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Phoenix finished 45-37 with a top-10 defense and a middling offense, then got swept in the first round. The offseason reads like a direct response to that specific gap.
A Defense That Outperformed Its Record
The Phoenix Suns finished the 2025-26 regular season 45-37 and made the play-in field, but their postseason ended in a first-round sweep at the hands of Oklahoma City, losing all four games by a combined margin that made the series feel more lopsided than the seeding suggested. The underlying numbers tell a more specific story than the record does. Phoenix finished with a defensive rating of 113.9, good for 10th in the league, while its offensive rating sat at just 115.4, 16th overall. The net rating landed at plus-1.5, 15th in the NBA, a figure dragged down almost entirely by an offense that underperformed relative to the talent on the roster. An analyst who studies roster construction through efficiency data called the gap between the two sides of the ball the clearest signal in the box score. “A top-10 defense with a bottom-half offense usually means the shooting around your best scorer isn’t good enough,” the analyst said. “Phoenix ranked 12th in three-point percentage at 36.1, which sounds fine until you realize how much of that shot volume came from players who weren’t knocking it down consistently.”
The Offseason Mirrors the Efficiency Gap
Every meaningful move Phoenix made this summer targets one half of that equation or the other. Signing Luke Kennard, who shot a league-best 47.8 percent from three last season, directly addresses the offensive shooting gap without disturbing the defensive identity the roster built under head coach Jordan Ott. Re-signing Mark Williams, Jordan Goodwin and Collin Gillespie keeps the personnel largely intact behind that top-10 defensive rating rather than risking it on unproven additions. The trade for Miles Bridges is the one move that cuts against the efficiency logic, adding size and scoring at real draft-pick cost while carrying real off-court risk.
“Keeping Williams, Goodwin and Gillespie is the analytics-friendly version of this offseason,” one observer following the roster said. “The Bridges trade is the swing that isn’t about efficiency at all, it’s about betting that a bigger, more physical frontcourt player changes the offensive rating even if the underlying shot profile doesn’t improve much.”
What Arizona is Watching This Offseason
According to BetArizona, whose coverage includes the latest Arizona sportsbook promo codes for bettors following the Suns and the rest of the state’s teams, one analyst noted: “Devin Booker’s efficiency held up even as the offense around him got more spread out last season. Whatever changes on paper this summer, he is still the swing factor for whether that offensive rating climbs.”
Phoenix enters the season priced as a long shot in the futures market, and the roster moves explain why oddsmakers see modest upside rather than a leap. A team that fixes a specific efficiency gap without adding a second star tends to move a few spots in the standings, not into title contention. According to Bleacher Report’s breakdown of the Suns’ roster following the 2026 draft and free agency, Phoenix used the thirtieth pick on Arizona Wildcat forward Koa Peat, giving the frontcourt rotation another body without touching the win-now veteran core that produced last season’s top-10 defense.
What the Numbers Say About 2026-27
If Kennard’s shooting lifts the offensive rating even five spots while the defense holds its ground, Phoenix’s net rating moves meaningfully without a single marquee addition. That is a modest bar, but it is the one this roster was actually built to clear. Whether Bridges adds to that number or subtracts from it, by taking size that shows up in efficiency at the cost of shot profile the offense already struggled with, is the single biggest swing variable on the roster. “I’d rather see boring continuity than another big swing after last year’s ceiling was a first-round sweep,” a fan wrote after the Kennard signing. “Fix the shooting, keep the defense, see where that gets you before doing anything drastic.” The full efficiency picture, offensive and defensive ratings, net rating splits by rest days, and shooting data broken down further than the box score allows, is worth tracking as the season builds toward opening night.