 What's the word y'all? The Phoenix Suns are on a seven game win streak and Devin Booker is playing a different brand of basketball and I love it. Now I know if you keep up with the NBA, you saw this shot on Twitter because this is one of the toughest game winners that you'll see all season long. Book was in his own bag and that was after him struggling to score in the first bit of this game. But I just want to break this down just a little bit, right? So he gets a full shot like basically he waits until 10 to go. Now based on what I know about Tom Thibodeau after watching him coach my favorite team before and based on the people that are on this team, I'm assuming that Tom Thibodeau is saying, hey, when he starts to move, he'll show a double, deny, deny, deny, we'll let Yuta, Jordan, Yusuf or Eric, anybody else take the shot. We do not want Devin Booker to have this ball. And when Booker starts to go with 10 seconds to go, he does give it up to Jordan. He maybe quickly goes back to rotate against Eric Gordon. But this is the moment that confused me. Why is RJ not completely denying the ball? Like I'm not saying this is RJ Beards fault, but I'm just confused on like the game plan is to get the ball out of Devin Booker's hand. You did that successfully. Now prevent him from getting it back. We get an easy dribble handoff between Jordan and Devin and the rest is history. Devin Booker leaning to his right, ridiculous shot, a shot that will be on his mixtape for the rest of his NBA career. Like that is a crazy, crazy shot. Now I just spent 10 minutes trying to find the original tweeter of a tweet I saw this morning. So my apologies, I could not find it. But it had to do with Devin Booker in his pull-up jump shot that it has become an unblockable shot in the association. Kenny, what does that mean? The times that Devin Booker has taken a leaner in the league so far this year through his first nine games, he's been blocked on that leaner twice and both of them times came from a defender behind him. So when he is leaning and there's nobody behind him, this is a shot that he could get up over anybody. Devin Booker has been one of the best players in the association over the last couple of seasons. It was a four seasons, five seasons, whatever you want to call it, he's always been a bucket. But I've talked about this before that players have different evolutions of themselves in basketball. This is, Kenny beats from the nerd talk when we talk about like Pokemon and stuff, right? Like Squirtle goes from Squirtle to War Tortle to Blast Noise, right? Devin Booker is hit, I'm not even gonna say it's his last progression, his last evolution because he's still so very young but this version of book is my favorite version because boy, oh boy, what he is doing as the primary ball handler is something we've seen in moments, right? We've seen when Chris Paul has been out over the last couple of seasons where Devin has taken over as the lead ball handler. It looked very comfortable and very good doing it. But right now, this is, again, just a whole not the level. I remember in the off season when they were talking about after they pulled off the Bradley Bill trade and stuff, they were talking about the lead ball handler, the point guard position, and there was a report from Shams that basically said that the Phoenix Suns are preparing to have Bradley Bill as the point guard of this team. And that was confusing to me because I had seen both of these players basically try to play this role before and Booker has been the guy that has, I guess, been the most comfortable, looked the most normal while playing point guard. And now we're seeing that to the highest degree. In this game against the Knicks, it's not a game I watch live. The way I've been watching Hoops this season is I'll pick three to four games out every night if it's a long slate and focus on those games and every game that I miss I'll watch it next morning. Today was that next morning, right? So I rewatched this from the beginning and the amount of times that Devin Booker saw a double team today or I guess last night was insane. And he felt very comfortable in those scenarios where he ended the game with 11 assists and only two turnovers. And again, you saw on this very last possession they sent two bodies and it did not matter. And he's been able to hold down the fort while Bradley Bill is becoming healthy and while Kevin Arrant is becoming healthy and it hasn't really mattered too much that those guys haven't been there. Now Kevin did hold down the fort while Devin was gone and Bradley was gone. But for this team to be able to just hold the fort until it happens is ridiculous. And I think that that goes into like this off season, right? One of the biggest criticisms about the off season for the Suns is like, okay, we know the top three dudes can really hoop their butt off, right? Maybe there's some overlapping talents, whatever, whatever, but we know those top three dudes are incredible. What about the rest? And over the course of this win streak we're kind of seeing the rest say like, hey, do not forget about us. We know we're not Devin, Kevin or Brad, but we are viable NBA players. Eric Gordon has been the same player for a decade. And I mean that as a compliment, because when you get to your thirties as a smaller in height guard, because I mean, you know, you got the muscles and everything, you usually see some type of drop off. The man is as efficient and as good as he's really been. But what is worse, the grace analyst playing really good basketball hitting a ton of his shots. Yousef Nurkens is definitely hit or miss, but when he's hidden and he is effective he's looking good. And in there still experiments in quite a bit too. Yesterday we saw Chamezi Metz who really hit the