A paean for Devin Booker

All-Star nod or not, he deserves kudos for the Suns' successes.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Self-Portrait (1876), Pierre-Auguste Renoir

NBA All-Star reserves will be announced on Thursday. Devin Booker is on the fringe. There are just so many worthy candidates in the Western Conference and while the Suns have been on a nice run of late, it’s a real mystery as to whether Booker will get the nod. He deserves it, I’ve put him on my unofficial ballot and he did get an All-Star nod last season amid an otherwise rough Phoenix Suns season. But Booker’s scoring is down a touch this year and Chris Paul will likely draw the lion’s share of credit for the Suns’ impressive turnaround. There’s even a chance CP3 will get an All-Star nod over Booker.

Amid all this snub potential — or should he make the team amid the potential for backlash to his having earned a spot — consider this a paean to the season Booker’s had and the player he has become. The knock on Booker for years was that he was a single-minded scorer who didn’t try on defense, didn’t lift up his team and didn’t win games. This was always malarkey. (Well, the defense stuff was kind of true for a while.) You can’t win games as a young top-tier scorer if you don’t have NBA-quality players around you, if you don’t have a system that reinforces the team’s strengths and addresses the weaknesses. Except in the most extreme cases, you can’t win with just one great player in the modern NBA.

And so the Suns did not win, even as Booker developed into one of the league’s best scorers. Let’s take a trip back to the 2018-19 season, Booker’s fourth. Booker finished No. 7 in the NBA in scoring at 26.6 per game on solid efficiency. But the Suns went 19-63, and the questions about Booker’s true quality reached a fever pitch (insomuch as anyone ever talked about Booker and the Phoenix Suns at that point, nine years into a playoff drought).

Here’s the list of every player who played at least 500 minutes for that 2018-19 Phoenix team, in addition to Booker:

• A rookie Mikal Bridges (he led the team in minutes played)

• A rookie Deandre Ayton

• Josh Jackson

• T.J. Warren

• A 38-year-old Jamal Crawford

• Richaun Holmes

• Kelly Oubre

• A rookie De’Anthony Melton

• A rookie Elie Okobo

• Trevor Ariza

• Dragan Bender

• Troy Daniels

• Isaiah Canaan

This was the infamous “do the Suns need at least one NBA point guard on the roster?” season (yes, the answer was yes) and … seriously, knowing what we know now about these players, should that team have won more than 19 games? Holmes, Oubre and Warren have turned into nice players, and Bridges and Ayton have developed (the former moreso than the latter, I’d argue).

It’s helpful sometimes to look back in retrospect at formative seasons in a player’s narrative and see what came of the main actors. That’s instructive for Booker. He was discredited by some for the Suns’ woes. Looking back, those woes were unavoidable given the tools at hand.

The story of Booker now risks get lost in the well-earned story of Chris Paul, demigod of persistent excellence. Booker is framed as a one-note scorer-creator who didn’t know how to win until the brilliant veteran showed up, took control of the program and put everything in order.

How true is that?

Or is the real story instead that Booker had it in him all along, but now he has supporting talent befitting a second-tier contender, including the still-excellent CP3, a fully developed Bridges, a more reliable Ayton and talented character actors in Cam Johnson, Dario Saric, Jae Crowder and Cam Payne? (Igor Kokosov caught a bad beat, but add stable coaching into the mix.) You would think that the Suns’ impeccable bubble performance behind Booker would keep the mythos that Booker’s Suns Just Didn’t Know How To Win at bay; alas.

Booker is one of the half-dozen most talented scorers in the NBA; he embraced the trade for a controlling, slow-it-down and legendary point guard in service of team victory; he has given up the ball some amount; and he has offered nary a single lament. This is exactly what we the basketball fandom often desire and they the basketball masters require young stars to do. Book has done it. Book should be lauded accordingly.

In fear that he will not receive the laurels of a deserved All-Star nod, or that if he does he will face scorn that seeks to detract credit from him for the Suns’ successes, we offer this paean to Book.

Valley Boyz forever.

