The NBA has a very short memory. Think of the last six months or so that Zach LaVine has had. The Bulls were desperate to get rid of his contract over the summer, and were even reportedly trying to attach a first-round pick just to move him. There were no takers. Now LaVine looks like a potential All-Star again, and suddenly he’s one of the most notable names on the trade market.
The Oklahoma City Thunder built a cottage industry around this phenomenon during their rebuild. They’d find desperate, win-now teams that needed to dump big contracts, receive an asset or two to bring the player in, rehabilitate his image, and then flip him a year later for more value coming on the other side. It worked for Chris Paul. It worked for Al Horford. Oftentimes these players are painted as albatrosses in a vacuum when there are typically external circumstances working against them. Horford didn’t have a bad contract. The 76ers were just playing him at the wrong position. Smart teams can find value in talented players in bad situations.
Of course, the fact that the NBA has a short memory means that it has a short memory about the fact that it has a short memory. There haven’t really been copycats to Oklahoma City’s “fix someone else’s problem” strategy because teams tend to be more scared of risk than they are excited about reward. Case in point: there are a whole bunch of teams that could have been paid to take LaVine over the summer, passed, but seemingly have no interest in the second chance that the Phoenix Suns are offering them in Bradley Beal.
Yes, yes, I know, the circumstances are not perfectly analogous. Beal is older than LaVine. He was never as athletic. He has that pesky no-trade clause and he’s on a pricier 35% max contract right as the new CBA has made such contracts more onerous than ever. All of that is reasonable. But the Suns are desperate to find a home for Beal as part of their attempts to land Jimmy Butler. The fact that they just traded one very good first-round pick for three bad ones suggests they are willing to pay someone to take him. And yet, to most of the league, he is ostensibly getting treated as a wholly toxic contract.
The Milwaukee Bucks, for instance, were painted as a possible landing spot in recent days. Beal could provide a far more reliable third scorer than the increasingly injury-prone Khris Middleton. Landing him could also get the Bucks out of the second apron depending on the overall construction of the deal. That’s no small thing. Staying above the second apron for multiple seasons at a time has severe consequences. Yet according to Chris Haynes, the Bucks are not interested and “a connection between the two is nonexistent.” That seems a tad extreme, especially out of a team that reportedly may be interested in LaVine.
Why don’t contenders want Beal?
As of now, there is no team known to be willing to take on the Beal contract. Even if there were, there is no indication that Beal would accept a trade to that team, and his agent, Mark Bartelstein, has said that at present, he has not agreed to go anywhere. Bartelstein added that he hasn’t ruled out accepting a trade, either, though, and even if ideal destinations aren’t exactly lining up, it’s not as though Phoenix looks all that great now, either.
Jimmy Butler mock trades: Suns in position for blockbuster, but they’ll need help from Bucks and others
Sam Quinn
Beal has already been benched. The 22-21 Suns have shown nothing to suggest that they are capable of genuinely contending for a championship. That isn’t an opinion based on their performance. The Suns have more or less admitted it themselves by pursuing Butler to this degree. While Beal has already earned generational wealth on this deal, it’s worth wondering what the rest of his career looks like if he spends the next two-and-a-half years as a reserve for the Suns before entering free agency again going into his age-34 season. Getting somewhere else could meaningfully improve his long-term earning power even if he’ll never be a max player again.
What he almost certainly can still be is a very good offensive player. Even now, when he’s treated as absolutely untouchable to most teams on the trade market, he’s still scoring an efficient 17 points per game. He’s also doing that on a team that isn’t exactly optimizing him. The Suns essentially have two better versions of him in Devin Booker and Kevin Durant, and that has forced him, like so many third bananas before him, to quietly accept a lesser role.
At Beal’s peak, less than 10% of his possessions went to spot-up shots, according to Synergy Sports. Last season, roughly 24.7% of his possessions went to spot-up opportunities, more than any other type of play. His isolation and pick-and-roll rates have declined accordingly. In his last season with the Wizards, those represented 44.3% of his possessions. This season, those numbers are down to 32.6%. He touches the ball, on average, 60.1 times per game this season. In Washington, he peaked at 79. His usage rate got as high as 34.4% in Washington. It is now 22.6%. Part of what’s going on here is that the Suns just use him less than the Wizards did. That, in itself, does not indicate significant decline.
