The Phoenix Suns have won just 79 of their last 294 going back to the 2016 season. This rebuild is now in Year 4 and currently on track for their worst year since their inaugural season some 50 years ago despite young additions to their core like Devin Booker and DeAndre Ayton.
If it feels like it’s been longer than four years of the Suns rebuilding, there’s a good reason for that. Steve Nash was traded to the Lakers after the 2012 season. The team won 25 games in 2013 before surprising everyone by winning 48 and 39 games the following seasons.
Despite signaling rebuilding closer to 6–7 years ago, it’s truly close to four.
In that same time, the Timberwolves had been fine-tuning their own rebuild with Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine and Karl-Anthony Towns. This was a team on the rise, incrementally raising its win total season after season before ending its playoff drought in 2018.
Yet, the Wolves have struggled to pick up wins against a Suns team that has lost an average of 75 percent of its games over the last four seasons.
Even in 2018 when the Wolves had playoff aspirations, sitting in the third or fourth seed much of the season, they managed to drop the season series to teams like Phoenix and Memphis. In the end, what separated the best teams in the conference from the others was the taking advantage of those easy-win opportunities.
Since 2016, the Wolves have an 8–5 record against the Suns, including a 3–4 record in Phoenix. Put another way, Wolves-Suns games have been a coin flip in Phoenix but almost a sure Wolves victory in Minneapolis.
Here’s a look back at some of the Wolves’ struggles in Phoenix:
- December 13, 2015: Lost 108–101 on a two-game road trip two days after an overtime loss in Denver.
- Lost 107–104 by a Mirza Teletovic 3-point buzzer beater on March 16, 2016, in the second game of a road trip after three days off.
- Wiggins’ game-winner gives the Timberwolves the 112–111 victory on January 24, 2017.
- Lost 118–110 on November 11, 2017, after having three days off to recover from playing the Warriors. This should’ve been a bounce-back victory.
- Sealed an 0–4 West Coast trip by losing 107–99 on December 15, 2018.
When you look at the context of these losses, you see that there was no exceptional factor like the schedule that was working against the team. It seems that the league typically gives the Timberwolves two or three days off before playing a game in Phoenix.
Playing the Suns at home and on the road has been wildly different of the last few years. Overall, the Timberwolves have a -3 point differential in seven road games versus the Suns compared to being a +53 over six games at home.
The lone loss by the Wolves at home to the Suns was in December of 2017 when Isaiah Canaan sank three go-ahead free throws to seal the win. Late-game heroics have been commonplace on both sides whether it was Wiggins, Derrick Rose, or Mirza Teletovic.
I’m not going to fault the Wolves for hitting game-winning shots but I do feel comfortable in saying that based on the directions of these respective franchises, there have been too many games that have come down to one play.
In fact, as someone who has watched most of these matchups, the Wolves had seemingly approached the Suns as they had already won and not taken them seriously enough. Even Sunday’s victory didn’t feel secure until the moment Rose hit that shot at the buzzer. Before that, the Wolves couldn’t get a stop and Wiggins and Rose combined to go 1-for-4 from the free throw line in the final minute of the game.
This isn’t like the Wolves going 6–16 against the Seven-Seconds-or-Less Suns from 2004–2010 or having a 1–15 record against the Charles Barkley Suns. It’s certainly not as bad as losing the first 25 games in franchise history to Phoenix.
Things have been worse but these struggles are more peculiar and less explainable than against these other eras.
