The Suns bet the house on Bradley Beal. It backfired spectacularly.

The Suns bet the house on Bradley Beal. It backfired spectacularly.

PHOENIX — General Patton prized good plans violently executed. He would have hated the Phoenix Suns, who amounted to a risky plan clumsily executed.

Eager to double down on his February 2023 blockbuster deal for Kevin Durant and smarting from a second-round playoff exit, Suns owner Mat Ishbia acquired Bradley Beal from the Washington Wizards that June in hopes of building a “Big Three” capable of winning an NBA championship. With Durant, Devin Booker and Beal, Phoenix would seek to overwhelm its opponents with a trio of alpha scorers. Booker pondered the Suns’ weaponry and boasted in October: “I don’t know how teams are going to guard us.”

Six months later, the Minnesota Timberwolves swept the Suns out of the first round of the playoffs with a 122-116 victory in Game 4 at Footprint Center on Sunday. Not only did Phoenix fall short of championship contention and take a step back from last season, it got booed by its home crowd during a Game 3 loss and became the first team to be eliminated from the postseason. To make matters worse, Beal had pledged that the Suns would win Game 4 — “I’ve never been swept a day in my life, so I’ll be damned if that happens,” he said — only to play horribly in the finale. If this was the closing argument, the Suns’ trade for Beal was a mistake beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Roster-wise, everybody talks about the firepower, but you look around the league and it comes down to the details,” Booker said. “You can’t just go out there and think you’re going to win off talent.”

Beal, 30, looked nothing like the three-time all-star who twice averaged more than 30 points during his 11-year run with the Wizards. An injury-plagued campaign in which he missed 29 games came to a dreadful end: With Phoenix’s season on the line, Beal scored just nine points on 4-for-13 shooting, committed six turnovers, fouled out after playing 31 minutes and was torched by Anthony Edwards, who led the Timberwolves with 40 points.

This surely wasn’t what Ishbia, a mortgage company executive who bought the Suns in December 2022, had in mind when he reoriented his roster to land Beal, parting with Chris Paul, four future first-round pick swaps and six second-round picks in the deal with the Wizards.

“Anytime you get in foul trouble, it disrupts the whole rhythm of your game,” Suns Coach Frank Vogel said. “[Beal] was out there competing his tail off and playing super hard. Missed some looks he normally makes. We’re asking him to guard Anthony Edwards and to play point guard against full-court pressure, which we didn’t do a good enough job of alleviating that for him. That’s on me and our staff, just making sure we handle their pressure better. [The Timberwolves’] pressure disrupted us the whole series and probably took its toll on Brad.”

Of course, Beal’s inconsistent season and nightmarish Game 4 are only one part of Phoenix’s predicament. Beal was the NBA’s sixth-highest-paid player this season and is owed $161 million, fully guaranteed, over the next three years. To make room for his salary alongside maximum contracts for Durant and Booker, the Suns parted with Paul, their longtime starting point guard, and dumped Deandre Ayton, their starting center, to the Portland Trail Blazers for Jusuf Nurkic, a lesser replacement. Phoenix was also forced to sacrifice depth and fill out its bench with minimum salary contracts.

The summer’s gambit left the Suns with no margin for error: Beal had to be amazing, or the whole house would fall.

The whole house fell. Phoenix never replaced Paul and shot itself in the foot with crippling turnovers all season. Nurkic was a less effective defender than Ayton, and the Suns couldn’t hold the middle or rebound against the bruising Timberwolves. The revolving door of role players around the “Big Three” was consistently overpowered and outmatched. Consider: Booker (49 points) and Durant (33 points) combined for 82 points on 38 shots in Game 4 — a stunning output — yet the Suns couldn’t keep pace with a Timberwolves attack that ranked 17th in offensive efficiency during the regular season.

“It’s disappointing,” Vogel said. “There’s no other way to put it. There’s no worse professional feeling in the world than getting swept in the playoffs. I’ve never been a part of it. I feel pretty low right now.”

Phoenix Suns Coach Frank Vogel said Sunday that he has the full support of team ownership amid rumors about his job status. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Vogel, facing rumors that his job is in jeopardy, opted for a small-ball lineup Sunday in hopes of neutralizing Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert. Beal’s awkward fit as a makeshift point guard, coupled with his poor outside shooting and foul trouble, prevented Phoenix from generating any real flow. Instead, the Suns subsisted on Durant and Booker hitting tough shots and parading to the free throw line, while the Timberwolves bided their time for a late-game comeback.

The chaotic endgame saw Edwards score 16 of his 40 points in the final period to carry Minnesota to its first playoff series victory since 2004. Meanwhile, Timberwolves Coach Chris Finch had to be helped from the court after suffering a serious knee injury in a collision with guard Mike Conley, who was fouled by Booker near the sideline.

When the night began, Vogel said he hoped his team would protect the ball, make more three-pointers and rebound more effectively. Afterward, Booker lamented Phoenix’s struggles spacing the court and competing on the glass, while Durant pointed to sloppy execution, inconsistent rhythm on offense and a lack of continuity compared with the NBA’s top contenders. In one way or another, every one of those persistent problems resulted from the Beal trade and the roster compromises it required.

The Suns don’t have any easy pivots. Vogel insisted Sunday he has “the full support of Mat Ishbia,” though Phoenix’s owner fired former coach Monty Williams shortly after last year’s playoff exit. Beal possesses a massive contract that few, if any, teams would be willing to swallow, and he holds a no-trade clause that further restricts his value. Durant, 35, and Booker, 27, both suggested the Suns would run it back with their same core.

“Communication trumps all, and we weren’t good at that this year,” Booker said. “Hopefully everybody is feeling the same type of hurt. It has to be fixed. I have to be better. Kevin has to be better. Brad has to be better. Coach has to be better.”

To properly support Durant and Booker, Phoenix needs a distribution-minded point guard, two big wing defenders and a couple of proven frontcourt pieces besides Nurkic. Good luck. The Suns can’t hit the “undo” button on the Beal trade, and they can’t reasonably expect to flip him and his contract for useful pieces in another deal.

Risky plans clumsily executed often lead to dead ends. No wonder Durant, who hasn’t reached the conference finals since he left the Golden State Warriors in 2019 free agency, declined to provide specifics on what went wrong for the Suns.

“Whenever I provide context, it will be looked at as an excuse,” he said. “So I’ll just be better next year. … I don’t want to be up here making excuses for what happened. We’ll deal with it and figure it out as a family moving forward.”

Kevin Durant has not reached the conference finals since leaving the Golden State Warriors in 2019. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)