“Quack, Quack, Quack, Quack.”
The puck stops here! Or it needs to if the Phoenix Suns want to have a shot at winning a playoff series this season. The here that I’m talking about is the glass.
After an unexpected first-round playoff appearance, the Suns are back, hoping to improve upon last season, one that established a culture and new direction for the organization after the short-lived Kevin Durant era. It was a season that greatly exceeded national and local expectations, yet fizzled when the competition ratcheted up in the postseason.
In that final stretch run, the Suns’ stalwart seven-footer and leading rebounder Mark Williams finally succumbed to the injury bug, as has far too often been his fate over the course of his career, leaving a second year Oso Ighodaro, a sprinkling of Khaman Malauch and a whole lot of small ball to replace his vacated minutes.
During this Mark-less stretch, the Suns struggled to compete on the glass. Larger teams had their way with the Suns, including a disappointing Houston team that swept the Suns in the regular season series. Houston will be back, and bigger, with the return of Steven Adams, and they won’t be the only team in the West with a clear size advantage over the Suns. From Wemby to Kessler Walker, from Gobert to the double big lineup in OKC, the Suns are going to need to figure out how to close out defensive possessions with a rebound if they want to be the team they envision.
The Suns expect to be a team that gets out in transition, a team that relies on downhill rim pressure and foul shots (uh-oh) rather than the great equalizer that is the three-ball. They can no longer afford to get worked on the glass and expect to win, especially in the playoffs where giving up an offensive rebound in the closing possessions is enough to end games. The problem of size has limited the Phoenix Suns’ championship potential for years, long before the arrival of Ishbia, Gregory and Ott.
One of the all-time great fictional teams, the Mighty Ducks, found themselves in a similar situation as this year’s Phoenix Suns. Returning off a Cinderella season with new, more challenging goals, the Ducks were quickly derailed by the size and physicality of the brutal Icelandic Junior National team. In the end, they overcame their limitations. Not through the individual efforts of any one player but through the collective efforts of a team and their coach.
The Phoenix Suns must take a similar approach to solving their rebounding woes, or watch the goals we set for them this offseason sink into the cold Icelandic sea.
Just like Gordan Bombay, the mastermind behind the Triple Deke and Flying “V” formation in D2, Jordan Ott returns to the Phoenix Suns for his second go-around as an NBA head coach with a number of puzzles that still need to be solved.
How do they optimize the scoring talents of Devin Booker and Jalen Green with a roster that requires at least one of them to facilitate? How does Ott incorporate the new talent that’s been added to the roster into an established culture while allowing the team space to morph into something new? How does he adjust the offense to account for likely inconsistent three-point production from his starting five? All of these are important questions, but to me the issue that really limits the potential of what the Suns can be, a top-ten defense that causes havoc plays to generate transition opportunities, is finding a way to be a better defensive rebounding team. Mark Williams is once again out of the lineup, so Jordan Ott will have to get creative in order to cover up the defensive rebounding deficiencies of his young, promising centers, neither of which appears ready to replace Mark Williams’ rebounding production.
Ott will need to prioritize defensive rebounding as he tinkers with lineups in order to find the most effective rotations, specifically in who he pairs with Oso and Malauch as they grow into their roles.
Oso might need to be paired up with length so lineups that feature Dillon Brooks at the four might be better suited for a different center, whereas a pairing player like Ryan Dunn with Obo might be a better fit. Malauch provides length but still lacks the strength and processing speed to get into and hold position, so he needs to be paired with strength, like Miles Bridges or rebounding guards who can get to balls that are out of his reach, such as Collin or Goodie.
It will certainly take some experimenting in the beginning of the season, but it can’t be pushed aside if the Suns want to earn a playoff seed that gives them a chance to advance. Luckily, like the Mighty Ducks in the Junior Goodwill Games, the Suns have added some pieces for Ott to add to the mix. The first will open up a level of physicality the Suns haven’t tapped into since the early nineties.
When Team USA needed to beef up, they went to the streets of Chicago to find Dean Portman to play next to Fulton Reed. The two came together to form the Bash Brothers, the unruly, frequently penalized, enforcers of the Mighty Ducks.
