PHOENIX — Bradley Beal has revived a tradition.
A teenaged Beal, at the behest of his mother, would begin each basketball season with a note to himself, writing long-term goals on a piece of paper. He’d scribble how many points he wanted to average, how many wins he envisioned, what tournaments he hoped to dominate. The venture wasn’t finished once pen departed paper.
As a high schooler, Beal would crumple that note under his pillow and leave it there for the entire season.
“I’d pray on them, reflect on them. … Like, I’m sleeping on this and I wake up to this,” Beal said in a conversation with The Athletic.
He continued the ritual through graduation and into his sole collegiate season but stopped as a pro.
Until this past summer.
A man who shies away from change, yet had renovated significant parts of his life over the previous year, needed to return to his comfort zone. Beal, who spent his first 11 NBA seasons with the Washington Wizards, had foiled during his first run with a new team, the 2023-24 Phoenix Suns, a star-studded squad with massive expectations that eventually got swept out of the playoffs’ first round. Beal battled back injuries throughout the year. His counting stats cratered from their levels in Washington, where he not long ago averaged more than 30 points in back-to-back seasons.
“I was in a funk (last season),” Beal said. “Not gonna lie. I was in a funk.”
So were the Suns, an organization that exploded into unchartered payroll territories to create what it believed would be a contender. A trade for Kevin Durant and another for Beal could not get the Suns close to that status — at least, not right away. Phoenix won 49 games in 2023-24, finishing one spot above the Play-In Tournament and flaming out during a first-round sweep at the hands of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Beal did not meet expectations, nor did the rest of the group.
But this season might be different.
Beal’s conventional statistics aren’t what they were in Washington but, asked to be a secondary scorer alongside Durant and Devin Booker, he’s played the feistiest defense of his career thus far. The Suns are 9-2, tied for first place in the Western Conference. They changed coaches and added role players. Though Durant, a former MVP still at the top of his game, just sustained a calf injury that will keep him out for at least a couple of weeks, this team does not appear the same as the one that let down a season ago.
Beal is operating differently, as are the Suns.
Scraggly duct tape lines both of the basketball courts in the Suns practice facility. Each side of the floor has six boxes, all expertly measured with perfect right angles.
Phoenix head coach Mike Budenholzer implemented them shortly after receiving the job this summer, when the former Milwaukee Bucks and Atlanta Hawks head coach signed a five-year contract to accept the same position in his home state. He explained the boxes to the players shortly into training camp.
These boxes are the team’s blueprint. Each one is a marker of where players who do not possess the basketball should set up as they get into their offense.
“It’s just a gentle reminder,” reserve guard Grayson Allen said.
When a player is in the corner, he must be in the box in the corner, not a step away from it. When he’s on the wing, he must be in the box on the wing. And so on …
These are the types of strategies the front office hoped to find when it hired Budenholzer in May, an acquisition that was six years in the making.
Back in 2018, Suns president James Jones interviewed Budenholzer for a head-coach opening. Jones melted during that conversation — specifically because of the way Budenholzer held players accountable and the relationships he built with them along the way. But the Suns were rebuilding, and Milwaukee offered the coach championship hopes.
Budenholzer chose the Bucks before Phoenix ever had the chance to get far down the line with him. He helped Milwaukee to a title in 2021.
This summer, the Suns did not waste time. Once they knew they were moving on from now-former coach Frank Vogel, they locked in on Budenholzer.
The front office understood the flaws that had to change. The Suns did not shoot enough 3s in 2023-24, they believed. The rebounding was unimpressive, as was the ball control. They needed to clean up the messiness.
They began the coaching search at owner Matt Ishbia’s home in Birmingham, Mich., where Jones, Ishbia and CEO Josh Bartelstein welcomed Budenholzer, who was in a tier by himself at that point. Budenholzer reeled off ideas for the group. He pitched new ways to use center Jusuf Nurkić alongside the big three. He pushed the same thought the front office had, that Phoenix needed to get up more deep balls. The Suns required better ball movement and less isolation, Budenholzer told the contingent.
The job was his.
Now, these Suns play with a different verve.
Their defensive rotations are crisper. People around the organization credit that to improved communication — which, no question, comes with familiarity and, in some cases, such as Beal’s, with an improved mindset.
They will play small lineups and annihilate defenses with shooting aplenty. When they do, they’ve uncovered a secret weapon to help the rebounding: Royce O’Neale, whom they traded for last season and re-signed this past summer and who is one of the world’s better wings on the boards. The offense is not the same. They run fewer conventional pick-and-rolls. Forget about the big men. Beal or Tyus Jones will set screens for ball handlers, discombobulating defenses.
Phoenix ran 38.4 pick-and-rolls per 100 possessions last season with a non-center as the screener, 19th in the NBA according to Second Spectrum. As of Tuesday, that number was up to 56.4 in 2024-25, third-most in the league.
