The Phoenix Suns might be screwed in the future because of the NBA Draft and their only way out of it will be through… the draft.
Blockbuster trades for Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal had a chance of torpedoing their long-term upside even if short-term success followed. It did not follow, and it has made the torpedoing more sudden and severe.
They do not have control over any of their own draft picks for the next seven years. Every Suns selection over that timeframe is in the hands of another franchise.
Durant was acquired from the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for unprotected first-round picks in 2023, 2025, 2027 and 2029, as well as a pick swap in 2028. The Washington Wizards were given first-round pick swaps in 2026, 2028 and 2030 in exchange for Beal. The 2031 first-rounder was inexplicably split into three much less valuable ones.
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The Suns still have some draft picks. Just not their own, the far more important ones to own given the bleak look of things ahead.
How did they get here? How do all these swaps work? And what picks do they still have?
Here’s a complete rundown year by year, reviewing what happened to the Suns’ own pick before covering the picks from other teams Phoenix owns.
2025
Suns’ pick: We start very basic. The Houston Rockets will pick in Phoenix’s spot that ended the season tied for the ninth-best lottery odds. Houston acquired the rest of the Phoenix draft capital from Brooklyn last summer, a move that has aged incredibly well.
That makes the Rockets the most logical trade partner for Durant, but Houston’s got a playoff run to make and a draft lottery to watch presumably before any discussions even get started.
Phoenix couldn’t have possibly foresaw an outcome when it was potentially a lottery team by the time Durant was in second full season as a member of the Suns. The worst-case scenarios for the rest of Durant’s current contract that runs through to the summer of 2026 had to be first-round playoff exits, not lottery picks. Yet here we are.
Pick owned by Suns: As part of the 2031 trade that will come up a few more times, the Suns acquired the Cleveland Cavaliers’ pick in 2025, which will be 29th. This is the first of three firsts from the Utah Jazz that will be the least favorable between Cleveland, Utah and the Minnesota Timberwolves. More later on how that could shape up in the back-half of the decade.
There is also a second-round pick Phoenix gets via Denver that will be slotted 53rd.
2026
Suns’ pick: This is where the pick swaps begin, applying to Phoenix’s selections in 2026, 2028 and 2030. Lock in with me here.
To make it even more complicated, this is not the Suns’ pick anymore. By making that trade for the first-rounders in 2025/2027/2029, they opened up their flexibility to move a selection in 2026. To dump Jusuf Nurkic’s contract, the price was this first-round pick.
Charlotte will get the lowest first-round pick amongst Phoenix, the Memphis Grizzlies, Orlando Magic and Washington Wizards.
OK, let’s review the logic at the time behind these swaps, because they age horribly.
Before the Nurkic trade, the thought here was the Suns themselves would be picking somewhere in the 20s, or at worst, the high teens. Thus, any swap would only be moving them back a few spots in the 20s if the trending-up situations for Memphis and Orlando landed there.
Now, Memphis and Orlando are going through its own issues. The Grizzlies surprisingly fired head coach Taylor Jenkins and have a Ja Morant situation that has developed further this season into on-court regression, while the Magic limped to a 41-41 record despite showing tons of promise last season and at the beginning of this year. Perhaps this won’t be as bad a double-digit gap for Charlotte in the swaps.
But this is an unmitigated disaster, especially when you consider the costly price of the Suns re-layering these swaps.
The swaps began with Washington in the Beal trade, which is actually where an end to the shenanigans would have been OK. The Wizards are going to stink for at least another year.
But by acquiring three-second round picks from Memphis in exchange for swaps in 2026 and 2030, the Suns opened the path to significantly dropping back in the first round. And then they inexplicably did it again with the Orlando Magic for just this swap and got back another trio of second-rounders.
So was it worth it for those six second-round picks? Uh. No.
Three of the six second-round picks were used to get Royce O’Neale, one was used to move up for Oso Ighodaro, one was lost in tampering for Drew Eubanks and the last was used to get off Cam Payne’s salary for tax reasons.
O’Neale has been a great addition for that return and Ighodaro has the potential to develop into a trustworthy spark off the bench. But that is hardly worth mortgaging potential top selections.
To again simplify it, if the Suns are in the lottery in 2026, the Hornets (who own this swapped mess of a pick) will have to hope the Grizzlies, Magic and Wizards are all in the lottery with them. And the Suns better hope their own pick does not move up in said lottery. Imagine that as part of the price of getting Beal. Get ready to start being incredibly anxious on lottery day.
Pick owned by Suns: No first-rounder in 2026. Phoenix will have a second-round pick via the Nurkic trade, but it is the worst from either the Denver Nuggets or Golden State Warriors. So, likely in the 50s, maybe in the mid-40s.
2027
Suns’ pick: Houston has it again. This was the first unprotected pick of the four that had a decent chance of getting spicy at the time of the trade. Durant’s contract runs through the 2025-26 season and Phoenix had no way to know if he had a future in the Valley beyond that. But with that in mind, a team with Booker and Beal on it in theory shouldn’t be one of the worst in the league. But we just saw one that was and it also had Kevin Durant on it.
Pick owned by Suns: Our second first-rounder of the three from the 2031 trade. The ask here is the odds of Cleveland, Minnesota and Utah all being in the lottery. They are extremely low. Cleveland is set with three franchise players at the moment and Minnesota has 23-year-old Anthony Edwards. The Jazz could still be bad but they could also hit big in this upcoming draft and star to turn things around. All said, even the most optimistic opinion would describe the chances of the Suns not picking in the 20s as low.
