.

The Suns are a bad basketball team right now. Not because they can’t score. They can. Not because they’re missing shots. They’re not. But because they refuse to stop anyone. And until they figure that out, no amount of three-point accuracy is going to save them.

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Next week doesn’t get any easier for the Phoenix Suns. Devin Booker? Still out. And if history tells us anything, he’s going to be out for a while. The last time he tweaked his groin, he rushed back too soon and ended up sidelined for 21 games. I’d bet my Christmas stocking that the Suns, who’ve already been treating Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal like porcelain dolls, will be equally cautious with their franchise cornerstone.

And as for the schedule? It’s a gauntlet. Back-to-back games against the Denver Nuggets, who are stumbling but still dangerous, aren’t exactly the holiday gift the Suns needed. This was supposed to be the week to right the ship — a four-game stretch against sub-.500 teams that should’ve been the basketball equivalent of comfort food. Instead, the Suns built momentum all right, momentum in the wrong direction.

Now it’s a murderer’s row: Denver tonight, Denver again on Christmas, then Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks on Friday, followed by the Golden State Warriors on Saturday. The Suns will chuck threes, no doubt about that, but can they stop anyone? I can’t see it. Not right now. This team is defensively broken, and it’s as plain as the garland on the tree.

Here’s the thing: defense isn’t rocket science. It doesn’t take a revolutionary scheme or a clipboard full of X’s and O’s. It takes attitude. It takes effort. Two things you can’t teach and two things this Suns team is sorely lacking. You can’t coach a team into giving a damn. That’s on the players. And right now, they don’t seem to care enough to stop anyone from running up the score.

So, Merry Christmas, Suns fans. Maybe Santa will bring you some defensive intensity. Because if he doesn’t, this team’s stocking will be stuffed with nothing but bricks and L’s.