The Suns choose money over having a single point guard in the rotation

Mat Ishbia's will to spend is not bottomless.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Let’s start the week with Pieter Bruegel The Elder’s Peasant Wedding from 1566-69.

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Scheduling Note

We’re going into offseason maintenance mode. AKA burnout prevention mode. AKA I can’t talk about Dame and Harden every day and I don’t have deep thoughts on Braxton Key signing a two-way contract mode.

The newsletter will arrive three times per week (planned to be Monday-Wednesday-Thursday, but variable as news happens), and the frequency of free-to-all newsletters will drop to about once every two weeks. Everything else will be available to paid newsletter subscribers only. I’ll also be taking a week off (July 31-August 4) to recharge.

Thanks as always for the support.

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You Can’t Buy Point Guard Depth

Over the weekend, the Suns traded Cam Payne to the Spurs, signed Bol Bol to a minimum contract and traded a future first round pick swap for three seconds.

To me, that’s all really a lot of smoke and paperwork to save some money by deciding you don’t need point guards on the roster.

According to Bobby Marks, replacing Payne on the roster with Bol saves Phoenix about $26 million. Payne is on a $6.5 million contract that increased the Suns’ total payroll into a higher tier of penalty. Bol’s minimum contract is smaller and doesn’t count against the tax in the same way. So Mat Ishbia saves a ton of money here.

Here is a complete list of point guards on the Phoenix Suns roster:

• Saben Lee

• Jordan Goodwin

The plan is for Bradley Beal and Devin Booker to share point guard duties, and for Kevin Durant and Eric Gordon to handle the ball a lot, too. No word on what the Suns will do if any of these players miss games or need help. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

It’s fine, in my opinion, to take a flyer on Bol after the other offseason work Phoenix has done. It’s concerning that the Magic, a young rebuilding team, gave up on him. Maybe strong veteran leadership will help. Totally fine to take a flyer on him.

But the idea that Ishbia will spend whatever it takes to win a championship has just suffered a potentially fatal blow. Payne is a mid-tier (or slightly better) reserve point guard. Without a true starting level point guard, and with two ball-sharing lead guards who each missed about 30 games last season, and without a back-up plan that isn’t Saben Lee or Jordan Goodwin, this is a huge risk for Phoenix. A risk taken to save the boss man some money.

On another level, this is really funny because last decade the Suns were always the team that either had zero point guards or three starting point guards, rarely anything in between. History repeats itself!

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Buckets

Sabrina Ionescu is a controversial superstar in WNBA circles because she has been elevated to a level of fame and endorsement power that Black players better than her have not reached. The latest conflagration on that tip is Ionescu getting the WNBA cover of NBA 2K24 instead of, say, A’ja Wilson.

But it is not controversial to say that Sabrina can shoot. This is the cleanest 3-Point Content performance in NBA or WNBA history, bar none.