The Suns’ Second Round Picks Matter

We have reached my least favorite part of every season. I despise March basketball. Oh, I’ll still watch the games, but I’ll do it longing for the NBA Playoffs and MLB Opening Day. I’m ready for games that feel important. 

For 11 calendar months out of the year, if you asked me if I wanted a shorter season, I would say absolutely not. I will accept nothing less than 82 games! I love my Suns, and I always want more basketball. In March, I’d settle for 70.

So yes, despite my best efforts, my eyes are wandering away from the regular season. They always do in March. They’ll be back, but in the meantime, they aren’t wandering away from the Suns. In fact, they find themselves looking ahead to the draft, which is my favorite sporting event of the year.

I couldn’t help but think of the draft when watching the Suns play the Timberwolves on Tuesday. Oso Ighodaro and Rasheer Fleming just look good. Oso had 16 points and 10 rebounds on good efficiency and a few great defensive plays. Rasheer only had nine points, but he hit a couple of threes, and he looks like a completely different player than he did at the beginning of the season.

Both of these guys are examples of second round successes found in the Ishbia era. The ability to find diamonds in the rough in the second round is only going to be more important as time goes on. The Suns had to take a big swing with Khaman Maluach at the 10th pick in the draft last year because that is likely going to be the last lottery pick in the Devin Booker era.

Even if the Suns are bad, they don’t have full, unprotected control of their own draft pick until 2032 at least. Given previous history, it is likely that when that pick becomes tradeable, it too will be traded for more assets, like the 2031 pick was. Phoenix traded that pick for multiple picks that were all likely to be later in the draft than that one will be. The Suns are living on draft pick credit right now, and they keep kicking their due date down the line.

Whether or not that will be an effective strategy is still not certain. In the meantime, however, you can expect your Phoenix Suns to make their draft selections at the end of the first round or in the second round. 

Now, I have been guilty of thinking very little of second round draft picks. I have long viewed them as a currency that front offices use to squeeze just a little more value into their trades until draft night, when they become worthless. 

But they aren’t worthless assets. Oso Ighodaro and Rasheer Fleming have proven this season that second rounders can turn into real rotation players. 

I have been guilty of feeling some doom and gloom about the post-KD era. I believe that Devin Booker is good enough to be the best player on a championship team because I have seen him climb to just below the top rung of the ladder. We have a superstar in his prime.

What I didn’t think we had was anything else. The last couple of seasons were so difficult to stomach that I was on board the “trade everyone” train. All I saw was a lottery team with no meaningful draft capital and a roster utterly devoid of talent.

What Brian Gregory and Mat Ishbia saw was opportunity. This team now has young players on it that can blossom into a real core that can bring Phoenix back to the top. And the ones that are blossoming aren’t even the ones that we expected.

The second round doesn’t matter for every team, but it matters for this one. It matters because the Brian Gregory front office is capable of making it matter.

So, no, the Suns don’t have a first round pick in this upcoming draft, but they do have a second. As the season winds down and my eyes wander back to the games, I am going to keep the draft in the back of my mind.