Scrappy Suns are exceeding expectations, and get ready for Bulls-Heat three-peat

PHOENIX — Maybe the NBA should force every team to give up its draft picks!

It’s hard to argue with that notion in Phoenix, where the Suns’ future remains clouded by a series of short-sighted moves that left them without control of their next seven drafts, but the present is oddly exciting thanks to a team that is playing as hard or harder than any club in the league. With no ping-pong-ball fixations after last season’s 36-win season, the Suns are instead sending out a gritty, undersized squad that has overachieved its way to a 24-15 start in the unforgiving Western Conference — even with key offseason acquisition Jalen Green playing only two games.

I got to see their effort in person on Friday, when I witnessed the Suns’ 112-107 win over the Knicks. While New York’s injuries certainly were a factor in the outcome, so too were the palpable play-hard moments that allowed Phoenix to prevail.

Most notably, watch here as backup center Oso Ighodaro shuts down Jalen Brunson’s final attempt to tie the score, then Grayson Allen deflects his pass, hustles into the backcourt and banks it off Mikal Bridges’ face and out of bounds.

In a week where we’re talking about Washington shutting down Trae Young to hang on a top-eight protected pick (the Wizards listed him as “out” against Phoenix on Sunday with knee and quad injuries; the knee is an injury he returned from with the Hawks on Dec. 16 to seemingly no ill effect, and the quad is the “contusion” that had him listed as questionable and then changed to “out” for six straight games before he was traded), and other teams are pivoting to their own increasingly brazen draft-related shenanigans, the Suns’ night-in, night-out competitiveness has been a refreshing jolt. We don’t expect the league’s second-tier teams (at least on paper) to roll into games guns blazing like this.

Credit the hiring of Jordan Ott and the front office’s offseason imports that have turned the boring, underachieving squad of a year ago into one of the league’s best stories. Defensive stopper Dillon Brooks has been a culture changer — their words, not mine — while also having a career year offensively. Yes, his weaknesses are easily identifiable: His motor runs too hot sometimes, and his shot selection can get too wild. However, this is the seventh straight season, across three different teams, where Brooks’ squad has exceeded preseason expectations — sometimes massively.

It goes beyond Brooks. Scrap-heap pickups such as Collin Gillespie and Jordan Goodwin have turned into hugely valuable players, Allen is having perhaps his best season at age 30, and 7-foot-1 center Mark Williams is already closing in on a career high by playing 34 games so far.

The embodiment of the Suns’ season, though, was that last play by Ighodaro. Back story: He played 23 minutes and had zero points and zero rebounds. Just before the final play against Brunson, he had bricked two free throws that could have extended the Suns’ advantage. No, his was not an inspiring statistical story.

Yet in a Phoenix season that seemingly makes no sense, it is the player who makes no sense that typifies the Suns’ success. Ighodaro averages 5.9 points per game, has not made a 3-pointer in his NBA career, shoots 52.5 percent from the line, doesn’t block many shots (1.4 per 100) and has one of the worst rebound rates among any center in captivity.

Based on that information, you’d think he stinks. You would be horribly wrong. Ighodaro has the best net rating on the Suns and the biggest on-court vs. off-court differential, with the Suns outscoring opponents by 7.5 points per 100 possessions when he plays and losing by 1.2 when he sits. So, yeah, playing 23 minutes with no stats and still massively impacting winning was pretty much par for the course.

That was why Ott kept him in the game: He shook off the misses, played to the score by crowding the 3-point line and daring Brunson to drive past him and then stayed down when Brunson tried to bait him into a three-shot foul.

“I missed the free throws, but it was on to the next play,” Ighodaro said. “Me and Dillon had communicated well on the switch with (Karl-Anthony Towns) and Brunson. I just tried to stay down and not foul, forced him right. Then, yeah, he tried to step back, and I didn’t bite. … He picked up his dribble, and then, like I said, (Allen) made a great play.”

“It’s obviously a no-3 situation. So that obviously helps the defense a little bit; you can guard it a little differently. So I just want to just get up and pressure him a little bit but not foul. I’m just trying to stay down on his pump fake and then step through. I just kind of got my hands out of there, made sure there was no contact, and (Allen) just did a great job.

Ott added: “We’re challenging him not only just to switch, but to switch and disrupt … but again, it’s the ability to move on to the next play, which is so hard.”

Brooks has also been a bit of a motivator for Ighodaro at times, imparting his experience on the second-year pro.

“(He) and Dillon have their little pitter-patter back and forth,” Suns star Devin Booker said. “Dillon has challenged him on the defensive end, and I think that last stop on Jalen was a product of that. He has the capabilities of (being) a versatile defender to guard one through five, and there’s not many people that can do that, so that’s definitely a bonus to have on our side.”

Brooks spoke of Ighodaro’s versatility.

“He’s young, he’s fast, he’s athletic, can play multiple and guard multiple positions,” Brooks said. “He does unique things that some big men don’t have, which he does like the little things on the offensive end and on the defensive end. He sprints up into screens, sets the screens in the right places when you gotta drop it off.

“And on the defensive end, you can switch with him, guard multiple positions. … So he’s like a, back in the day, call him a tweener. That’s what they used to call me. He’s like a tweener in that aspect because then bigs are on their heels on the offensive end. He’s got a lot of tools that he can tap into. He’s just learning to listen and learn to work, and you see it coming out in Year 2.”

While Ighodaro had a bizarre stat line with no points and no rebounds, that didn’t mean he made no impact. The 2024 second-rounder, selected 40th out of Marquette (some thought partly because he’s from Phoenix), is a spicy passer from the elbows who had one of the standout dimes of the year to Ryan Dunn in the first half against the Knicks.

