power rankings<\/a> of every team if the 2025-26 NBA Season started today.<\/p>\nBailey wrote on Phoenix:<\/p>\n
“Four short years ago, Devin Booker was in the NBA Finals with a Phoenix Suns squad that included Chris Paul, Deandre Ayton, Cameron Johnson and Mikal Bridges.<\/p>\n
“Those four and every single other member of the 2020-21 team is now gone, and Booker is tasked with leading the hodgepodge roster left in the wake of a series of unfortunate moves that saw both KD and Beal come and go.<\/p>\n
“Individually, Booker figures to have another strong campaign. Mark Williams will give him good rim-running and defensive anchoring when healthy (he’s averaged around 35 games per season for his career). And Jalen Green will have a handful of show-stopping scoring performances.<\/p>\n
“But there isn’t enough here to seriously challenge in the West. There might not even be enough to make the play-in tournament. So, Suns fans could more or less be forced to wait the next half-decade while the waived-and-stretched portion of Beal’s contract is still on the books for about $20 million per year.”<\/p>\n
Without any control of their first-round picks until 2032, the Suns will have to hope the development of their new young core around Booker pans out in the coming years.<\/p>\n
Based on how the Suns have been ranked, many do not expect the 2025-26 season to be the year that this team makes a big leap after finishing last season with a 36-46 record and missing the playoffs, especially with how loaded the rest of the Western Conference is.<\/p>\n
The Suns are looking to build around a new gritty and defensive identity, which has been preached by owner Mat Ishbia this offseason, and will hope this new mindset will jumpstart the retooling of the team next season. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHOENIX — The Phoenix Suns are a completely new team with completely new expectations as they head into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68481,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":["post-68480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}