Does Devin Booker have a case as the best point guard in the NBA?
There’s this great Mitch Hedberg joke. Well, there’s about a billion great Mitch Hedberg jokes. I’m thinking of one in particular, though: “I saw this wino. He was eating grapes. I was like, ‘Dude, you have to wait.’”
I’m thinking about it because I’m watching Devin Booker carve up the New York Knicks in a brilliant performance at the World’s Most Famous Arena. That Booker poured in 28 points, capped by a game-winning pull-up 3-pointer from the right corner, is, at this point, essentially expected. He has averaged 20 points per game in every season since he turned 20. He’s got five 50-point games on his résumé, tied for the 20th-most in NBA history, including one of only 13 70-point games ever; right from Jump Street, he’s been as pure of a scorer as they come.
More interesting than Booker’s work as a finisher, though, was his craft as a creator. The way he probed the soft underbelly of Tom Thibodeau’s coverages off the dribble until a crease had presented itself, calmly accepting New York’s onrushing double-teams (my, how times have changed!) before serving up on-time and on-target feeds on which teammates like Eric Gordon and Chimezie Metu could snack:
Not the sort of cross-court lasers to the far corner, blind wraparound drop-offs threaded through six sets of limbs or saucy hook-pass lobs lofted over the top of hapless defenders to trigger an alley-oop detonation. Just your garden-variety ho-hum litany of leaks in the dam — plug it up over here, something opens over there — that eventually washes you away.
Booker finished with 11 assists against just two turnovers in 38 minutes of work on the road against the NBA’s fifth-ranked defense, and watching it back, the word that comes to mind is “control.” He had total command of the game, of its pace and rhythm; of what the Suns offense wants to get to, of what the Knicks want to prevent him from getting to, and of what he needs to do to stripmine their scheme and get to what he wants anyway.
This is the star stuff, the stuff of the best initiators in the world — the depth, richness, boldness and punch that we want our brightest young things to have right away. But dude: You have to wait.
For some in Suns fandom, in the national punditry and within the Suns’ organization — the wait started years ago. Now, though — in Year 9, at age 27 — the wait is over. Point Book is firmly and fully here, and it’s a hell of a thing.
The Suns eschewing a proper point guard in favor of putting the ball in Booker’s hands full time isn’t exactly a new idea. (I first wrote about it five years ago — back when short-lived Suns head coach Igor Kokoskov looked at a point guard rotation featuring Elie Okobo, De’Anthony Melton, Tyler Johnson, Isaiah Canaan and Jawun Evans and thought, “Hey, actually, new plan” — and I know I wasn’t the first.) Throughout all those years of losing and all the griping about “empty calories” stat lines that never seemed to consider the context of the talent that surrounded him, Booker was quietly getting more and more experience: in reading layers of defense in the two-man game, in understanding half-court spacing and how a nudge or feint in one direction could open up a passing window in another, in developing a feel for getting defenders on his hip and controlling the action, and in all the other unsexy, nitty-gritty elements of running an NBA offense.
“I want to say by his third year, he was already handling the ball,” superstar teammate Kevin Durant recently told Gerald Bourguet of PHNX. “Being asked to do a lot on the ball up top, dealing with guys double-teaming him at half-court, double-teaming him all over the floor.”
After brief dalliances with point play interspersed with his primary role as a shooting guard, though, Point Book’s time finally came during the 2023 NBA playoffs — first, when Phoenix needed his playmaking to gain separation from the Clippers in Round 1, and later, when Chris Paul’s groin injury left the Suns in need of a star-level table-setter against the Nuggets midway through Round 2.
When Booker averaged 7.2 assists per game as Phoenix’s primary postseason facilitator, it seemed like the writing was on the wall. When the Suns dealt Paul to Washington during the offseason in exchange for similar-to-Booker combo guard Bradley Beal, it seemed like the proverbial passing of the torch had come. And in spite of preseason reporting suggesting that Beal would play point in purportedly positionless Phoenix, it became eminently clear who’d be running the show when Booker closed the door on the Warriors on opening night:
I know the summertime reporting said Beal would be the point guard, and maybe things just fell this way because Beal was out, but ... kind of think the Suns knew who their point guard was midway through the Nuggets series, and the end of last night showed why. pic.twitter.com/CD3RnVtyrh
— Dan Devine (@YourManDevine) October 25, 2023
“He’s been able, every season, to add to his game,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajaković, who coached Booker for one season as an assistant with the 2019-20 Suns, prior to the Suns’ Wednesday visit to Toronto. “To be honest with you, I was thinking [to] myself: ‘Oh, [this year’s Suns] don’t have a point guard? How are they going to be this year?’ He’s doing an outstanding job.”
While his Raptors would go on to limit Booker to just eight points on 2-for-12 shooting with five assists in a 112-105 defeat — it’s awfully nice to be able to sic O.G. Anunoby and Scottie Barnes on an opponent’s lead guard — Rajaković’s assessment was spot on. A player who came out of Kentucky with “question marks about [his] ball-handling ability and how prolific of a shot-creator he will become at the NBA level” has, through years of work and repetition, blossomed into one of the best point guards lacing ’em up on a nightly basis.
