The Volume. All right, welcome to Hoops to night here at the Volume. Happy Sunday, everybody. I hope all of you guys are having an incredible weekend. I'm coming to you guys from Ennis, Montana on vacation. We were planning on not working, but I knew there was one thing that could happen that could potentially make us work while we're out here, and it was Bradley bial getting traded. And I was actually just joking with Ryan, our producer, and we were saying, if you got traded to Miami
might not have been as big of a deal. But a trade to the Phoenix Suns that does not include DeAndre Ayton puts together most definitely the most talented top four in the NBA, Bradley Beal, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and DeAndre Ayton. From a sheer talent perspective, we'll go ahead to toe to toe with any group of four players probably that's played together in the history of the league.
It's definitely gonna be an interesting group there, but it presents some basketball issues that they're gonna have to address. And so I just want to share a couple of quick thoughts on the move and how I think it's gonna impact the Suns this season. You guys know the drive before we get started. To subscribe to the Volumes YouTube channels. You don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter and underscore Jason LT so you
guys don't miss any show announcements. And if for whatever reason, you guys miss one of these shows and you can't get back over to YouTube to finished, don't forget. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts. Under Hoops tonight. All right, So with Bradley Beal as a basketball player, I'm not gonna go too deep into that again because we did that in kind of our trade when he first when the first report came down that it was kind of imminent that he would be traded. I did
a deep dive into the basketball side of things. So if you want to see that, go a little bit further back on the Volumes YouTube feed and you'll find the video where we did that deep dive that said, quick synopsis, he's way better than people think he is.
This is very common thing that happens in the NBA as soon as the guy signs a long term max contract and has a couple of seasons where the team isn't very good instantly starts to be viewed as a negative asset, which I don't understand a couple different reasons for that. First of all, it's a max contract, Like you can't just pay a max contract to Steph Curry and Janna Santana Kumpo and Nicole Jokic. Like, there's a lot of stars in the league, so just about every
team in the league is good. If they have any intention of winning a championship's gonna have to pay a max contract to certain people. Not to mention the fact that in the long run, as a new TV deal gets signed, these numbers may not seem as intimidating as they seem at this particular moment in time. But just like with anything in life, you get what you pay for, and if you want a really good basketball player, he
might be expensive. Bradley Beal is a very similar type of player to Devin Booker in the sense that he relies heavily on pull up jump shooting, but at the same time, like Devin Booker, he gets to the rim really well compared to a lot of the guards at his position. As a matter of fact, Kevin Durank gets to the rim a tiny fraction as often as Bradley Beal and Devin Booker do, so it kind of helps them with some of their rim pressure things. I do
see some redundancies there. I've talked about this con before, but it's like diminishing returns. So when you have three really high level ball handlers like this, is there a point where the value of what the third ball handler brings to the table is lessened by the simple fact that you already have two players at the position who are better at what he does. Right. So I'll give
you an example. If I have Devin Booker and Kevin Durant on a basketball team and those two guys are creating lots of defensive rotation situations where you've got a
guy in a closeout situation, Devin Booker. Excuse me, Bradley Beal might be many times better than Kantavious Caldwell Pope at attacking a set defense, But in pure closeout situations, when it's just knocking down open threes or driving a close out making a play when the defense is already warped, how much better is a guy like Bradley Beal than a guy like Kantavius callwoll Pope really in that specific role. That's what I mean by the concept of diminishing returns.
I think it's important to have multiple top tier shot creators. That's why the Booker Kevin Durant pairing makes a lot of sense on the surface. Once you get to that third guy, though, I really start to look at what are you good at that doesn't involve having the basketball in your hands? And that's gonna be the big challenge for this big three, for Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and
for Bradley beal Is. Even though they managed to keep Deandratan in the deal, chances are, like you're gonna have to fill out the rest of the roster with veteran minimum contracts. And like we talked about in our ten Characteristics of Champions video, every recent NBA champion's got highly paid, highly qualified role players down the roster, and this Sun's team is not going to have that. It's gonna be
a lot of veteran minimum contracts. Maybe, if they're lucky, they can poach a really good forward on the mid level exception to help them on the wing. But what that means is you're gonna have a lot of guys on the team that aren't necessarily great at anything, and that's gonna put a lot of pressure on guys like Devin Booker, Bradley Beal, and Kevin Durant to take on duties that go beyond their ball handling. So if the question is, hey, Jason, can this big four work, the
answer is yes. As long as Kevin Durant plays like an all defense player, as long as Bradley Beal and Devin Booker bring enough to the defensive table to make up for some of the inability to surround them with higher quality role players, It's gonna be a lot of pressure on those guys to be great in those areas. That said, this is a very competitive group. Devin Booker
in particular, is very competitive. Bradley Beal, I know a lot of people are down on him, but I've seen enough high leverage basketball from him, especially in playoff situations, to know that he's a gamer and he's gonna fight in those situations. So I definitely think it can work. That's just gonna be the delineation right there. If they try to play the same way they've been playing at
all their previous destinations, it will fail. If all three of them embrace the dirty work to another level, it will succeed. That's gonna be the your entire payroll is taken up by four stars. Those stars better do the dirty work. They got to do what Bam and Jimmy Butler do. They got to do what Lebron James and
Anthony Davis did in twenty twenty. They've got to do what Giannison, Tannakoopo and Drew Holliday did in twenty twenty one, or even like that Warriors group where you've got a bunch of different archetypes of players and only one supreme ball handler, but they're all stars in their roles in
different ways. So that's going to be the challenge. Definitely need to try to use that mid level exception slot to track down a good small forward that they can put out there, an athlete that can help them in those specific areas of the game. And then all three of them on the offensive end are going to have to really work on being active off the ball to
maintain rhythm. Rhythm is gonna be the biggest challenge when you have three guys that work off the dribble and high pick and roll a lot, and are looking for pull up jump shots and things along those lines. It's going to disrupt their rhythm as they divide their usage, and so having one of them in particular, potentially dive into more of an off ball roll could help Kevin Durant, guy who's had a lot of success in off ball
situations in his career. But then you run into the problem where if you put him off ball, then you're not getting the high end benefits of him being on the ball. So I'm really curious to see how it all comes together. I will do a deeper dive into this trade in all of the ensuing details when I get back into town, but I just wanted to give my initial two cents. I really don't understand why Washington
did this. I feel like that there was probably a better opportunity out there if they were more patient, maybe try to get some more bidders involved, But it's always
complicated when there's a no trade clause. There may or may not have been some nepotism at play, with the agent for Bradley Beal and his son being highly involved in the basketball operations for the Phoenix Suns, So who the hell knows what's going on with all that, But if this trade gets finalized and goes through, it's the most talented top four in the league and one of the most talented top fours of all time, and it's going to be really really interest staying dynamic from there.
All right, guys, that is all I have for today. I'm gonna enjoy the rest of this trip and I'll see you guys for the NBA Draft and some other stuff next Thursday. The volume