Suns owner hints at how long team will keep Big Three together

Feb 8, 2023; Phoenix, AZ, USA; Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia speaks to the media at an introductory press conference at Footprint Center. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

Phoenix’s Big Three of Devin Booker, Kevin Durant, and Bradley Beal went kaput in their first year together last season, and Suns owner Mat Ishbia may not view the trio as an indefinite experiment.

Ishbia appeared this week on Arizona Sports’ “The Burns & Gambo Show” and discussed the team’s plans for the future. Though he noted that the Suns are comfortable being a second-apron luxury-tax team for the time being, Ishbia said the goal is for the team to get out of the second apron by 2026.

“I think a lot of owners like to hide behind the second apron as an excuse to not bring key players back,” said Ishbia . “[The second apron] is only going to impact you if you’re in it in three out of four years. We’re in it for the next two seasons. The third year we will try to get out of it to avoid [our] picks being frozen.”

With the NBA’s new collective-bargaining agreement recently kicking in, the second apron is set at $189 million for next season. The Suns have rocketed way past that (sitting at nearly $223 million in active payroll), which creates adverse consequences for them, even beyond just a stratospheric luxury tax bill. As a second-apron team, Phoenix does not have access to the taxpayer’s mid-level exception, can’t offer more than minimum salaries to outside free agents, and is unable to aggregate player salaries in trades, among multiple other team-building restrictions. As Ishbia also alluded to, spending three of the next four years in the second apron will result in the “freezing” of future draft picks too (meaning that those picks cannot be traded and/or will automatically get moved to the very end of the first round).

All of this means the Suns will almost certainly have to break up their Big Three by 2026 if they want to get out of second-apron hell by then. The 27-year-old Booker is the youngest of the three, is the homegrown franchise player, and is still under contract through 2028, so he is probably staying. But Durant, 35, will be a free agent in 2026, and Beal, 31, will be entering the last year of his contract in 2026 (making him easier to trade by then).

For now, Phoenix is looking to bounce back from an underwhelming first season of the experiment in which the Booker-Durant-Beal trio got swept out of the first round by the young Minnesota Timberwolves. Though the Suns did pull off some nifty minimum-salary signings this summer , Ishbia may be tipping his hand that the Big Three era will only go two more years.

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