Welcome to the defining profession of the BOGO era (Bold Owner Goes Overboard). In one corner, we have Phoenix’s Mat Ishbia, who’s quick to jettison any asset that’s not nailed down to overpay for the shiny object that’s next to hit the market. On the other hand, we have Washington’s Ted Leonsis, who modestly began the long-overdue demolition less than a year after boldly declaring that Bradley Beal’s no-trade clause was a “point of partnership.”
Curiously, the partnership became less symbiotic when one of the alleged partners planned to spend the next January in the upper Midwest. The no-trade clause likely cost the Wizards significant opportunity and influence, as it severely limited Washington’s trading options once the franchise made the inevitable conclusion that it was time to move on.
That conclusion, of course, came three years too late after much talk of never tanking, and in the meantime Beal’s commercial value has plummeted from a potentially Rudy Gobert-esque return to … not so much. (In the end, the deal appears to include Chris Paul, Landry Shamet, a few second-round picks, and a probably irrelevant first-round pick swap or two to Washington in exchange for Beal and Jordan Goodwin. It could still stretch to three-team -Deal, but that would be the Washington-Phoenix part of the deal.)
That the Wizards got a whole lot, not a lot, and still won the trade is a testament to the Suns’ willingness to do extremely splashy things under Ishbia, having already brought Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson and four unprotected firsts for Kevin Durant to Brooklyn had exchanged . This trade has been at least semi-defensible as only a small handful of players on the planet are capable of winning a playoff series on their own and they are not commercially available at reliable intervals.
The Beal trade, on the other hand, is a whole different beast. Start with the fact that Beal’s contract is likely to be negative, even without the no-trade clause, which is now being carried over to Phoenix. He’s making $42.5 million this season at the age of 30, with a projected BORD value of $32.5 million for 2023–24.
He’s still a good player but he’s getting paid like a great. With weak defense, injuries and his oddly disappearing 3-ball, it’s a real challenge to rank Beal in the top 25 players in the league. However, that contract will pay him like a superstar until he’s 33, with a $57 million grant in 2026–27. If things are not going well, this number will be difficult to deal with.
Did I mention Beal has a no trade clause?
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I’m also a bit taken aback by the Suns’ rush to get rid of Chris Paul. While at least trading it is better than the crazy idea of scrapping it entirely, it’s weird how much they’ve hurt its value. Yes, he got injured in the playoffs, he clearly took a step back in 2022-23 after a 2021-22 All-Star season. He is 38 and sometimes slows down the team too much. Still, I’d argue that Paul at $30.8 million wasn’t a significantly worse offer than Beal at $42.5 million, and he doesn’t come with a huge bill for the next four years and a no-trade Clause.
In all these discussions, the Beal trade is in a vacuum. But of course the Suns don’t play in a vacuum. (Though it may seem so, given how quickly her future draft picks are disappearing.) Instead, Beal now plays on the same team as Devin Booker … who may be the player most like Beal in the entire league other than Booker younger and a little better at just about everything.
The presence of Booker (not to mention Durant) will inevitably push Beal into something he hasn’t been in a long time: a mostly off-play distance player who may face a Chris Bosh-style drop in his touches to Miami. There is only one basketball; Mathematics doesn’t allow for anything else.
The positive hope is that Beal’s shot profile in Phoenix will be significantly more 3-point-heavy and precise. It’s not pipe dream, not when Beal relied so much on created shots in Washington and had much higher 3-point percentages when he had the best assist, John Wall. But that doesn’t come naturally either, and the Suns certainly haven’t addressed a weakness here.
The Suns will of course field lineups with both Beal and Booker in the starting XI, but that forces either Booker to be a full-time point guard or either of those two to be a full-time wing stopper. LOL on the second so watch out for the Suns bringing back Torrey Craig or look elsewhere for cheap wing defenders to bolster the rotation.
