Why The Suns Waited Too Long To Trade Eric Bledsoe

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Why The Suns Waited Too Long To Trade Eric Bledsoe 

Post#1 » by RealGM Articles » Tue Nov 21, 2017 7:01 pm

At last season’s All-Star break, the Phoenix Suns were 18-39 with the second-worst record in the league. Seven-and-a-half games and seven teams stood between them and the playoffs despite the fact that their best players had been pretty healthy. To that point, sophomore shooting guard Devin Booker played in all but one game and TJ Warren was staying on the court after missing a month due to a strange head injury.


The biggest development was Eric Bledsoe’s health because after missing 51 games in 15-16 and 39 in 13-14 (with a healthy season in the middle), the 27-year-old point guard had only missed one game and that was for scheduled rest shortly before the All-Star break.


Those factors put Phoenix in an unenviable but still workable situation as a team stuffed with young players not ready to be competitive in a stacked Western Conference. They had avoided spending a ton of long-term money that off-season (just Jared Dudley for three years and $30 million, which has not turned out beautifully but was still comparatively solid for 2016’s spending bonanza) but would have limited flexibility since they still had to pay Tyson Chandler and Brandon Knight through 2019 and 2020, respectively, while some of their young players were moving off rookie scale contracts.


The Phoenix front office had plenty of clear indications about where they were as a franchise. After all, they selected two of the youngest players in the entire 2016 draft after doing well with a very young Booker the year before. Whether or not Booker, Dragan Bender, Marquese Chriss and their remaining picks worked out, it was going to take a while.


At that same point, the Suns had a critical mass of veterans ill suited for a process that would take that long. Some would be able to mentor the young players but they did not need established players at every position to fulfill that purpose. Fortunately, the Suns’ books gave a clear guiding light for how to resolve the situation because no team was going to take on Knight or Chandler’s albatrosses of contracts without serious assets and that would have been a horrendous use of resources for a very young team. Dudley was more on the margin but an additional two and a half years at about $10 million per season, though GM Ryan McDonough was smart to have his contract decline each season, was too rich for too long.


That left Bledsoe as the perfect trade piece, an unambiguously good player in or close to his prime on an incredibly team-friendly contract. While teams could never totally wash away Bledsoe’s injury concerns, being healthy for the whole season to that point was as good as he would ever look from that perspective. Furthermore, while point guard has become a very saturated position around the league, horrendous recent seasons demonstrated the necessity of having at least one lead ball-handler on roster.


It was also obvious why Bledsoe was a poor long-term fit with the Suns. They were a construction project in the early stages and he was a finished product ready to be part of something bigger who had already experience the playoffs as a young Clipper. By the time his teammates were ready, Bledsoe would be close to thirty with the chance to leave as an unrestricted free agent in 2019 even if Phoenix wanted to bring him back.


Bledsoe’s contract drove his value even higher. In February, teams would have had two and a half regular seasons and three potential playoff runs on a contract paying him less than $15 million per season, a number that looking almost comically out of scale with the ridiculous contracts signed the previous summer due to the rapidly rising salary cap. Bledsoe was only making $2.5 million more than Jeremy Lin and the newly signed Net was both a clearly inferior player at the same position and one of 2016’s best bargain signings.


While it is impossible to know what offers were on the table in February, it was a superior time to move Bledsoe. After all, trading for him then would have given the acquiring team the rest of the regular season and playoffs if they qualified to figure out Bledsoe’s place and fit before the 2017 offseason, additional value worth paying for in assets. The 16-17 season was also unusual because both conferences had wide-open races for at least one playoff spot so there were more franchises in the mix. That was also before the 2017 draft class added a series of capable and intriguing young point guards to the pool, though that understanding may have kept some teams out of the bidding.


Instead, McDonough kept Bledsoe in February. Less than one month later, the Suns were clearly out of the playoff chase and elected to sit a healthy Bledsoe for the entire final month of the season in a race to the bottom of the standings. That unsurprisingly alienated Bledsoe and set the table for finally trading him in November for Greg Monroe and an eventual first round pick from Milwaukee.


There is not enough publicly known about what the Suns were offered at the February deadline to say definitively that they made a mistake waiting but that choice created a series of events that was simultaneously predictable, damaging and avoidable. Even if moving a talented player on a good contract was unpalatable at the time, it was not a situation that was going to resolve with bringing back the same super young roster plus one high draft pick.


Being a general manager is an incredibly hard job with competing pressures and it is worth remembering that owner Robert Sarver gave McDonough a contract extension this summer and we cannot know if that happens if he trades Bledsoe at the deadline. That said, the Eric Bledsoe situation certainly appears to be a teachable moment about the importance of honesty in self-evaluation for front offices because failure to do so can lead to serious consequences.

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Re: Why The Suns Waited Too Long To Trade Eric Bledsoe 

Post#2 » by Bentley1225 » Tue Nov 21, 2017 7:28 pm

I think the Brandon Knight injury affected the timing of the Bledsoe trade.
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Re: Why The Suns Waited Too Long To Trade Eric Bledsoe 

Post#3 » by popfan » Wed Nov 22, 2017 6:58 pm

Keith Smith of RealGM gave the Suns org a C+ for the trade, which I thought was overly generous. While this article is more critical, it still took the high road. What it failed to mention was how Sarver + McDonough didn't anticipate that the firing of their coach would trigger Bledsoe to publicly complain. The article only briefly mentions their alienation of Bledsoe. Being unprepared, Sarver + McDonough overreacted unwittingly creating a sell-off situation for themselves. Not only do Sarver + McDonough need to be more honest in their self-evaluation, they also need to demonstrate more public restraint, more vision and better planning. If you intend to fire your players coach, then do it carefully and respectfully to avoid implosion. These goons behaved more like plantation owners than high-profile business executives. In the process they publicly humiliated themselves and the already depressed Suns brand.
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Re: Why The Suns Waited Too Long To Trade Eric Bledsoe 

Post#4 » by nbacomplex IG » Thu Nov 23, 2017 4:25 am

I think that the cumulation of events that lead to the eventual less-than-satisfactory trade for the Sun's was both Bledsoe's and the Sun's management fault. Bledsoe should not have killed his trade value by first tweeting that he would not like to remain on the Suns team, and the Sun's management should not have elected to sit Bledsoe for the remainder of the season. If Bledsoe had chosen to not request a trade then the Sun's would have been able to garner more than a measly pick and Greg Monroe, a good role player but nothing compared to Bledsoe. I am willing to bet that there were better offers to be had than what eventually turned out to be. Also, the Sun's management should not have sat him for the rest of last season, but also should not have decided to sit him this season until they could find a trade because that lowered his trade value even further because teams knew that they would be forced to move him rather than have Bledsoe collecting dust on the bench. Now if I were the Sun's management, and Bledsoe had just made his tweet of "I don't want to be here" I would decide to continue to play him, but also actively be shopping him for good, young players like Jackson or Booker and/or good picks, but not from teams like the Bucks. Also, by giving the Bucks Bledsoe, you are making a good team that has no chance of being in the lottery a strong star tier player who will further elevate their team. This was my first post on this site and I will likely get flamed for my opinion but I am looking forward to see what people have to say about my opinion.
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