All of a sudden, the Suns have injected a shot of physicality into a perimeter-laden squad.
“I know how to screen,” Booker said, cracking a smile before throwing a playful jab at a much brawnier teammate. “Now, I’m teaching (Nurkić).”
The Suns run much of the actions the Boston Celtics do, only instead of Derrick White screening before split-cutting, it’s Tyus Jones doing the deed. The point guard, maybe the best minimum signing of the summer, brings a no-nonsense on-court presence. He has led the league in assist-to-turnover ratio in six consecutive seasons. He is the ultimate organizer, basketball’s Marie Kondo.
Budenholzer isn’t wired much differently.
Vibes have changed; culture has revamped. After a season of maneuvering without a conventional point guard, the Suns now have one.
“We didn’t love it as a team (last season),” Beal said. “The dynamic we had — we didn’t have a (point guard), which everybody crucified us on. It was tough. It was very tough. Everybody was kinda out of position last year, not necessarily what made them who they are.”
Players got the impression a season ago that there was a distinct hierarchy inside the offense. The big three of Durant, Booker and Beal got their shots, then everyone else fell in line. Today, the goal is to become more free flowing.
Jones gets the Suns into their offense earlier in the shot clock. The team plays faster. It’s emphasizing paint touches and kickouts from there.
Beal is more locked in on role-playing traits. He dropped nearly 20 pounds over the summer to help with quickness and has received many of Phoenix’s most-difficult defensive assignments on the perimeter, a change from his more lackadaisical ways on that side of the floor in D.C., when he had to lift every offensive weight and didn’t have much energy remaining.
Most importantly, the Suns are winning games and fixing their former flaws in the process.
They finished 20th in defensive rebound rate in 2023-24. Well, they’re up to sixth so far this season.
They were 25th in turnover rate a year ago. But no Budenholzer- or Jones-led team could ever be so sloppy. They are up to 10th through 11 games.
“I was gonna be comfortable regardless (of) if we had Tyus,” Beal said. “But man, a million times over, yes, he makes life significantly more easy for everybody.”
Beal believes he put too much pressure on himself last season after departing D.C., a place he insisted for more than a decade he never wanted to leave — and had the Wizards put a competitive team around him, maybe he never would have.
The more he battled last season, the less he looked like the All-NBA guard that was somewhere inside of him, and the more frustration mounted. Not only had the Suns traded Chris Paul and a first-round pick for Beal during the summer of 2023, when Beal used the NBA’s only no-trade clause to direct himself west; they had also gone all in to do it. The little flexibility the organization possessed went out the window once it traded for a third star and, more importantly, a third max contract.
But Beal began the year with a back injury. He returned for a few games; then exited the lineup again. He came back for three more, then went out again. The cycle continued.
“I’m geeked up, ready to go — and boom, my back,” Beal said. “So, now the injuries kind of start piling up again, right? So, that was where a lot of my funk came from. I’m battling that along with having this huge expectation of a ‘big three’ and making sure that we’re on the floor together, and I’m putting pressure on myself because I know they traded for me for a reason. I gotta contribute. I gotta be available.”
Anxiety piled on top of itself.
Early in his career, when Beal dealt with stress fractures in his leg, he took on the label of injury-prone, which outwardly bothered him. He proclaimed then that he would embark on a mission to become an iron man. He changed his body and eventually played in 82 games for two consecutive seasons. But injuries have plagued him since — and 2023-24 was the most trying of them all.
“It screwed me over in the head a little bit,” Beal said.
The 2023-24 Suns dominated when their starters played together, but they didn’t share the floor enough. And once any of them had to rest, the roof collapsed. The regular season bred inconsistency. The playoffs turned into a special type of struggle. The Timberwolves outscored Phoenix by 71 points during a four-game drubbing.
Following the postseason dud, Beal needed to shake things up.
For three and a half months after the Suns’ season ended, he did not touch a basketball. In fact, he barely thought about the sport. He didn’t watch the playoffs, the NBA Finals or the Olympics. At the end of July, he finally returned to the court for workouts.
“It was literally eliminating the stressors, right? For whatever reason, I was allowing hoops to kind of stress me,” Beal said before grabbing his phone and motioning it forward. “And this to stress me.”
No longer is Beal thinking the same way — and no longer do the Suns look like a team in trouble.
Just before the start of training camp, Beal’s wife, Kamiah, asked him what his goals were for the upcoming season. That’s when Beal had a flashback. It was time to return to his old ways, writing down what he hoped would occur through June.
But life has changed since Beal was attempting to speak accolades into existence as a child. He’s married with three kids. He’s struggled to find happiness in basketball — never comfortable during the end of his run in Washington, when the Wizards lost constantly, and imperfect during Year 1 in Phoenix.