The Suns added Miles Bridges, and in doing so, they are able to play Dillon Brooks at the three, which seems a better fit for his stature. Beyond their physical attributes, both players play with an edge and aggressiveness that lends itself to success on the boards. Can Dillon and Miles come together as veterans and leaders on this team to not only provide that grit and intention through their play on the court but permeate it through the locker room to the Suns’ young forwards? A player like Ryan Dunn, who was one of the better defensive rebounders on the team last year and who’s looking to carve out a role on this team, could stand to benefit substantially from the Bash Brothers mindset. Now that Mark Williams is sidelined, the Suns will need all the help they can get.
Yet the Bash Brothers aren’t the only direction Ott can turn to fortify his front court. He has at his disposal a unique weapon in the war of the boards. The Mighty Ducks found an edge when they discovered Tyler Russ and his Knuckle Puck. The Phoenix Suns have Jordan Goodwin.
Now that Russel Westbrook has aged out of relevance in the NBA, there really is no other player in the league like Jordan Goodwin. He’s physical, crafty, and determined, finding any opening to sneak into places a 6’3” journeyman should never tread and snatch a basketball out of the hands of an unsuspecting opponent. As Khaman works to find his flow, having a guard like Jordan Goodwin, or to a lesser extent Collin Gillespie, to swoop in on balls that bounce away from the young seven-footer could cover up some of his deficiencies in positioning as he develops his processing speed.
While so much of Goodie’s success is tied to rebounding on the offensive end, could Goodie expand his impact on the defensive glass in order to shore up the front court when the starters go to the bench, ensuring that defensive stops don’t turn into open threes and easy buckets?
Goodie is Goodie; rain, sleet, or snow. He’s put in years of work to get there, but for Oso and Khaman that’s just not the case.
The toughest call for Gordon Bombay in the Goodwill Games ended up being the move that won the tournament. Replacing his veteran goalie, Golberg, while he was on a heater, with a talented goalie from Maine, Julie “the Cat” Gaffney.
In the biggest moment, a shootout, against the Icelandic team’s best scorer, Bombay made the move to insert the Cat because of the shooter’s vain tendency to go glove side. While Goldberg was a player Bombay had leaned on through both movies, the Cat was known for her quick glove. Situationally changing goalies made sense.
Oso earned Ott’s trust over the course of last season. Ott knows he can depend on Oso to be where he needs to be and loves the defensive upside of his switchability. Yet situationally there are matchups where it will make sense to start and skew the minutes towards Malauch.
Flat out, Oso is not big enough to hold up against the league’s strongest centers. You can not win a playoff game against the Nuggets with Oso matching up against Jokic. Ott needs to be flexible and willing to play through the mistakes that come with starting a young center. Losses that may come in the beginning of the year will turn to valuable experience that will be paid forward in the back half of the season.
On the flip side, it may not make sense to play Malauch against teams that are going to bomb threes that lead to a lot of long rebounds. The Suns are blessed with diversity at the center position. Ott should lean into that.
I personally would like to see some double big lineups, where Oso is setting screens on offense and Khaman is on the three-point line stretching the floor, and defensively Khaman is taking the center and anchoring the defense, and Oso is guarding the four. I’m not going to stick Oso out there to guard MPJ or some of the more athletic fours in the league, but if Houston wants to run out Adams and Sengun, Phoenix might have an answer in KhOso.
None of these answers even need to be permanent. They just need to hold things together until they get Mark Williams back. Mark, like Adam Banks on the Mighty Ducks, is a known commodity, and if the Suns don’t fall apart before he returns, having him fresh for the back half of the season and hopefully available for the playoffs could make his injury a blessing in disguise.
Plenty of questions still remain, and their answers will only be revealed on the court, but one thing I know for certain is that if the Suns can’t improve their rebounding, they won’t be winning a playoff series. Not in this Western Conference. Not without the three-point shot. The Suns are going in the direction of the rest of the NBA in emphasizing it, but do they have the pieces to do so successfully? Ott will certainly have more to work with than in his inaugural season, but there’s a lot of ground to make up. There’s no one player that can fix this, and just like the Mighty Ducks, the Suns must learn to fly together.
