PHOENIX — You wouldn’t have guessed it from watching them the last two games, but the Phoenix Suns are in a precarious position.
With a month remaining in the regular season, they have failed to pull away from a potential play-in tournament while being mostly healthy since the All-Star break. With a 39-29 record and eighth place in the standings, there’s a very good chance that this is now out of their complete control. It will take a combination of these wins to win enough games while making other teams lose enough games.
“We’re in the playoffs before the playoffs,” Suns head coach Frank Vogel said Tuesday. “We all want to get into the top six. We are confident that if we are in a play-in match we will win, but there are too many variables in a match situation like that.
With 14 games left, scoring double-digit wins doesn’t seem feasible given the basketball we’ve watched recently and all season, as well as the grueling schedule that remains.
Phoenix ends the year with a hellish 10-game streak. The final three games of a five-game road trip will take place in Denver, Oklahoma City and New Orleans before the final three at the Footprint Center hosting Cleveland, Minnesota and New Orleans. Four on the road finishes playing the Clippers twice before traveling to Sacramento and Minnesota.
All of these teams currently hold a playoff spot.
What sets the stage in advance is a crucial four-game stretch. Phoenix should go 4-0 and might need it.
A back-to-back home game featuring the Philadelphia 76ers on Wednesday and the Atlanta Hawks on Thursday kicks things off. Philly is 9-13 since Joel Embiid went down and the Hawks have been consistently below average all year. Then it’s two games over three days in San Antonio against the Spurs.
The Suns are 0-4 against these teams this season.
There is a real sense of gravity that should weigh on the Suns’ shoulders every game. That’s what made the lackadaisical nature of Phoenix’s performances in Charlotte and Milwaukee so surprising. What’s driving this is what will likely make them a play-in tournament team.
That was evident in Sunday’s loss to the Giannis Antetokounmpo-less Bucks, a game on ABC. Phoenix’s defensive effort was as weak as it has been all year, with the denial of 3-point shots in a terrible state, especially after Milwaukee started making a few.
– RB (sunsrtrash) (@RyB_311) March 18, 2024
“We definitely can’t lay eggs like that,” Suns guard Bradley Beal said Tuesday. “We need to come out with a lot better focus and a lot more sense of urgency than we’ve experienced. This is completely unacceptable and we all know it. …It starts with the three of us, our attention to detail and our focus.
The Suns reviewed this film in practice on Tuesday.
“Keep the 3-point line. That’s by far our main goal with our movie session,” Vogel said. “I’ve been doing a lot of drill work just to double the urgency that’s expected of me as far as defending the 3 better.”
Vogel and Beal both pointed out a center’s spread look as a shooter, which also gives the Suns problems in Boston, for which Vogel noted Phoenix has defensive schemes but lacks execution.
“Awareness,” Vogel said. “A lot of over-helping, a lot of short closing.”
Beal outlined the best way to keep those shots from getting in.
“We have to avoid these things. … We can control a lot of the 3s they attempt,” he said. “Don’t even look up, I think that helps us.”
We’re past the point of a specific weakness like this improving to help the Suns become a contender. They have to do it now just to win basketball games and stay out of the play-ins.
If there was a decision to be made now, exactly four weeks into the play-in tournament, it would be for three teams to compete for the final automatic spot in the Western Conference.
From late January to early February, the Sacramento Kings (39-28) won six of seven, but went 10-9 in their last 19 games. They don’t pose as much of a threat to at the same time make a run or move down in the standings.
For a more volatile team, it’s the Dallas Mavericks (40-29), who are 14-6 over their previous 20. And their remaining matches are favorable. They will face Sacramento twice in the same week, and the same for the Golden State Warriors (35-32). The only competition Dallas faces is Oklahoma City in the final game of the regular season. All this makes the Mavericks the prohibitive favorite to snatch this sixth position.
There are still a few distant projects, the validity of which will solidify or dissipate in two weeks.
The Los Angeles Clippers (42-25) are 8-10 since February 7. They were apparently in the top four in the standings before this slide, and because the New Orleans Pelicans (42-26) are 13-5 over this span as well, LA could slide. Entering action Tuesday, it was at 25 losses, one fewer than New Orleans, three fewer than Sacramento and four fewer than Dallas and Phoenix. One more slip-up over these half-dozen games could make things interesting, especially if another team below the Clippers gets hot besides New Orleans.
On the other hand, the Los Angeles Lakers (37-32) seem stuck for the play-in match of the No. 9 and 10 seeds. Their very good streaks were offset by very bad ones during the ‘year. Golden State, also with 32 losses, is pretty much cemented in this game as well.
But could the latter escape? The Warriors are 14-7 in their last 21 outings, and a major difference is also that they have the lightest schedule of all of these teams. Their remaining top-six competitors in either conference are Minnesota, Orlando and New Orleans. That’s it. Two critical matchups against the Mavericks and another singular one against the Lakers stand out.
The fact is, ’tis the season of dashboard-gazing. This would have been difficult to imagine six months ago, or even three, but here we are. This is now the reality for the Suns.