2028
Suns’ pick: This is one of the swapped-to-oblivion picks the Suns still have. To state it clearly, the Suns do have a first-round pick in 2028. It will just likely be much worse than where they would have picked without the swaps.
With that said, we are officially in the “Too Far Away To Speak In Any Sort Of Guarantees” range. Too often, we are tricked into the concept of longevity for a team’s fate one way or the other. Who knows where any of these teams are at three years from now.
What we can do is take some educated guesses.
The good news for the Suns is that this is where Brooklyn and Washington factor in as two of the three teams as part of the formula. The Suns will get the lowest selection between itself, those two franchises and the New York Knicks.
The Nets only have one real building block right now, 23-year-old guard Cam Thomas, who could be an All-Star in the future but also isn’t necessarily someone you’d bet confidently is the first or second best player on a title team. Keep an eye on how this upcoming draft pans out for them. Brooklyn has its own first rounder, plus three more outside the lottery. It needs to land more significant pieces with those picks to put around Thomas in order to be out of the lottery by 2028.
The Wizards are not anywhere close to starting from as much scratch as that. It has recent high selections in Alex Sarr (No. 2, 2024), Bub Carrington (14th, 2024), Kyshawn George (24th, 2024) and Bilal Coulibaly (7th, 2023). Coulibaly has provided the most sparks resembling potential future stardom out of any of them so far, but nothing too definitive. With that said, all three of the 2024 rooks seem to have at least solid futures ahead of them. Like Brooklyn, landing one of the true keepers in the top drawer of the 2025 draft is necessary for ascension anytime soon.
The Knicks in the 2027-28 season will still have Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart and OG Anunoby under contract. Karl-Anthony Towns has a player option for that year, while Mikal Bridges’ extension originally signed with the Suns runs out in the summer of 2026. They are positioned to be very good for half a decade. They are also the Knicks. So, who knows.
All it takes is one of those three holding a claim as a certified playoff squad at that time for the Suns to suffer consequences, with the severity of those dependent on where the Suns are at then. That is our scariest look forward yet, because this would be the summer Booker’s current contract expires. Either Phoenix figured out the quick retool and he signed an extension already, or it went badly, maybe enough to the point where Booker didn’t sign. More on this in the 2029 section.
Pick owned by Suns: We just covered it in those swaps, ya silly willy. It’s just that first-rounder for the Suns. No second-rounder.
2029
Suns’ pick: This is not so much a pick swap as it is “a one team gets the best pair on the lot” type of situation. Houston gets the two best selections from its own first, Dallas’ first and Phoenix’s first. Brooklyn receives the worst of the three.
In terms of how bad this could come back to bite the Suns, again, we are in the galaxy of impossibles. No one can reasonably sit here and declare certainties, whether that’s Booker is for sure gonzo or he’s a lifer. The latter would give this pick a pretty good shot at turning out OK for the Suns. The former is the disaster scenario.
Phoenix will have to of somehow stumbled onto a whole new group of core players for this to turn out OK. Ryan Dunn was a solid role player as a rookie, a huge win for his draft position. We covered Ighodaro.
Those might be two hits on rotation players. But Phoenix needs far more than that in its future core in order for this range of the pick giveaways to not be a catastrophe. It needs to draft another future star to go alongside Booker.
And the frightening part of this is we just covered where the other opportunities will be. 29th and 53rd in 2025. Nothing in 2026 and an extremely likely non-lottery pick in 2027.
Going off a 20-year sample size from 2000-19, 64 players drafted in the top-10 have been All-Stars and/or All-NBA. That number drops all the way to 19 for selections 11-20, and even further to 11 for positions 21-30. The 2025 All-Star Game had 26 honorees, 15 of which were top 10 picks.
That’s going to put a large onus on acquiring more picks in the future and making some key finds in free agency as well.
If Durant is traded, he will yield some decent draft capital and maybe some good young players too. There are more guys to move. But how many of those picks will 1) be in the near future at the time of those deals and 2) land in the lottery? You get premium draft selections when blowing it up a few years deep, not right away. Contenders are trading for these stars.
Free agency and other finds on the margins will be tremendously difficult. It’s also doable.
Look around the current top rosters in the NBA and pick out the guys who needed multiple situations before maximizing their potential. Derrick White was an incredible find for tremendous value by Boston. New York was Hart’s fourth team and it was Isaiah Hartenstein’s fifth before he finally latched on somewhere before getting a giant payday from OKC.
How about picks outside the lottery? Brunson was a second-rounder and so was Houston’s Dillon Brooks. Cleveland’s Jarrett Allen went 22nd, Rockets All-Star Alperen Sengun was selected 16th, Desmond Bane went 30th and Houston’s Fred VanVleet didn’t get drafted.
These next two years will be all about the work on the margins. Godspeed, Suns front office.
Pick owned by Suns: The last of the first-rounders in the 2031 trade. Again, say the line. Who! Knows! What! Will! Happen! Four! Years! From! Now!!!! The Suns would need Cleveland, Minnesota and Utah to all miss the playoffs in order to land a first-rounder with some value. No second-rounder.
2030
Suns’ pick: The last year of the swaps! They’re finally gone! Phoenix gets the worst first-round pick out of itself, Memphis and Washington.
Pick owned by Suns: Whatever the swap gods decide. No second-rounder.
2031
Suns’ pick: Utah’s got it. Fully unprotected. We’ll see if the gamble paid off if we have not yet been given the sweet embrace of getting engulfed by the sun.
Pick owned by Suns: They don’t have any at the moment. No second-rounder.
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