The Real Reasons Phoenix Suns Are Better Without Kevin Durant This Season
Kevin Durant beat his old team on Monday. He had 26 points on 9-of-21 shooting in the Houston Rockets' 100-97 victory over the Phoenix Suns. He hit the dramatic game-winner.
On the season, his current squad is now 3-0 against his former one. And he had plenty to say about it after Monday's matchup.
Regardless of who took the blame for last season, and even with the loss to Houston, the Suns look like a stronger, more balanced team than they were with Durant on the roster in 2024-25, and that reflects fit and timing more than any failure on his part.
Following an offseason that saw Phoenix jettison three of its top five scorers from the previous campaign (Durant, Bradley Beal and Tyus Jones), the Suns weren't supposed to be able to push the Rockets like this.
They weren't supposed to be 21-15 through 36 games, at least not according to conventional wisdom. Their preseason over-under was just 30.5. It seemed like this was going to be a gap year. It seemed like the $19.4 million annual cap hit from the Bradley Beal waive-and-stretch would be crippling through 2030.
It seemed like the Suns didn't pick up enough star power to make up for what they lost.
Now, nearly halfway through this season, it's clear that most (though not all) of us may have had these Suns pegged wrong. What they lack in star power they've more than made up for in toughness and grit, which is exactly what owner Mat Ishbia promised in August.
As cliche as it sounds, that really might be the difference between this team that's on pace for 48 wins and the one that finished 2024-25 with 36.
In just a few months, Phoenix completely flipped its culture, became one of the hardest-playing teams in the league and is racking up wins because of it.
But that's not the only reason for the immediate turnaround. Or at least, that's not the most specific way to describe it.
5. Point Guard Play
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One of the byproducts of Phoenix simply throwing together as much name recognition as it could was Booker and Beal being forced to play point guard.
Of course, Mike Budenholzer didn't have to do that. Collin Gillespie was on last season's roster. And Jones started 58 games at the 1. But in practice, Booker, and to a lesser extent, Beal and Durant, ran the show.
But the thing is, though they've all been good playmakers relative to their positional peers, all three of those stars were still wings. And they were wings who'd all experienced several years as the go-to, No. 1 scoring option.
They had all also spent time with high-end point guards. Booker had Chris Paul when he went to the Finals in 2021. Durant played with Russell Westbrook and Stephen Curry. And Beal's most successful seasons from a team perspective happened when he was playing with John Wall.
Expecting any of them to naturally settle into the kind of table-setting, pass-first point guard role that so many teams need was, in hindsight, ridiculous.
And now, with Durant, Jones, Beal and Budenholzer gone, first-year head coach Jordan Ott has elevated and trusts Gillespie to run the team.
He's not CP3, but he might be the closest thing Booker has had to that kind of distributor since 2021. He doesn't make a ton of mistakes. He's willing to be a secondary or even tertiary scoring option. He's fine simply initiating an action and then getting off the ball. He's also content to shift into an off-ball, catch-and-shoot type role in any given possession.
With all due respect to one of this season's true breakout players, Gillespie is a raw talent downgrade from Beal (though probably not by much at this point in their careers). But he's a clear positional upgrade.
4. Effort
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Simply playing hard is now one of the defining characteristics of the Suns, which wouldn't be all that noteworthy if not for the way they played last season.
Yes, much of that is a direct product of the attitude from newcomers such as Dillon Brooks, but they're infusing something into the roster that's bled into holdovers like Booker and Grayson Allen (who's been hurt for much of this season but is effective when available).
The Suns fly around on the defensive end (they're fourth in deflections per game). They attack loose balls like every one could decide the game (they're fifth in loose balls recovered per game).
And when you're going from one of the most apathetic teams in the league to this level of effort, it makes a real difference.
3. Defense
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Obviously, effort is a big part of defense. In fact, there's probably nothing more important.
But Phoenix also added defensive talent in Mark Williams and Brooks. Oso Ighodaro and Ryan Dunn developing on that end helped too.
And Ott leveraging all that talent into an aggressive, high-pressure defensive scheme that constantly turns opponents over or funnels wings and guards into Williams has taken the Suns from 27th in points allowed per 100 possessions last season to the top 10 in 2025-26.
2. Chemistry
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Every few years, the NBA will give us a new example that good basketball is about more than just cramming as much star power into a lineup as possible.
Dwight Howard, Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant didn't jell with the Los Angeles Lakers. Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Joe Johnson and Deron Williams probably got together a few years too late for the Brooklyn Nets.
And when the Suns added Beal to KD and Booker, there was just way too much philosophical overlap. All three wings were geared more for scoring than coexisting on a superteam. There wasn't quite enough willingness to defer. There weren't enough role players willing to focus first and foremost on the defensive end. And the entire experiment collapsed by its second season.
Now, there's one superstar and several others on the roster who are happy to magnify a role.
Gillespie is a classic floor general. Grayson Allen is a high-end, high-volume floor spacer. Royce O'Neale, Jordan Goodwin, Williams, Dunn and Ighodaro are all expending at least as much effort on defense as they do on offense and are OK with just getting leftovers on the more glamorous end of the floor.
Brooks might be the biggest source of irrational confidence in the NBA right now, and they've only had 30 total minutes from Jalen Green so far.
There's a chance this group will coalesce even further. Green might make the attack even more dynamic. As good and surprising as Phoenix has been, there's still time for this team to get even better.
1. Devin Booker
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Perhaps more than anything else, this season is reminding us that Devin Booker is a bona fide NBA alpha.
The team he's currently leading probably isn't headed to the NBA Finals, but the souped-up version of this team made it there in 2021.
That may seem a little dismissive of CP3, but by that point in his career, he was willing to be a supercharged No. 2 to Booker.
Unless Green takes some kind of unexpected leap, the current Suns probably don't have that player on the roster, but they check just about every other box.
And that's made them good enough to already be more than halfway to last season's win total. It's driven them to shocking wins like the one they had over the Oklahoma City Thunder earlier this week.
None of this is really a knock on KD or even Beal, either. Durant is thriving with the Rockets. He fits better there. He and Booker didn't make a ton of sense together. Basketball is about more than the names on the screen, and the 2025-26 Suns are teaching us that lesson again.
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