Scores

Bulls 120, Rockets 100 — Chicago might really have something brewing. The Bulls shot 54% from the floor, 24 assists to just 11 turnovers as a team, beat the brakes off of the Rockets’ starters.

Grizzlies 92, Mavericks 102 — Nice defense-first win for Dallas, but I’m really just here to celebrate the fact that Justise Winslow got back on the court over the weekend! He has two games under his belt for Memphis now, and I would encourage you to focus on the positive that he’s back and not look at the box scores. He’s been off 400 days, cut him some slack.

Heat 108, Thunder 94 — OKC has lost seven of nine, embracing their true nature as a bad team that plays hard and has a top talent in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The Heat, meanwhile, have won three straight and I feel like I need to study up on Max Strus before the playoffs?

Blazers 100, Suns 132 — So did Devin Booker intuit that Terry Stotts left him off his All-Star reserve ballot? 34 points in three quarters on 12/17 shooting.

Hornets 110, Jazz 132 — Charlotte led 90-85 with a minute left in the third. In five minutes of gametime, Utah went on a 26-2 run to take a 19-point lead, with Donovan Mitchell and Bojan Bogdanovic on the bench. Good lord. Utah tied a team record with 28 threes; Georges Niang went 7/7 from deep.

Wizards 127, Lakers 124 — Washington is one of the hottest teams in the league, winners of five straight (including victories over the Celtics, Nuggets and now the defending champs). Russell Westbrook: 25 FGAs, 12 FTAs, one three. You love to see it. L.A. has lost three straight after that mystifying win streak in which the team seemed to be on the verge of an embarrassing loss every night. Playing with fire, it’s come home to roost. (Mixed metaphors, it’s TZ baby.)

Not to make excuses, but you can tell LeBron is tired on this dagger play by RWB. Headsy play by Bestbrook.

Schedule

Nine games including a TNT doubleheader. The All-Star reserves will be announced at 7 p.m. ET before the first game. Prepare for snub talk and on-court vengeance! League Pass Cup games denoted with a 🏆. All times Eastern.

Hawks at Cavaliers, 7 🏆
Pistons at Magic, 7 🏆
Kings at Nets, 7:30
Warriors at Knicks, 7:30
Sixers at Raptors, 7:30
Celtics at Mavericks, 7:30, TNT
Timberwolves at Bucks, 8
Blazers at Nuggets, 10, TNT
Wizards at Clippers, 10

Random Request of the Fortnight

So the NBA produces 10-minute highlight reels of every game and sticks them on YouTube and the League Pass apps. They don’t replace watching a game of course (not a whole lot of non-block, non-steal defensive highlights in there), but it’s nice for catching up and seeing any huge highlights you’d miss.

Why doesn’t the NBA have a broadcast or digital channel that just runs those on repeat for a given day’s action?

Links

I can’t believe I missed this, but … as they say, this is a rich text.

NBA on TNT @NBAonTNT

"Y'all need to stay off my Instagram..." @JimmyButler joined TNT & @DwyaneWade did a deep dive into some of his old posts 🤣

It gets better!

Taylor Swift @taylorswift13

@NBAonTNT @JimmyButler @DwyaneWade 13/10 😺

Jake Fischer reports that the Mavericks are quietly shopping Kristaps Porzingis. Not quietly enough, apparently!

Kevin O’Connor on what the Celtics and Bucks need to do to reclaim their places atop the East.

Tom Haberstroh in TrueHoop on the Jazz’s propensity to shoot early. ($)

Shaker Shamman in SI on NBA players who can’t dunk. ($)

Interesting piece from Eric Woodyard on the intersection of Damian Lillard’s on-court style and his love of boxing.

Apropos of nothing, this podcast from Bomani Jones and Joel Anderson talking about Texas and Louisiana was equally enlightening and hilarious. I could listen to these two talk about whatever four hours a day.

Jon Krawczynski in The Athletic on the circumstances of the end of Ryan Saunders’ tenure in Minnesota. ($)

Be excellent to each other.