Phx-Suns.Net

Wally_West wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:32 pm

Jalen green for Dejounte Murray(Klutch)?

Superbone wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:36 pm

Like Ishbia said, we're just running it back guys. O'Neale and Allen will never believe him again.

Mori Chu wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:36 pm

Williams - bad

Mori Chu wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:36 pm

I think we might have given up too much shooting this offseason. Grayson and Royce were basically our most reliable 3-point shooters, and now they're gone. Guys who shoot that well don't grow on trees. And I don't really trust our remaining guys like Booker, Green, Goodwin nearly as much from 3, though Gillespie has become pretty reliable. I hope the FO brings in at least one more shooter. Let's look at our roster and see who is good at 3-point shooting:

Booker - decent (has reputation of being a great one, but the percentage is not that good)
Green - meh
Brooks - decent
Bridges - meh
Williams - bad

Gillespie - good 3pt shooter
Goodwin - decent
Dunn - bad
Highsmith - ?
Maluach - meh
Oso - bad
Fleming - good
Brea - good, but doesn't play
Bouyea, Huntley, Livers - ? are these guys even on the roster?

Who in that list really scares you from 3? Book, Gillespie, Fleming? With the occasional 3 from Brooks or Goodie? I think over the course of this summer, 3-point shooting has swung from being a relative strength of this team to a visible weakness. And IMO that'll be a big problem for us, since we can't really outcompete good teams in most other areas like athleticism, strength, size, rebounding, or defense.

Ring_Wanted wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:30 pm

Shabazz wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:08 pm

Ring_Wanted wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 11:48 am

virtual9mm wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 11:41 am

Ring_Wanted wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 11:34 am

Exactly. Just leave the picks out and it is an ok move for both teams. CHA was done with Bridges regardless, and we for sure needed to do something about the guard logjam.

Almost as if Ishbia wants to make sure the Suns never have a lottery pick, committing to building with one. Brilliance or lunacy I don't know. But the Suns pretty much will never tank.

The lottery changes help us in this regard but yeah, even if you don't believe in tanking, handing out unprotected picks that far out is just bad business.

Horrible. Maybe for a star. But for Miles Bridges???

This Ponzi scheme will require payment at some point.

Indeed. We were sending out more than enough in Allen (the better player imo) and O'Neale. Can't convince me that we had to give up that pick for a lowly swap in 29, a second rounder and some cap flexibility. Really, the more you think about it, the worse it gets.

Shabazz wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:41 pm

Ring_Wanted wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:30 pm

Shabazz wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:08 pm

Ring_Wanted wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 11:48 am

virtual9mm wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 11:41 am

Almost as if Ishbia wants to make sure the Suns never have a lottery pick, committing to building with one. Brilliance or lunacy I don't know. But the Suns pretty much will never tank.

The lottery changes help us in this regard but yeah, even if you don't believe in tanking, handing out unprotected picks that far out is just bad business.

Horrible. Maybe for a star. But for Miles Bridges???

This Ponzi scheme will require payment at some point.

Indeed. We were sending out more than enough in Allen (the better player imo) and O'Neale. Can't convince me that we had to give up that pick for a lowly swap in 29, a second rounder and some cap flexibility. Really, the more you think about it, the worse it gets.

I would also prefer Allen to Bridges in today’s NBA and with our roster construction.

How many poor-shooting bigs can one team sustain? I think we may have the worst shooting lineup in the entire NBA. By my sophisticated math, we have 1 (ONE) plus 3 point shooter in our top 10. That’s insane.

The first-round pick the Hornets are sending out will be the least favorable from Charlotte, Utah, Cleveland or Minnesota in 2029.

Mori Chu wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 28, 2026 12:57 pm

If you look at this trade from Charlotte's perspective, it's a steal. They are clearly rebuilding, given that they shipped out LaMelo. In that light:

- They ship out a guy with major character issues who doesn't fit their new rebuild timeline.
- He was on an expiring contract, so now they don't have to worry about extending him for huge $$$ or losing him for nothing.
- They get way better at shooting with two snipers on the wing.
- They get two very tradeable contracts that lots of contending teams would want.
- They get a 2033 1st that is quite likely to be a juicy high-lottery pick.

I think they totally won this trade, even if Miles turns out to play well for us. Excellent trade for a rebuilding team from their perspective.

And the 1st they are sending us is poodoo.

The first-round pick the Hornets are sending out will be the least favorable from Charlotte, Utah, Cleveland or Minnesota in 2029.

^ That is going to be a really mediocre 1st round pick.

June 28: Hornets deal Bridges, picks to Suns

Charlotte Hornets get: G Grayson Allen, F Royce O'Neale, 2033 unprotected first-round pick
Phoenix Suns get: F Miles Bridges, 2027 second-round pick (least favorable of Boston and Orlando), 2029 first-round pick (least favorable of Charlotte, Utah, Cleveland and Minnesota)

Grade for Charlotte: B+

What this means for the Hornets: Just a few days ago, the Hornets made the surprising decision to remove one member of last season's best five-man lineup, by trading LaMelo Ball to Minnesota. Apparently, they weren't done breaking up that band.

It makes sense to think of this trade as a natural follow-up to the Ball blockbuster, which brought Naz Reid to Charlotte along with draft capital, including an unprotected first-round pick in 2033.

