What's next for Suns? After feel-good season, the Thunder remind them just how far they have to go

This is hardly a problem exclusive to the Suns, of course. Few opponents are going to register as much more than a speed bump to the defending champions. It's just one the Suns are uniquely poorly positioned to address.

Suns rising or setting?

Take the team Phoenix faced in its first Play-In game, the Portland Trail Blazers. The Suns emptied the clip for a 45-win season. They've given away control over literally every one of their tradable first-round picks. They waived-and-stretched Beal to duck the luxury tax and the aprons, incurring five years' worth of dead money in the process. The Blazers won 42 games with a full clip of assets. Other than 2026, they control all of their own first-round picks. They have control over three valuable Bucks picks as well. They have a clean luxury tax clock, a bevy of young players and the flexibility to build their roster in just about any way they can imagine.

This is what the Play-In Tournament and the seeds it can generate are supposed to be: a way station. Portland stopped there on the way to bigger and better things. For Phoenix, at least for now, it might be a destination. This team just doesn't have that many ways of getting better given the picks it has spent and the money on its books.

There are pockets of upside scattered throughout the roster. Jalen Green was a No. 2 overall draft pick, after all, and while his brief regular season was uneven and his Thunder series wasn't much better, his two spectacular Play-In games were hopefully a sign of things to come. Phoenix just picked Khaman Maluach at No. 10. He didn't play much as a rookie, but he was a fairly raw prospect. It'll be a few years before we know where he's going. Maybe one of the younger players who showed promise in smaller roles -- Gillespie, Fleming, Ighodaro, Goodwin, Ryan Dunn -- has more room to grow than we realize. The best player of the 2020s was drafted during a Taco Bell commercial in the second round. Never say never.

But think about where the bar is. The Suns just saw: it's the Thunder. Oklahoma City has reserves with more promising long-term outlooks than Phoenix's starters and the draft picks to supplement them with just about any sort of external talent they decide they need. The Suns are shopping in the bargain bin. The Thunder have every imaginable resource. There's not a gap here. There's a canyon.

That isn't helped by the subtle but noticeable decline Booker has endured over the past few years. He'll turn 30 around opening night of next season. He's never gotten to the rim much, and we now have a two-year sample of below-average 3-point shooting. He's relying more on drawing fouls than he ever has in part because he just isn't as explosive as he was at his peak. His Thunder series was... fine? He generated reasonably efficient offense. He also did little to create advantages his teammates could consistently capitalize on. Nobody expected him to win the series or even a game, but this was far from the overwhelming postseason force we saw a few years ago. This version of Booker isn't an All-NBA player. He's more like a low-end All-Star.

What do you get when you put a low-end All-Star with a supermax contract on a roster full of dirty work role players? Probably what the Suns just had. For the time being, they're reasonably well-positioned to continue competing for Play-In Tournament berths. If one of the younger players really pops, maybe they sneak a top-six seed in the Western Conference. More likely, sustaining a culture like this gets harder over time. It's a lower-stakes version of Pat Riley's "disease of more." Players want more shots, more money, more spotlight. Getting players to buy in for a championship pursuit is hard enough. Getting them to do so for a play-in ceiling is a tougher sell.

Which players could the Suns target?

Maybe the Suns can do it. It's a reasonably achievable goal if the Suns are comfortable limiting the scope of their ambitions. If the Suns want to think bigger, it's probably going to involve some degree of risk. In this CBA environment, risk isn't in short supply. It's never been easier to trade for a star if you're willing to accept one who's hurt, overpaid, or is in some other way less than a safe bet. We just saw Trae Young and Anthony Davis get traded for basically nothing.

Those are the sorts of players that are likely available to Phoenix. They're the most obvious Ja Morant team, for example, given Booker's need for a teammate who can both serve as a primary playmaker and generate the rim-pressure that he doesn't. The 76ers are built around two reasonably young guards and are stuck with two enormous contracts owed to older players. Paul George and Joel Embiid are likely gettable. The Suns will gain trade access to their 2033 first-round pick this offseason. Probably not enough to sneak into the Kawhi Leonard derby, but worth the phone call, and a nice chip to put on the table should the right high-risk, high-reward player become available.

It's a fascinating conundrum for the Suns, specifically, because their recent experience taught them the dangers of over-indexing on stars. Their two years with Durant and Beal were miserable. Their first year without them was a reasonable success. In a perfect world, the Suns would import the right player into their culture, keep that player healthy and reap the rewards of both talent and structure. Any such acquisition has to come with the acknowledgment that it might upset the delicate balance the Suns have struck if for no other reason than the outgoing salary needed to make a deal like that work. Getting any big name means sending multiple veterans out.

That's going to be the defining dilemma of this Suns offseason. Are they comfortable with another version of the season they just had? If so, while it's by no means given, it's certainly attainable. If the goal is simply to put a respectable team on the floor for their fans, it's probably preferable. If the goal is to try to take any sort of step towards something bigger, to genuinely challenge teams like the Thunder rather than just facing them, it's going to involve a degree of risk that could sabotage everything they spent the last year building and plunge them right back into the misery of the Durant-Beal era. Are the Suns happy being good, or are they going to take another stab at great?