rotation and hit some good shots. I think that Azir Little was a player that should be getting more PT as things start to come together. But the depth aspect of their team, that the biggest question mark through the first couple of weeks of the season or the first month of the season hasn't really been a question. When they made these trades with the Kevin trade and then the Bradley Bill trade, I immediately defaulted to this as a contender, but I need to see it on court. And I still feel that way, right? I still want to see everything happen together, but the more and more I watch this team, the more, I guess, confident I really feel in that. Because again, I was one of the guys that was the big question mark I had other than the depth is the overlapping skill sets, right? Brad, Devin and Kevin, though they're not the same player obviously, they do hold some overlapping stuff. But with Devin playmaking and feeling as comfortable as he does with the ball in his hands and Kevin playing some of his, but how is Kevin to right 35 is still doing what he's doing? I don't really know. So when Brad comes back and we got a small little sample serving of Brad and he let die in it, when Brad comes back, this team when those three are on the court is going to be virtually unguardable. Because I would argue when it's just Kevin and Devin do the few games they've played together, it's been virtually unstoppable. Like they had one of the games against Utah, they played two games against Utah in both of those games with bangers. One of those games when those two do share at the court together, it was like Will Hardy, who is now one of the better coaches in basketball, he didn't have an answer. Now he also doesn't have the personnel to really have an answer, but like that's a guy that over this, his first year as a head coach has shown us like he had no answer when those dudes were on the court together. And what do the numbers say when they're together, they have a net rating of a 10.78, only 159 minutes, but it's still pretty good. Now I don't want to give anybody else credit for the success of a singular player, but I can't help but watch the last couple of games of Devin Booker and see my favorite of all time, Chris Paul somewhere in there. Like again, Devin is a player by himself and I believe that no matter who Devin was around, we saw for the first couple years of his career, he was gonna be a successful player, whether you paired him up with a guy like Chris Paul or not. But the way he's methodically figured things out on the offensive side of the ball feels very Chris Paul like. I just cannot be more excited about the time when they finally get together because Devin Booker, if you look at his shooting splits over the course of his career, he's always been about a league average as far as percentage goes. Of course, he's always got a ton of three-pointers up, but he's never been a 40% three-pointer till this year, right now, five attempts per. Again, he's only played nine games. I don't think he's gonna shoot 43% from three, but oh my God, if he does, give him the MVP award right now. But one thing that has been consistent throughout the course of Devin Booker's career is that his catch and shoot three-part percentage has been 40 plus percent his entire career. So whether he is on the ball when Devin and Kevin and Brad come back or off the ball, he is going to be a lethal, lethal threat regardless because his catch and shoot numbers are 44% for an entire season, 42% on the entire season. Now, it's on low volume, right? Because he's always been a guy that's like, when I have the ball, I'm gonna do what I can do. But if we can get him to a play make the way he does when he has the ball and when he doesn't have the ball to catch his shoot more than the previous years, I don't know what the answer to that is. We just gotta get them all healthy at the same time, man. We just gotta get them all healthy at the same time. You may ask if our referee still got him as a shooting guard through the first nine games of the season. I think we can transition book to the one based on what we see. And we doing that, where does Devin Booker rank amongst point guards in ball? That is my question to you. This is what I'm looking for next when it comes to this trio is the rim pressure, the amount of shots we can get at the rim. And right now Booker is not getting to the rim of time. Kevin Arrant is getting to the rim, almost none. But Bradley Beale thought the course of his career has been a guy that got to the rim. 31% of the shots to be specific and that's in a 72% tile. So if we can add that version of Bradley Beale to this roster where you're getting rim pressure but also getting the mid-range jump shooting of Kevin and Devin and now the three point shooting of Kevin and Devin because even Devin Booker and Kevin Arrant, they're both having career efficiency numbers from three. Again, I just don't know what you do about this team. I'm also still thinking about the defense when you talk about long-term, Frank Vogel is a defensive minded coach by nature. So even though the pieces may not necessarily be there to be an above average or to be a great, let's say great defensive team, I'm very curious to see once he gets everything to gather how it's gonna look. As of right now on the season, they're 16th and over the last two weeks, they're seven game win streak. They're the 22 ranked defense, which is not great, but they have the number one ranked offense. So seven wins in a row, seven wins in a row. So there's still a lot of things that they're figuring out because they haven't been completely healthy. But either way, the Finnsons have been a great watch and Devin Booker's been great. Kevin Arrant has been great. We need Bradley Beale to get healthy.