After spending most of his career playing off the ball next to the likes of Paul, Ricky Rubio, Eric Bledsoe, Elfrid Payton and Brandon Knight, Booker is now firmly entrenched as the leader in touches, time of possession and passes thrown for the Suns. It’s going pretty well: Phoenix sits sixth in the league in offensive efficiency, and has been even better if you isolate only the minutes where Booker’s been cooking without Jordan Goodwin, the only other nominal point guard on the Suns’ roster, on the court. In those Point Book minutes, Phoenix has scored a blistering 127.1 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions — miles above what league-leading Indiana has managed over the course of the full season.
Booker heads into Friday’s matchup with the defending champion Nuggets averaging a career-high 8.5 assists per game, fifth in the NBA. He’s creating more points per game via assist than anybody besides Tyrese Haliburton, Trae Young, Nikola Jokić and Fred VanVleet. Only former backcourt partner Paul and Haliburton are setting up more 3-point looks per 100 possessions than Booker, whose teammates are shooting 52.3% from deep off his feeds, according to NBA Advanced Stats tracking data.
His assist rate has skyrocketed. After notching the helper on 27.3% of his teammates’ baskets last season, he’s now dropping dimes on 44.2% of their makes — a mammoth increase that slots him in third in the entire league, behind only Haliburton and Jokić. He’s managed to achieve that explosive growth as a playmaker without the growing pains of a mountain of miscues; he’s turning the ball over on just 11.8% of Phoenix’s offensive possessions, a very strong rate for such a high-usage creator.
“He had a lot of experience in that for four, five, six years, and now it’s just second nature,” said Durant, who, as you might expect, has been the most frequent beneficiary of Booker’s distribution. “You see how he’s handling the ball now. He looks like a point guard, ’cause he’s always been doing that.”
He’s doing it at a higher level than ever these days, with the kind of patience and calm that comes with knowing you’ve studied enough to have all the answers to the test.
Booker knows when to sling the pass a half-second early to beat the help defender leaning the wrong way, and when to take one more dribble and keep probing all the way under the basket to find an angle to dump it off to a lurking big or a streaking cutter. He knows when to sell the pocket pass to the roller so you get the low man to commit to the tag, when really all he wants is to hit the skip pass to the spot-up shooter in the corner. Good passers make the pass that’s open; great passers create the openings themselves.
A point guard’s passing also works in concert with his scoring; putting the ball in Booker’s hands has also paid dividends simply by making it easier for him to call his own number. (I’m reminded of what then-Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni told Jared Dubin about the 2016 decision to shift James Harden from shooting guard to point guard: “We’re just trying to make it easier for him. Why camouflage it? You know that’s where it’s going. You know he has to make plays. So why not do it?”) With more frequent opportunities to survey the scene with a live dribble, and with defenses concerned with the dual threats of him either letting it fly — he’s making 41% of his pull-up triples this season — or finding an open teammate, Booker has stepped up his downhill attacking game, averaging a career-high 15.1 drives to the basket per game and working his way to the free-throw line 7.7 times a night, also a career best.
You can see both the comfort level Booker feels and the full weight of his skill set — the pull-up game from beyond the arc and in the midrange, the ability to finish inside (a career-best 72% at the rim) and get to the line, the capacity to find teammates and create openings — when he’s operating in the pick-and-roll, which he’s doing both more frequently and more efficiently than ever:
Phoenix has scored 1.19 points per possession when Booker shoots or passes out of the pick-and-roll, according to Synergy Sports Technology — by far a career high and third-best among 73 players who’ve run at least 100 pick-and-rolls, behind only Haliburton and Derrick White.
“He has grown so much,” said Rajaković. “And his confidence … he’s playing the best basketball of his life right now.”
The Suns have needed Booker’s best, because their best-laid plans of overwhelming offensive onslaughts have yet to come to fruition.
With a persistent back injury limiting Beal to just three games and Booker missing eight games with a calf strain, Phoenix has yet to see its new big three in action for even one possession of game time. (Booker also left Wednesday’s loss to the Raptors twice after rolling his right ankle early in the third quarter; he’s listed as questionable for Friday’s game against Denver.) With Beal and Booker in and out, Durant has shouldered a massive early-season load — and, predictably, done so brilliantly, averaging 31.3 points, 6.9 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game on 52/49/90 shooting splits. But relying on Durant — age 35, having missed significant time due to leg injuries in each of the last three seasons since rupturing his Achilles tendon in the 2019 NBA Finals — to carry a 33% usage rate over 37 minutes per game for six months just isn’t a sustainable plan. At least, not if you’d like him to have anything left in the tank come April, May and June.
That was the whole idea behind the Beal trade: many hands make light work during the regular season, so that you can have three bona fide All-Star shot-creators and shot-makers on the floor when it counts. Phoenix’s best chance of getting back to the Finals and mounting a serious challenge for the franchise’s first NBA championship depends on surviving Beal’s early-season absence without prematurely burning out KD or falling too far off the pace being set by the Timberwolves, Nuggets and Thunder at the top of the West. And the Suns’ best chance of that is Booker, now squarely in his prime and in full control of all he surveys in the Valley, playing like an MVP.
Maybe not the MVP; it’s early for that conversation, but it sure seems at the moment like it’s still Jokić, Joel Embiid and then everyone else. (Though Shai Gilgeous-Alexander might have something to say about that.) But prior to this season, the list of guys who’ve averaged 27 points, eight assists and five rebounds per game with a true shooting percentage north of .600 was four names long: Michael Jordan, LeBron James, James Harden and Luka Dončić. That’s the company Book’s keeping right now, thanks to the dramatic level-up in the playmaking department that’s turned him into the best version of himself we’ve ever seen — and that, as it turned out, was, well, well worth the wait.
