We are 32 games deep in the 2025-26 season. There are just 50 of these things left\u2026 where has the time gone?!<\/p>\n
Jordan Ott has done wonders with this team, leading them to six games over .500 despite several injuries to key players sprinkled in throughout the year.<\/p>\n
Phoenix is currently sitting in the 7th seed out West with a record of 19-13. They are just 1.5 games back of the 6th-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves, and 2.0 games back from the Lakers and Rockets. They\u2019re hanging around.<\/p>\n
And now, with Nikola Jokic set to miss a month, the depleted Nuggets could be a team to watch free-fall over the next 10-15 games. Phoenix is only 3 games back from them.<\/p>\n
December was a strange scheduling month, sandwiched between the NBA Cup and the holiday season, which threw things out of whack. The Suns survived a brutal stretch without as much damage as many anticipated, especially without Jalen Green and Devin Booker for part of that stretch.<\/p>\n
The next step for the Suns to take is to play themselves out of the play-in bracket and into the top 6 to secure a playoff spot without the stress of a play-in game (or two). It doesn\u2019t get much easier, but the key is to take it one game at a time, as they\u2019ve done all year.<\/p>\n
This is a brutal 5-game stretch here. Cleveland is a tough road test to kick things off. Then, you factor in the back-to-back against the Thunder and Rockets, and things could get messy if you drop tomorrow\u2019s game. The Kings and Grizzlies games are ones you have to take if you can\u2019t pull off any upsets. 2-3 is acceptable, though 3-2 would be preferred.<\/p>\n
Could we see the Suns rest Mark Williams for the first game against OKC so he\u2019s available for the Houston one?<\/p>\n
The Next 5 Games After That<\/p>\n
A whole bunch of East Coast teams here, and it continues long after, with 12(!) straight games from January 9th to January 30th all coming against teams from the \u201cother\u201d conference. They have some more tough tests here, especially that 3-game road trip against playoff teams in Miami, Detroit, and New York.<\/p>\n
If they come out of this 10-game stretch 5-5 or better, that\u2019s a win in my book. Not to say that they can\u2019t do better, but staying afloat despite tough stretches is the name of the game to set themselves up for a big run in February\/March.<\/p>\n
Jalen Green\u2019s status is something every Suns fan will be monitoring closely as well. If they can get him back halfway through this stretch, that\u2019s a morale boost that could lift them higher. His return will require a bit of a learning curve with how to make him work in their system, as it does for any player returning from an injury for an extended stretch. I\u2019m not overly concerned on that front.<\/p>\n
This 10-game stretch won\u2019t make or break the season, but it\u2019s filled with another set of tests for the fun Suns team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We are 32 games deep in the 2025-26 season. There are just 50 of these things left\u2026 where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3791],"tags":[7,6,2065,472,4045,604,4147],"class_list":{"0":"post-506149","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-phoenix-suns","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-nba","10":"tag-phoenix","11":"tag-phoenix-suns","12":"tag-phoenixsuns","13":"tag-suns","14":"tag-suns-analysis"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115810546914589322","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}