He spent an introspective summer focusing on getting his mind and body right. He lost weight, leaned into a more defensive mentality and remembered his love of the game.
Alongside his wife, Beal grabbed a piece of paper and wrote just two words on it. No stats. Nothing tangible. Instead, this was a reminder that no good would come if he didn’t live by the following mantra:
“HAVE FUN,” he wrote.
It took a calamitous year to think that way, but today, that’s what’s happening.
The boxes on the Suns practice court are so new that Budenholzer hasn’t even painted them in, yet.
One box overlaps with the baseline, stretching past either side of the backboard and reaching out just past where the rim extends. This is “the dunker’s spot,” the place Nurkić can linger for dump-offs or offensive rebounds. One long rectangle is in each corner. A couple of square boxes are on either wing and another is at the top of the 3-point arc.
Budenholzer painted similar boxes in blue on the Bucks practice court, which nudged Milwaukee to elite floor spacing. Shooters on the wings can’t cozy up against the 3-point arc; they must back up a step, especially if they have the range to make defenders close out frantically. The Suns wanted to shoot more 3s this season. So far, they’re doing it.
A season ago, they sunk to 25th in the NBA in 3-point attempts per 100 possessions. This season, they’re up to fifth.
“That mindset was a little bit already there,” Allen said. “Like, OK, we got to actually look for 3s. We got to take them. We’re not passing up 3s to drive and try to get to more actions. And then, with the spacing that Bud has put in, I think that’s just encouraged us.”
The Suns are learning to play together.
Booker has been in town his entire 10-year career. Durant now enters his second full season in Phoenix, as do Beal, Allen and Nurkić. They are hyper-focused on communication in whichever ways possible. Budenholzer traveled to Europe to see Nurkić over the summer, when management made a point to visit all of its players, wherever they were residing. Following practices, the top rotation players gather to talk through plays or tendencies.
“We have little segments … You know, that goes a long way,” Booker said.
Budenholzer preaches a paradoxical philosophy — one that’s true for skills outside of basketball, too. To break the rules of writing, one must first master grammar. Well, to create randomness, as Budenholzer calls it, a team must implement structure.
“It starts in open gym,” Budenholzer said. “Trying to just get them to do all the things (sharing) the ball, moving people, moving different screens, different combinations, and then throughout practice, maybe in warmups, through drills, through breakdowns. It’s kind of a recurring theme.”
Five years ago, after a promise that he would attempt to recruit top-tier talent to Washington and a declaration that he would “die in a Wizards jersey,” Beal emphasized even further how bound he was to stay with the franchise that drafted him in 2012.
“I hate super teams,” Beal said at the time. “And that’s just me. … Like everybody, just get your own team and just try to win with what you’ve got.”
Things change fast in the NBA.
Beal is, of course, a member of a super team now by his own choice. Phoenix has the league’s most expensive payroll. Beal is on a max contract and has been an All-NBAer. Booker is a prime-aged Olympian. Durant remains in the tier 1 of greats. The Suns would not be 9-2 without his crunch-time heroics against the Dallas Mavericks, LA Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers, Miami Heat … the list goes on. Late-game offense for Phoenix has turned into a smaller player, such as Beal or O’Neale, screening for Durant or Durant screening for Jones, then pulverizing some helpless defender from the high elbow.
Seven games that Durant has played in this season have come within five points with five or fewer minutes to go. Phoenix has won all seven of them.
It took the Suns time to fill out this roster. If they continue to roll, if Durant makes a quick enough recovery for them to maintain at the top of the West and make noise come the spring, they could present a new model for second-apron teams, who are learning on the fly. Phoenix pulled off the trade for Durant in February 2023. It executed the Beal deal the ensuing summer, blowing past the second apron, a payroll threshold that severely limits team-building resources.
The Suns of last season had Beal, Durant and Booker, along with a few quality role players. But they didn’t have enough.
A year ago, they didn’t have a point guard. Now they have Jones. They were without a reliable backup center, which they’ve now uncovered in Mason Plumlee, a minimum signing whose slick passing has helped speed up the second unit. Late first-round pick Ryan Dunn, who resembles a flying squirrel while defending ballhandlers, looks like a hit. They’ve re-signed important free agents, the only way for teams above the second apron to maintain any semblance of flexibility.
Not only did they extend Allen and re-sign O’Neale this summer; they also handed Josh Okogie, who doesn’t play when the team is fully healthy, a salary that’s larger than market value, which (because of the league’s convoluted collective bargaining agreement) makes him easier to include in trades.
Add in a couple of All-Stars, including a former MVP in Durant, and it’s enough to change Beal’s tune on super teams.
“Not that you need one to win,” Beal started. He sighed, then finished his thought. “But you kinda need one to win. And it’s really, really great to play with great players.”
(Photo illustration: Meech Robinson/The Athletic; photos: Barry Gossage/NBAE via Getty Images)