This brings us to the other big takeaway from the Beal trade. Phoenix used perhaps its last realistic trade-chip to step back defensively and add another offensive player… a perfectly natural reaction to losing in a second-round playoff series in which the other team was averaging 1.22 points per possession scored and his best player scored 34.5 points per game on 59 percent shooting.
One of the columns I never quite got out during the NBA Finals was that, given how idiosyncratic a player Nikola Jokić is, it was kind of difficult to emulate the Nuggets’ model of success. However, the one thing I thought teams would surely copy was the Nuggets’ model of arming themselves with a lot of tall wing defenders and essentially denying opponents the ability to spot mismatches along the sidelines.
Especially for a team like Phoenix that lacked elite rim protection or pick and roll switch specialists, this seemed like the surefire way to guarantee decent to good defensive scores.
Well, the Suns started with that model and then burned it to the ground to get Durant and Beal. While they haven’t lost any wing-backs in this swap, they’ve lost their ability to add any, which seems just as bad considering their lack of funds. They wonder if swapping Paul for two half-decent wings, each fetching $15 million, would have resulted in a better end product for the Suns. (The Suns at least bailed out some cheap productions by trading Goodwin, a rotary player on a minimum contract.)
There’s still a chance for Phoenix to salvage their major league game by making a similar one-on-two play with center Deandre Ayton. However, unless he has a breakthrough year, the chances of that seem slim since the league doesn’t place much value in centers in general, and centers in particular, making $30 million a year. It’s hard to imagine a move with this swap could see Ayton touching the ball, four times a game?
It’s perhaps the ultimate irony that a Suns team that has suffered for years from one of the league’s most favorable owners is now being punished for the new owner’s waste. In the absence of a dramatic Ayton transaction this offseason, the Suns are considering staying in the second tax group for at least the next three years, resulting in a “locked-in” future draft pick situation and virtually no flexibility to add players beyond minimum contracts .
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There is a certain KG-to-the-Nets potential here in the future. The Suns have already given unprotected picks to Brooklyn in the Durant trade in 2025, 2027 and 2029; If they stay above the second run-up in three of the next five years, their first-round pick may be automatically pushed to the end of the draft in 2032, based on a copy of the new CBA’s term sheet obtained by The Athletic and the new CBA rules, too when they have the worst team in the league.
As for Washington, it’s a bittersweet victory. After all, there seems to be a bigger vision in DC than the pursuit of averageness. Then again, the entire Beal saga was a completely avoidable own goal. As mentioned above, we’re less than a year from Leonsis proudly crowing that Beal’s ridiculous no-trade clause – granted under no duress whatsoever – was something: “I didn’t see it as a bargaining chip, but rather something .” a point of partnership.”
As mentioned above, the opportunity cost of not trading with Beal three years ago and instead chasing the ninth seed a few more times is really painful. I can report from my own experience how difficult it is to carry out an organizational turnaround in something like this. We were probably two years late with our own rebuild in Memphis and fortunate that Marc Gasol and Mike Conley still retained most of their commercial value when we pulled the trigger. Washington hasn’t been so lucky, and as a result, recovery is likely to be much longer and more painful.
Fortunately, the Wizards may have a chance to win this trade a second time by redirecting Paul to a third team for expiring contracts and/or secondary assets. This deal increased his contract guarantee to $25.04 million for this season; as of June 28, it’s fully guaranteed at $30.1 million.
This should put an end to any discussion about renouncing it. As a living, breathing player with a contract expiring at this point, Paul is a far more compelling player. In fact, any analysis of cap room shenanigans focuses on the wrong player. The Wizards could generate millions in cap-room by expanding Shamet’s $10.6 million over seven years, although that game also seems unlikely.
The weird thing is that a lot of it happens in slow motion. I don’t think the deal has increased the Suns’ title chances, but they’ll still do well this year. As with the Durant trade, the pain will come later, but when it hits, it will hit hard. The BOGO party is always fun while it lasts, but there’s no cure for a hangover.
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(Photo by Bradley Beal and Landry Shamet: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)