The Suns are off to a red-hot start. The scary part? They’re not even humming yet

Sometimes, it takes a while for new head coaches to put their fingerprints on a team. And sometimes, it really, really doesn’t.

Over the years, Mike Budenholzer has established a pretty clear blueprint for how he wants his teams to play — a set of principles forged in the fires of his years as an assistant (and, before that, a player!) under Gregg Popovich, and one he’s stuck by across 10 seasons as a head coach in Atlanta and Milwaukee. For good reason: Bud went 484-317 with the Hawks and Bucks, a .604 winning percentage. He missed the playoffs just once in a decade; in that same span, he won 50 games five times, 60 games twice, and an NBA championship.

So while the specifics of his task would differ when he took over the Phoenix Suns — succeed where Frank Vogel struggled in finding a way to maximize the offensive talents of Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and Bradley Beal; minimize the defensive liabilities on a team seemingly light on high-end stoppers; get the most out of the many bargain-bin contributors dotting a roster devoting $150.6 million to its three stars — it seemed reasonable to expect his general approach to remain roughly the same. And sure enough: Eight games into the 2024-25 NBA season, the Suns are 7-1, tied for first place in the Western Conference, and they’ve arrived there by beginning to look a lot like a Coach Bud team.

The shift starts on the defensive end. Think back to the Hawks teams built around Al Horford and Paul Millsap, and the Bucks teams built around Giannis Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez. Coach Bud teams tend to play conservatively on the defensive end, worrying a lot less about creating turnovers on the perimeter than avoiding fouls and protecting the paint, typically by having their big men sink back in drop coverage while point-of-attack defenders fight over the top of screens.

The goals: keep your hugest dudes near the basket to limit layups and dunks; keep your perimeter defenders close to their assignments to limit 3-point attempts; force contested shots, ideally from the midrange; and then vacuum up misses to prevent second-chance opportunities. So far, so good: Phoenix sits seventh in points allowed per possession, thanks in large part to cleaning up the components of high-level defense that have long been Bud’s calling cards.

After finishing last season 20th in defensive rebounding rate, the Suns now rank sixth, with center Jusuf Nurkić hauling in a career-high — and NBA-leading — 37.5% of opponents’ missed shots. After finishing last season 17th in the share of opponents’ shots that came at the rim and 15th in the share that came from beyond the arc, the Suns now rank eighth and ninth in those categories, respectively — and, critically, third in the percentage of corner 3-pointers allowed. (The only two teams better at vaporizing short-corner looks? The Houston Rockets, led by fellow Pop disciple Ime Udoka, and the Charlotte Hornets, coached by Charles Lee … who spent nine years as an assistant under Bud in Atlanta and Milwaukee.)

These Suns are fighting hard through screens rather than giving up easy switches, working hard to stay connected to ball-handlers, slalom through traffic and get a hand up; they’re contesting 40.3 shots per game, tied with the Celtics for sixth-most in the NBA. In a perhaps related story, they’re third in defensive field goal percentage, holding opponents to just 43.5% shooting; only the historically monstrous Thunder defense and Draymond Green-led Warriors have posted lower marks.

And while they’re not creating a lot of steals or deflections up top, they’re doing a heck of a job swarming down low to erase high-percentage looks near the cup, holding opponents to 61.2% shooting at the rim, fifth-best in the NBA, and blocking 6.3 shots per game, tied for third in the league.

Everybody’s getting into the act. Nurkić is doing the best Lopez impression he can, holding shooters to a 50% mark at the basket. Durant, whose defensive work will always very understandably be overshadowed by his towering offensive efforts, has been a weak-side menace, sliding over for a team-high 11 blocks. Booker has continued the work he began in the Olympics, punching above his weight class as an undersized small forward alongside Beal and newcomer point guard Tyus Jones.

Royce O’Neale has been a picture-perfect 3-and-D complement, guarding dangerous threats across the positional spectrum, and even sliding up to play some small-ball 5. Even Beal, a former league-leading scorer on a quarter-billion-dollar contract, is working his tail off on the ball.

“There’s been stretches in each of the games where the defense has been at a pretty high level,” Budenholzer told reporters after a win over the Lakers.

Some of the highest-level play has come from one of the team’s youngest players. One of the biggest concerns about the Suns heading into the season concerned their relative lack of size and stopping power on the perimeter. So, about that: Hello there, Ryan Dunn.

