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With news of Bradley Beal's trade to the Phoenix Suns filtering through the league on Sunday, the NBA landscape has already shifted less than a week after the Denver Nuggets won their first ever championship.
Remember when Kevin Durant was traded to the Suns, and they looked like arguably the most talented team in the league as a result? Granted Chris Paul won't be there next season, but he's hardly the Chris Paul of old, and when you add Beal to the mix this is a team with a level of talent probably not matched by any other in the league.
So what can we expect from the Suns and Bradley Beal in 2023-24? On paper, they look really hard to beat – will that materialize? Here are three bold predictions for Bradley Beal in 2023-24.
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1. Bradley Beal to average 6+ assists
Beal has played the bulk of his career – at least the early parts – as a shooting guard, with a ball-dominant backcourt partner in John Wall running the offense. Over the past four seasons, however, with Wall injured and then playing elsewhere, Beal has had to run the point a lot more often than he did early in his career, and the transition hasn't proven to be all that difficult for the hyper talented guard.
Beal is a capable playmaker, and in an offensively stacked Suns' side he may be forced to play that role reasonably often again. In Devin Booker, Durant and Beal, the Suns have three players who are better scorers than they are playmakers, but equally each of them is more than capable of running the point if need be. Of the three of them, Beal might be the most natural option to facilitate the offense, and though he'll certainly be playing off-ball plenty, expect him to be running a lot of plays for Durant and Booker coming off screens, too.
Averaging six or more assists isn't too significant an ask for Beal – he's done it just twice in his career, but each of those occasions came in the last four seasons and last year he was just a tick below at 5.4. Expect those kind of assist numbers to endure, if not improve, in 2023-24.
2. Phoenix Suns, Bradley Beal to experience some growing pains
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No one will question the talent of this new Suns roster, and over the course of an 82-game season a team with this much ability should be able to figure things out and prove incredibly difficult to contain on the offensive end. Trite as it may sound, however, the old adage that there's only one basketball might ring true, at least initially, for the Suns.
In many ways this is a strange fit, with three extremely talented scorers all taking up space on the same team. It will no doubt take some time for the Suns to figure out just how to spread the load across Durant, Booker and Beal – and don't forget Ayton, too. Early in the season, there will be games where this load distribution just doesn't work quite as hoped, and question marks will most likely come as a result.
Should the Suns have kept Paul, about as natural a point guard as there is, instead of trading for Beal? Are there too many guys looking for their own shot? What good is having Beal/Booker if they're standing in the corner while Durant faces up in the mid-range?
Expect the Suns to take a little bit of time to sort out the answers to these questions, but that's natural for any team as stacked as this and which has undergone as significant a change as they have in the past few months. But they've got plenty of time to answer them, and come season's end, they'll likely have done just that.
3. Bradley Beal to play more playoff games in 2023-24 than in last six seasons combined
Bradley Beal enjoyed a bit of playoff action early in his career, making the Conference Semi-finals in three of his first five seasons. Since then, however, postseason experience has been elusive. He played six playoff games in 2017-18, and then five in 2020-21, and that's all she wrote as far as playoff appearances go in the past six seasons. Expect that to change this season.
For all of the questions the Suns may have to answer about how to piece this incredibly talented jigsaw puzzle together, the fact remains that the puzzle is full of talent. No other team has a trio as dangerous, and though with Ayton there too there is an obvious lack of ability to build much of a bench behind this side, the quality of their starting five should allow them to overcome that. By the time the 2023-24 playoffs tick around, the Suns should be firing on all cylinders, and anything less than a very, very deep run into the postseason will be a disappointment for this team.
