Suns miss chance to win without Durant against Pelicans

The Phoenix Suns can still be a good basketball team without Kevin Durant (left ankle sprain). They just can’t play basketball stable enough right now to overcome the reduced margin for error. The most recent example is Thursday’s 126-124 loss to the New Orleans Pelicans.

There was a lot to like about this Phoenix performance. Very good defensive performances and numerous contributions from deep made up for the absence of Durant, Ryan Dunn (pain in the left ankle) or Jusuf Nurkic (bruise in the right thigh).

But the Suns (12-9) turned the ball over 17 times, many of them mental errors, and they gave up 45 points in the third quarter after allowing just 54 in the previous two quarters. They are now 1-7 without Durant.

Bradley Beal shot 10 of 18 for 24 points and played his ass off as usual, but had seven of those turnovers. Devin Booker had 28 points as he fought through a physical game and picked up fouls, but he had a miserable shooting night, going 6 of 20 while trying to find his place to score. It used to be not so difficult for him to do this in smaller teams.

Booker actually kept the Suns at bay late into the night, making back-to-back efforts at the free throw line to tie the game with less than a minute left. But New Orleans’ CJ McCollum isolated Grayson Allen and scored a tough basket on good defense before Booker’s drive-and-kick pass hit Allen for a 3-pointer that didn’t go. After that, the Pelicans got a breakaway dunk that almost sealed the ball until a missed Booker 3 was blocked by Phoenix and Allen scored for a 3 that actually went. The Suns quickly fouled, and after McCollum missed one of two, they called a timeout with 2.7 seconds left.

The play out of bounds gave Booker the ball at the top of the key, where he quickly lost control before a second body came over to block his shot, which couldn’t even reach the basket.

The Pelicans’ 45-point third-quarter score was the result of some quality shooting from a consolation goal allowed by Phoenix that revived their offensive flow, and from there they were 5-for-21 from three in the first half Attempts the Suns were OK with Up top was a 7-for-9 mark on 3s in the quarter. Their signature scorer Brandon Ingram got rolling and scored 21 of his 29 points.

This is the kind of snowball effect when Booker has to stabilize the team, even when Durant is playing. He’s had a fantastic knack for it throughout his career, but when he tried to swap balls with Ingram, he missed his last four throws in that span. While Booker definitely took a leap forward in the buildup that had previously seen him score 52 points in back-to-back games, the added momentum didn’t translate into the shots falling.

Royce O’Neale was outstanding with 19 points and made a handful of big plays in the fourth quarter to keep the Suns in the game. The bench was great, with Bol Bol and Josh Okogie both providing good minutes in a shorthanded situation. With 13 points, six rebounds and 10 assists, Grayson Allen continued his winning streak from the last two weeks and Tyus Jones was very good as always with 13 points and six assists.

The Suns had quite the painful look back on a first half in which they were only up by 11 against a fairly lifeless performance from the Pelicans before New Orleans emerged from halftime a completely new team.

The Pelicans are the strangest team in the NBA.

They made a smart buy-low trade to acquire Dejounte Murray, but certainly did so with the assumption that another move to balance their roster was imminent. It never happened, likely because frontcourt restrictions limited much of the league’s trading flexibility. New Orleans would just be rolling with too many chefs in the kitchen before injuries would hit it hard. Herb Jones, Trey Murphy III, McCollum and Murray are all back after playing in fewer than 10 games Thursday, while Zion Williamson made it two weeks into the year before suffering the hamstring injury that has been bothering him as is usually the case with most simple injuries.

Those two variables led to a 4-18 start for a squad that many thought would be in the play-in mix and some believed had a chance to sneak into the top six. Because the West is so great, the Pelicans were already 7.5 games behind the 10th seed despite only just reaching the quarter mark of the season. So if they want to turn things around, they need to gain some momentum immediately in December. The equipment they showed in the third quarter shows the potential New Orleans has to do this.

Some stats on the Durant-free stretch: The Suns actually didn’t fare too badly when he was healthy when he wasn’t on the field. Through the first nine games, Phoenix had a net rating of 4.6 in those 88 minutes. On Durant’s next seven misses, the Suns had a net rating of -10.4. So they could easily do without Durant when he took a break each half, but the weight of his absence over the course of an entire game was clearly felt.

Beal was great in the two games he played before he was also injured – 25 points per game on 51.5% shooting. And while the eye test didn’t suit Booker’s game as well, mostly due to the extra attention on defense, he still managed 25.4 PPG with a 44.8 FG%. From a production standpoint, the two still nailed it.

A big topic was follow-up shooting. Jones, O’Neale, Dunn and Allen combined to shoot 30.8% from 3-point range in the five games in which Beal and Durant were both injured. Of those 117 attempts, NBA.com’s tracking data classified 112 as “open,” meaning a defender was within three feet of the shooter.

Looking at how that played out tonight, Beal’s turnovers, Booker’s inefficiency and a major defensive mistake in the third quarter were a recipe for a loss on Thursday. If one of these three factors is a little less damaging, Phoenix wins this game handily. A good sign was that Allen, Jones and O’Neale shot 10 of 21 on 3s.

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