Watch how quickly he processes this:

“I was going for the DHO,” Ighodaro said, “and I saw Ryan had a step and his defender wasn’t looking so … I knew I had to throw it pretty hard, and Ryan made a great catch on the baseline and finished it.”

Ighodaro noted that he’s worked on his game at the elbows.

“I’ve kind of taken my time on the dribble so I can still have time to make reads and it’s a live pass,” he said. “Just working on those one-handed passes without having to bring my other hand and show the defense what I’m doing.”

Can Phoenix keep up this nonsensical run of success? Maybe so. The Suns have improved from 29th on defense a year ago to sixth this season and are winning the turnover battle by 1.5 per game. They’re short, don’t defensive rebound or draw fouls well and lean heavily on jumpers on offense; on the other hand, they lead the league in steals, and their opponent shooting numbers don’t seem fluky. Their net rating suggests they deserve their record, which is on a 50-win pace, and they should have Green back soon.

If so, the Suns can push the West’s more prominently mentioned contenders for one of four home-court advantage spots in the playoffs, and perhaps do something they never did with the Kevin Durant-Booker-Bradley Beal triumvirate: Win a playoff game.

Schedule geekery: Bulls-Heat three-peat

One thing you never see is an NBA team playing the same opponent three times in a row. Well, almost never.

The Chicago Bulls and Miami Heat will end up in that bizarre situation after condensation on the United Center court forced the postponement of the game between the two teams Friday.

Rescheduling NBA games is a bear, especially as we get later in the season and available dates start to vanish. In this case, the demands on Chicago’s United Center — home of the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks and March’s Big Ten men’s basketball tournament, among other things — only exacerbated the issue.

The league’s solution was to shoehorn in a makeup game on Jan. 29, a date that normally would have produced a back-to-back-to-back for both teams and thus created an untenable schedule.

But it doesn’t anymore, because the NBA moved the first game of Chicago’s and Miami’s ensuing games back one day … something the league could do because the Heat and Bulls already were scheduled to play each other at the start of a two-game “baseball series” in Miami.

As a result, the Bulls and Heat will play three times in a row — a veritable playoff series (or should I say, Play-In series?). They’ll meet Jan. 29 in Chicago and follow it up with games Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 in Miami before both get a well-deserved day off on Feb. 2.

Rookie of the Week: Nique Clifford, SF, Sacramento

(This section won’t necessarily profile the best rookie of the week. Just the one I’ve been watching.)

This may seem an odd choice since Nique Clifford isn’t exactly setting the league afire at the moment. The 6-foot-5 wing from Colorado State, selected 24th in the 2025 draft, is averaging just 5.6 points per game on 40.9 percent shooting, and his PER of 7.0 underscores those limitations.

However, a couple of things stick out with Clifford. First of all, he has the athleticism, hands and frame to be a pretty good defender and already can more or less hold his own on that end. In that, his presence perhaps presages some other choices that are coming soon for Sacramento, given that everyone I’ve talked to says Kings GM Scott Perry’s “type” is long, athletic, physical defenders. (This also, by the way, helps explain the Kings’ reported lukewarm interest in Ja Morant and Trae Young.)

Second of all, there is one particular trait of Clifford’s that fascinates me a bit: Perhaps no rookie in the league has had as many overly ambitious moments of flying a bit too close to the sun in search of YouTube-worthy dunks.

Here is Clifford from Sunday against the Houston Rockets, for instance, daring to try smashing on big man Steven Adams while taking off several kilometers from the rim:

Clifford is shooting only 47.0 percent on 2s this season, and that’s mostly because of his rough shooting numbers outside the charge circle; he’s made 82 percent of his shots at the rim, according to Cleaning the Glass, but he takes more non-rim 2s as a percentage of his shots and doesn’t draw many fouls. He’s also only completed six dunks this season, which makes the non-dunks stand out. To get some perspective on this trait, I wanted to talk to somebody with expertise in flying high and cramming home spectacular dunks.

Fortunately, there was just such a person in the Kings’ locker room.

“You keep going in there and being aggressive like that, eventually he’s either going to get a dunk or a foul,” said Sacramento guard and two-time dunk contest champion Zach LaVine. “But we just need to see him put one down for the confidence.”

As far as technique goes, LaVine said, “Get your takeoff right, and hopefully you have big hands. If you don’t have big hands, you’ve got to be able to jump high enough. But Niko’s athletic enough; we’ve seen him do some stuff in practice.”

I’ll add that Clifford has shown he can get to some good finishes when he stays below rim level. Here, for instance, he’s on the move in transition and pivots across the lane to get to a left-to-right Euro step layup against Kevin Durant:

I asked Kings coach Doug Christie about Clifford’s penchant for attacking the rim this way before Monday’s game against the Los Angeles Lakers, and whether he’d want Clifford to ease off on the throttle sometimes.

“No,” Christie said.” Because I would be wrong.”

Christie noted a recent game where Clifford “turned the corner, and as a player, I had that moment out. I turned, and I said, ‘Oh boy,’ and I yelled from the side, I said, ‘You go test (the rim protector).’ You have to. It’s the rite of passage. You got to go in there, and it might not go well, but then it might.

“By him doing that, all the rest of those things happen. … We want him to attack because that’s what he can do. Now once he does that and demonstrates that, the game (will) begin to open up for him. So, swing for the fences.”

Clifford should get plenty of runway to keep developing his offensive game during the rest of this lost season, but as an older rookie (he’s nearly 24 already), he has to establish an offensive floor for himself soon. The biggest part of that is knocking down more 3s (31.3 percent this season) and getting himself better looks inside the arc. But it also wouldn’t hurt his rep any if he can consistently yam poster dunks on 7-footers.