Despite being in the mix for Kevin Durant, the Phoenix Suns didn’t have a very good summer. Besides whiffing on several key free agents, they nearly lost out on Deandre Ayton due to negotiation difficulties.
To make matters worse, their team owner, Robert Sarver, shed a further spotlight on the franchise when his misconduct was finally exposed to the NBA world.
Fast forward to today, with six days to go before tip-off, and it’s clear that the Suns have made some mistakes over the past few months. As one NBA insider noted on Yahoo! Sports, the handling of the Jae Crowder situation, says all you need to know about what kind of summer the Suns have had.
NBA Insider Calls Out The Suns For Questionable Decision-Making
Crowder, 34, isn’t close to a star at this stage of his career, but he brings a certain degree of toughness and efficiency on both ends of the floor that really helped the team last season.
For some reason, the Suns have decided to trade him this offseason with little explanation, and the community has taken notice.
All this has left rival executives questioning why Phoenix barred Crowder from the team in the first place? Was he really that much of a malcontent? It’s considered a cardinal rule that when teams declare their design to trade a player, it intrinsically lowers his value.
“I thought the way Phoenix played the situation was strange,” one Western Conference executive told Yahoo Sports. “You’re not a super deep team. You’re a contender. Doesn’t it seem like there’s some other way to resolve this other than him sitting out and hurting your depth?”
“For Jae to hold out is pretty rare. It’s pretty extreme,” one Eastern Conference executive said. “It’s really interesting they didn’t just play hardball with him.”
Crowder has been often mentioned as Miami’s primary target to replace P.J. Tucker, a fellow contending mercenary forward, once Tucker departed for Philadelphia in free agency — on another three-year, $30-plus million deal structure similar to Crowder’s purported wishes.
Obviously, we will never know for sure the full details of the relationship between Crowder and Phoenix, and where it all fell apart.
But there may be much more to this story than we see on the surface, and it really has people wondering what we might potentially find out over the next few weeks and months.
