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On Sunday afternoon, the Phoenix Suns shook up the NBA world by trading superstar Kevin Durant to the Houston Rockets, as reported by ESPN NBA insider Shams Charania. In return, the Suns got Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, the number ten pick in this year's NBA Draft, and five future second-round picks.
While a Durant trade was seemingly inevitable this summer, that didn't make the Suns' fall from grace over the last few years any less jarring.
In fact, NBA cap analyst Yossi Gozlan took to X, formerly Twitter, to put into perspective just how far the Suns have fallen.
“Early 2023: The Suns have Devin Booker, Mikal Bridges, Cameron Johnson, Chris Paul, Deandre Ayton, and all their own picks. 2025: The Suns have Devin Booker, Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, no starting-level center, few picks, and Bradley Beal,” noted Gozlan.
Early 2023 was of course the time period when the Suns overhauled much of that young core in order to bring in a disgruntled Durant from the Brooklyn Nets.
The Suns actually had their most success of the Durant era in that first year, winning their first round playoff series vs the Los Angeles Clippers before bowing out to the eventual champion Denver Nuggets, but not before giving them their toughest series of that entire run.
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However, the Suns have not won a playoff game since that moment, and now, the team figures to be stuck somewhere in between a retooling of the roster around Devin Booker and a full-on rebuild.
At first glance, there would appear to be some heavy redundancy on the roster between Booker, Bradley Beal, and trade acquisition Jalen Green, each of whom is most comfortable playing the shooting guard position.
As Gozlan noted, the Suns also still lack a reliable big man. Perhaps they can now draft one with the first round pick they gained in the Durant deal.
Whatever the future holds, it's safe to say that Suns fans were not envisioning that the team would have gotten to this point this quickly.
