The Suns were without Devin Booker in Detroit on Thursday, when they blew a 16-point lead and lost by three, scoring just 15 points on 25 fourth-quarter possessions. Their offense hasn\u2019t been great (115.8 points scored per 100 possessions) with Booker on the floor, but they\u2019re now 1-3 without him, having scored just 101.3 per 100 over those four games. Of course, all four have been on the road and against teams \u2014 Houston, Minnesota, Oklahoma City and Detroit \u2014 that rank in the top nine defensively.<\/p>\n
Booker returned on Saturday, when the Suns beat the Knicks, who were playing without Jalen Brunson. Mitchell Robinson was there, but the Suns outscored New York (21-17) on second chances. While Phoenix is one of nine teams that have scored fewer points per 100 possessions than they did last season, it\u2019s seen the league\u2019s biggest jump in offensive rebounding percentage, from 26.4% (26th) last season to 33.6% (sixth) this season.<\/p>\n
The Suns\u2019 starting lineup didn\u2019t have its best night at Madison Square Garden, but bench minutes were huge as they erased two separate, 10-point deficits. Grayson Allen continues to close games, and the Suns have outscored opponents by 13.4 points per 100 possessions in 486 minutes with both Jordan Goodwin and Oso Ighodaro on the floor, and they have the league\u2019s fifth-ranked bench overall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Suns were without Devin Booker in Detroit on Thursday, when they blew a 16-point lead and lost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551411,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3791],"tags":[7,6,2065,472,4045,604,4728],"class_list":{"0":"post-551410","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-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115934370544086583","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551410","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=551410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}