His shooting percentages, both inside and outside of the arc are actually meaningfully higher in Phoenix than they were in Washington. His overall shot diet remains fairly similar as well. Though his rim volume has gone down this season, he took 23.3% of his total shots within three feet of the basket last year. That’s a higher percentage than any of his previous three seasons in Washington. His field goal percentage at the rim is actually higher in Phoenix than it was for most of his Washington tenure, though the spacing he works with now plays a part in that. He’s taking fewer mid-range shots, but so is the entire NBA, and his 3-point rate is mostly unchanged. The one area in which he’s dipped meaningfully is his free-throw rate. It was above 30% during his last five seasons with the Wizards. It’s below 18% in Phoenix.
That’s a natural consequence of age to an extent. It’s also explainable by his shot diet. You get fouled more often on drives than on spot-up looks. We’ve already covered what kind of shots he’s getting in Phoenix. His first step isn’t quite as quick as it used to be, but he was never an elite athlete to begin with. Beal’s game has always been based in craft and shooting more than blowing by opponents.
Asking Beal to recreate his playing style from the Washington days feels unrealistic. He’s in his 30s now, after all, but that doesn’t mean he should be as limited as Phoenix’s roster construction forces him to be. Frankly, having him in the role that the Suns do is a waste. Beal is not a great defender. He’s a decent enough passer but is by no means a point guard. He is a great shooter, but you don’t pay spot-up threats super max money. This breakup was almost inevitable in that respect. It’s almost impossible to make the most out of three high-usage ball-handlers because there’s only so much usage to go around. The Suns can’t get him the ball enough with Durant and Booker on the team to justify his salary or his defensive weaknesses. That doesn’t mean that other rosters couldn’t.
Potential Beal landing spots
It seems notable here that LaVine’s rebirth came on a team with far less ambition. LaVine doesn’t have to watch Booker or Durant Beal. He gets to cook. To an extent, a similar situation played out for Paul in Oklahoma City. James Harden’s usage was so high in Houston that the Rockets couldn’t maximize the skill set of a pure point guard. The Thunder, however, could. What we’re looking for here is a team that could serve as a middle ground for Beal. It’s not realistic to ask him to score as much as he did for the Wizards. It’s absolutely fair to ask more out of him than the Suns could.
And if he truly can’t do that? Well, he only has two years left on his deal after this one. To some teams, that’s an eternity. To others, honestly, it’s not as though they were going to make any major splashes in that period anyway. He may not want to hear it (and his no-trade clause means he doesn’t need to), but all of this probably means sending him to a bad team. There are a few that make some measure of sense.
The Toronto Raptors reportedly want to get in on the Butler deal as a facilitator. They have roughly $34 million in expiring money to dangle between Bruce Brown and Chris Boucher, and Kelly Olynyk is pretty movable as well at just below $13 million. They have plenty of room below the luxury-tax line. Immanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett, Scottie Barnes and Gradey Dick are all locked into long-term deals, so Beal’s money wouldn’t get in the way of any necessary expenditures. All four of those players need the ball. None need it at an especially high rate. Beal could provide what is probably a needed scoring injection as they navigate this mini rebuild. By the time they need to pay everyone else, he’ll be gone. He wouldn’t be a core part of the next Toronto championship contender, but he could be a helpful bridge as they figure out what that team might look like.
He could play a similar role for a Charlotte Hornets offense currently ranked 28th in the NBA. He’s used to playing next to high-usage point guards like John Wall and Russell Westbrook, so LaMelo Ball would likely be at least a viable offensive fit. Beyond Ball, Brandon Miller is the only other offensive player the team needs to prioritize. Finding a taker for the Miles Bridges contract would be tricky, and the Hornets would basically be committing to bad backcourt defense for the next two years, but again, what else are they doing with their money? Would adding a potential 20-point scorer and getting a pick for the privilege really derail any other big plans?
This is why the Bulls will likely come up quite a bit in the coming weeks. They’re already in purgatory, and they’re already paying a guard they may not want a lot of money in this period. Let’s say someone wants to give them assets for LaVine, and then the Suns will give them something to stick Beal into his salary slot. Their overall position in the league hasn’t materially changed. They’re still a a higher-end lottery team capable of selling some tickets (Beal is a star!) but mostly positioned to lose for draft position. As the Bulls have no cornerstone players on rookie deals yet, Beal’s contract won’t hurt them as they try to get some.
These are unlikely to be the sort of teams that appeal to Beal, but such teams, at least for now, don’t seem all that interested. If he’d prefer to continue playing a suboptimal role in Phoenix, well, that’s his contractual right, and if teams aren’t interested in taking the sort of flier on Beal that they could have taken on LaVine a few months ago, that’s their right as well. But if all parties involved here are willing to keep an open mind, Beal shouldn’t be the untradable albatross he’s often portrayed is. He is still a very good player making the best of the wrong situation. Put him in a better one and, like so many players before him, you’ll be amazed at how quickly his value around the league turns around.
