September 23, 2026
September 23, 2026
Phoenix Suns’ 2025-26 Season: The Rebuild That Refused to Tank
Phoenix Suns’ 2025-26 season began with a teardown, not a plan. Kevin Durant left for Houston in July. Bradley Beal followed him out the door weeks later, stretched off the books entirely. Vegas pegged the Suns for thirty wins and a lottery pick. Jordan Ott had no proven roster to inherit. He built something else instead. Phoenix won 45 games. The Suns clawed into the playoffs and forced a league that had already buried this era to look up again.
Every roster decision that summer pointed toward one truth. Phoenix was starting over, whether the fanbase wanted it or not.
Nothing signaled the reset like the morning of July 6. A record seven-team deal sent Kevin Durant to Houston. The return told its own story about where Phoenix’s priorities had shifted. The Suns pulled back Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, and a trio of draft picks in Khaman Maluach, Rasheer Fleming, and Koby Brea. A stream of second-round selections stretching to 2032 came along with them. General manager Brian Gregory, freshly promoted that May, had traded a top-five talent for youth, size, and future assets. He chose years over months, a shift ESPN’s season preview framed as the true end of the superteam experiment.
Ten days later, Phoenix stretched Bradley Beal’s contract and released him outright. The Big Three had never once played a full season together. Mike Budenholzer had already been fired that April, despite fifty million dollars left on his deal. The search for his replacement landed on a name few outside league circles recognized. Jordan Ott, a Cleveland Cavaliers assistant, took his first head-coaching job that June. He inherited a roster still being assembled around him. Mark Williams arrived when Vasilije Micić was shipped to Charlotte. Collin Gillespie and Jordan Goodwin filled out the depth chart behind him. Steve Nash returned that September in an advisory role, one more voice steadying a locker room in flux.
Nobody outside the building believed in this roster. The numbers explain why not one prediction model saw this coming.
Phoenix opened 2-4 and looked exactly like the lottery team Vegas had promised. Then everything shifted. The defense that ranked fourth-worst in the league a year earlier climbed to ninth-best, and that leap carried the season on its back. January delivered an 11-5 stretch and a 7-1 mark at home. Those numbers earned Ott the conference’s Coach of the Month award in his very first season. A March 10 win over Milwaukee eclipsed the previous year’s entire win total. A blowout of Memphis on March 30 marked Phoenix’s fourth above-.500 season in five years. ESPN handed the Suns one of only seven A grades leaguewide. Ott had built, in one evaluator’s words, an impressive hard-working culture almost overnight, a verdict Arizona Sports detailed in its full breakdown of the league’s report cards.
The margin between vindication and collapse ran thinner than the record suggested. February brought a 4-7 slide as injuries piled up. Phoenix’s NBA Cup run cracked apart entirely in the quarterfinals. The Suns played Oklahoma City without Booker and absorbed one of the worst losses in franchise history. March steadied the ship back to 8-8. April closed at 3-3, a stretch defined less by dominance than by survival. Every healthy night mattered more than the last. Phoenix rarely got two in a row without paying for it somewhere else on the roster.
None of this works without performances that turned bad matchups into manageable ones, and manageable ones into wins.
Devin Booker did not blink through any of it. He averaged 26.1 points and 6.0 assists on 45.6 percent shooting. He earned his fifth All-Star selection as a reserve. Every other name around him changed that season. Booker did not. Eleven years into his Phoenix career, he had already watched Durant, Beal, and half a roster come and go. He remained the one constant an entire rebuild could be organized around, and that stability mattered as much as any single stat line the Suns produced all season.
Dillon Brooks delivered a career-high 20.2 points a game. He claimed his first Player of the Week award in early February, a stretch in which he averaged 28.8 points while Booker sat out injured. Grayson Allen turned a November 10 game against New Orleans into a franchise record. He drilled ten three-pointers on his way to 42 points. Collin Gillespie quietly broke Phoenix’s single-season three-point record with 232 makes, passing Quentin Richardson to rank seventh leaguewide, a mark Basketball-Reference’s franchise page now lists among the season’s defining numbers. Jalen Green announced his arrival immediately. He buried six threes for 29 points in his very first game in a Suns uniform.
Two games, played nine days apart, ended up deciding how this whole season would be remembered.
Phoenix walked into April 14 needing one win over Portland to lock the playoffs shut. It slipped away in the final ten seconds. Deni Avdija scored 41 for the Trail Blazers. Jalen Green matched him with 35 of his own. Green missed the potential go-ahead shot as the clock expired, and Portland escaped with a 114-110 win that pushed the Suns to the brink of an early offseason, a collapse Arizona Sports covered in the hours after the buzzer. Phoenix had one life left. The Suns used it two nights later, beating Golden State 111-96 to punch a ticket to the eighth seed that had briefly seemed lost for good.
Winning that second play-in game only bought Phoenix a date with disaster. The defending champion Thunder swept the series in four games. Oklahoma City closed it out 131-122 as reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander averaged 33.8 points and 8.0 assists on 55.1 percent shooting across the series. Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein controlled the interior in the finale. Ajay Mitchell chipped in 22 points off the bench. Oklahoma City’s coaching staff never wavered from a game plan built specifically around containing Phoenix. It marked Oklahoma City’s third straight first-round sweep, a stretch Yahoo Sports chronicled as proof of how far the gap between the conference’s best and the rest had grown.
A four-game sweep looks like failure on paper. Inside the locker room, it felt exactly like that in the moment. How many franchises get gutted by a superstar trade in July and still find themselves playing meaningful basketball in late April? Phoenix beat its preseason win total by fifteen games. The Suns turned a bottom-six defense into a top-ten unit and gave a first-year coach a foundation instead of an excuse. Booker keeps anchoring the roster. Ott keeps building the culture that earned him a monthly award and a leaguewide grade nobody predicted in October. The front office keeps stacking picks for whatever comes next. Phoenix Suns’ 2025-26 season did not end with a trophy or even a single playoff win. It ended with proof that a teardown, handled with patience, can still leave a team standing taller than anyone expected.
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