The 28th overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft, Dunn’s discrete disruption numbers — three steals, two blocks and three deflections in 127 minutes — haven’t popped off the page, but his overall defensive impact has. Opponents are shooting just 27-for-77 (35.1%) with Dunn as the nearest defender, tied for the lowest mark among 153 defenders to contest at least 75 shots this season. This is where we should probably note that those “opponents” — Dunn’s most frequent defensive matchups in his opening weeks as a professional — have included James Harden, Luka Dončić, LeBron James, Paul George, Jimmy Butler and Tyrese Maxey, a fearsome slate that puts the 6-foot-8, 216-pound rookie in the 97th percentile in average matchup difficulty, according to The BBall Index’s charting.

That level of defensive versatility and quality is worth plenty on its own. The reason Dunn dropped to the bottom of the first round, though, was that he couldn’t shoot — just 23.5% from 3-point land, and 61.6% from the free-throw line, across two seasons at Virginia.

Here’s the thing, though: Um, turns out he can shoot?

Dunn (who’s listed as doubtful for Phoenix’s Friday meeting with the Mavericks) has already made more 3-pointers in eight games in Phoenix (13) than he did in 65 games at Virginia (12). And it’s not all wide-open corner looks; he’s looked comfortable relocating around the perimeter, launching with a contesting defender rushing into his face, and even pulling off a dribble handoff.

Why the sudden fluency from deep? Dunn recently told reporters that the impetus was “kind of the league, kind of the team — their model is getting 3s up.”

That, of course, is the other side of the Coach Bud coin: His Milwaukee teams consistently ranked near the top of the league in the share of its shots that came from beyond the arc, as he worked to spread the floor for Antetokounmpo’s rampages to the rim … and, as expected, he has brought that approach to the Valley.

Last season, the Suns took 37.8% of their shots from 3-point range, according to NBA.com — 21st in a 30-team league. Under Bud, that long-ball launch rate has skyrocketed: 47.3% of Phoenix’s attempts have come from beyond the arc, good for fourth. (The only Sun getting rotation minutes who’s not firing multiple 3s per game is Mason Plumlee, which, as a 16-minute-a-game dribble-handoff-and-roll backup center, is just fine.)

Maybe most important, given how unceremoniously things reportedly ended for Vogel last season? The stars seem to have bought into it.

You don’t want to totally dissuade Kevin Durant from working in his comfort zone, because it’d be pretty stupid to just snatch the paintbrush out of Picasso’s hand:

But surviving a battleground as daunting as this Western Conference, and knocking off teams as optimized for modern success as the Celtics, demands plucking all the low-hanging fruit you can … including taking, like, one big step backward.

“Long midrange” shots — attempts taken from between 14 feet out and the 3-point arc — account for just 16% of Durant’s shot attempts this season, according to Cleaning the Glass; that would be the lowest mark of his 17-year career. Three-pointers, on the other hand, constitute 31% of his shots through eight games; that would tie for his second-highest share ever. Booker and Beal are taking long 2s at career-low rates, too, and firing 3s at career-high clips.

This is a good thing! As Owen Phillips noted in his newsletter, The F5, the Suns went 26-9 last season when they shot 3-pointers at a league-average-or-better rate; the problem was that they only did it less than half of the time. Entering Friday’s games, the league-average share of field goal attempts that come from beyond the arc this season is 38.3%. The Suns have already topped that in six of their first eight games, winning five of them.

Here’s the interesting thing about that. Despite the revamped shot selection, and despite Jones bringing his customary high-floor table-setting to a team in need of offensive organization — 54 assists against just eight turnovers through eight games, leading the Suns in touches and time of possession and, as Beal recently told reporters, “mak[ing] our life so much easier” — and despite a more egalitarian overall ecosystem that’s producing about 14 more passes per game than last season, as well as a league-leading 5.5 secondary assists a night, leveraging the diversity of danger posed by their perimeter players to put defenses in dangerous positions …

… the Suns still only rank 16th in points scored per possession outside of garbage time.

Some of that owes to chilly early shooting from Booker (43.3% from the field, 34.9% from 3-point land), Jones (44.4% and 34.4% respectively) and Grayson Allen, who’s just getting ramped up after missing time with an Achilles issue and the birth of his child. Some of it is a lack of rim pressure — no team in the NBA attempts up-close shots less frequently — and the fact that the 7-foot Nurkić has long struggled to finish the point-blank looks he does get.

That’s the scary part, though: If the Suns are winning at this clip without their offense in sync, how good might they look if Budenholzer can get it humming?

“I don’t want to compare it to last year,” Booker told reporters after Wednesday’s win over Miami. “I just feel like we’re organized. We’re finding what works. And Kevin Durant is a motherf****r to deal with.”

Contenders have been built on less — and with Coach Bud making his impact clear early and often, that’s just what these Suns could be.

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