Adding Reid gave the Hornets four big men with diverse skill sets, all of whom are either solid NBA players already (Reid and Moussa Diabate) or recent draft picks who need playing time (Ryan Kalkbrenner and Hannes Steinbach). All four are also younger than Bridges.

So with Reid's ability to play power forward, where he'll now start for the first extended stretch of his career, Bridges had lost his spot. And the Hornets cashed in by acquiring another unprotected first-round pick in 2033. That's reason enough to make this deal, especially because it came at the cost of a player with just one remaining season on his contract, whom the Hornets might not have wanted to extend.

It will also be interesting to see how much Allen and O'Neale are able to give the Hornets on the court, after Phoenix included them in this deal primarily for cost-cutting purposes.

Allen is coming off a season to forget: He made just 35% of his 3-pointers -- after finishing well above 40% in his previous two campaigns -- and missed part of Phoenix's playoff loss because of a hamstring strain. Given that he'll turn 31 years old before the start of next season, he's clearly on the downslope of his career. But if his shot bounces back to its typical level, he can still help a team that led the league in made 3-pointers last season, but has since lost Ball.

O'Neale, meanwhile, has been an available and serviceable role player for years. He hasn't missed more than seven games in any season since he was a rookie (2017-18), and he has made 41% of his 3-pointers on high volume over the past two seasons (39% in his career). He'll fit nicely on Charlotte's bench.

The Hornets probably wish they weren't paying that duo in the neighborhood of $30 million per year to come off the bench. But that's a price worth paying to add to their growing pick stash.

Grade for Phoenix: D+

What this means for the Suns: Here is a list of NBA players who have been traded for at least one unprotected first-round pick so far this summer: Giannis Antetokounmpo, LaMelo Ball and Bridges. Antetokounmpo is a two-time MVP. Ball is a former All-Star and Rookie of the Year who's still just 24 years old. Bridges, meanwhile, is a 28-year-old forward who has never come close to making an All-Star squad.

That makes for a strange use of an unprotected pick, for a team that already has very little draft capital[/b]: The Suns had previously traded their first-round picks in 2027, 2029 and 2031, and they'd traded swap rights in 2028 and 2030.

Until this week, they were unable to trade any further picks outright, due to the Stepien rule that prevents teams from trading first-round picks in consecutive drafts. But now that 2033 picks can go for sale -- teams can trade picks from up to seven drafts in advance -- the Suns got rid of theirs with the utmost haste.

In return, they acquired Bridges, who in 2022 was sentenced to three years of probation after pleading no contest to a felony domestic violence charge of injuring a child's parent. He didn't play in the 2022-23 season and was further suspended for the first 10 games of 2023-24.

Since his return, Bridges has put up box score stats, but his raw scoring totals (17.1 points per game last season) overstate his impact. Advanced stats rate him as a roughly average player.

Bridges will add size to a small Suns perimeter rotation, but there are a few problems with his fit on a winning team. The first is his defense; the Hornets have typically had a worse defensive rating with him on the floor versus when he's off.

Bridges is not a very active defender. He averaged just 1.2 steals plus blocks per 36 minutes last season, which ranked 248th out of 279 players with at least 1,000 minutes. Many of the players below him are offensive specialists, either on-ball stars (Jalen Brunson, Devin Booker, Zach LaVine) or knockdown shooters (AJ Green, Sam Hauser, Duncan Robinson). Bridges isn't.

Instead, he's only a 34% career 3-point shooter, which complicates his fit next to a non-spacing center. It's worth noting that in 978 minutes together in Charlotte, Bridges and center Mark Williams -- another former Hornet who's now starting in Phoenix's frontcourt -- had a subpar 111.6 offensive rating, per databallr (though the Hornets were generally terrible on offense in those seasons, with Ball so often injured).

One wonders whether the Suns have an overly optimistic view of Bridges because of his connection to Michigan State, where he played for two seasons before entering the NBA draft in 2018. Suns owner Mat Ishbia, coach Jordan Ott and general manager Brian Gregory all spent years at Michigan State; Gregory was a consultant for the program in 2016-17, Bridges' freshman year.

(That might be overstating the case somewhat, as the Suns were rumored to be interested in trading for Bridges as far back as the 2024 trade deadline. That was Bridges' first season after his suspension, and it was before Gregory and Ott joined the organization.)

The Suns also completed this trade with an eye on their cap sheet. Allen and O'Neale will make a combined $29 million in 2026-27 and $31 million in 2027-28 (assuming Allen exercises his player option). Bridges will make $22.8 million in 2026-27 before becoming a free agent next summer; he's eligible to sign an extension worth up to three years and $89 million before then, according to ESPN's Bobby Marks.

That amounts to some savings for the Suns, but only a small amount if they keep Bridges beyond next season -- certainly not enough to warrant the trade of an unprotected first-round pick and the opportunity cost of losing their best trade chip.

The 2029 first-rounder the Suns acquired in exchange -- reacquired, in a way, because they'd first sent Charlotte the rights to the least favorable pick among Utah, Cleveland and Minnesota in the Williams trade -- is much less valuable than an unprotected selection. The Hornets, Jazz, Cavaliers and Timberwolves would all have to miss the playoffs in 2029 for that pick to land in the lottery.