Reports are circulating that the Phoenix Suns are trying to trade 32-year-old forward Jae Crowder for the 25-year-old power forward/center John Collins III, currently of the Atlanta Hawks.
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The Phoenix Suns have been treading water with star hall-of-fame bound point guard Chris Paul missing time and budding star Cam Johnson missing a few months with a torn meniscus.
It has been mentioned ad-nauseam how this current Phoenix Suns team is not bad but not the juggernaut-specific stats would lead people to believe.
The Suns are currently (as of Saturday afternoon) third in offensive rating, only trailing the Sacramento Kings and Boston Celtics, eighth in defensive rating, second in net rating, and second in the margin of victory; both stats have Boston in the first place. The Suns are not a bad team, but they are in fourth place in the Western Conference for a reason, and a lot of that is due to poor rebounding (the bottom 6 or middle in the pack in every category) and struggling defensively against opposing bigs when Deandre Ayton is not playing.
Once again, if I told you the Suns were going to be 4th in the loaded West while Paul and Johnson are out with Jae Crowder refusing to play, you’d likely take it. The problem is Chris Paul gets hurt constantly and always has, throughout his career, and Cam Johnson has a torn meniscus, so not only is he going to miss a few months, but there is also no telling how he is going to perform once he returns to the court.
According to many reports, the Suns are trying to remedy these issues via a trade that would send Jae Crowder to the Atlanta Hawks for John Collins. Collins is in his 6th NBA season and has averaged a respectable 16.3 points, 8.3 rebounds, and 1.5 assists over that span. This sounds good on paper, especially for a young player with postseason experience like Collins, but there is a caveat: this 2022-2023 season has started as Collins’ worst year to date. Collins has begun the 2022- 2023 campaign with a rather pedestrian 12.6 PPG, 7.7 RPG, and just 0.9 assists per game. The assists number looks particularly bad, but considering how much iso the Hawks play on offense, I can’t kill him too much.
Collins is not great, if he did get sent to Phoenix for Crowder, nobody would be making early comparisons to Amare Stoudemire or Tom Chambers, but he would undoubtedly be an upgrade. Looking at Crowder’s stats for the season, he is putting up a truly excellent 0 points per game, 0 rebounds per game, 0 assists per game, 0 minutes per game, 0 free throw attempts per game, no win shares, and nothing more. Who knows, with that kind of production, maybe he’ll get an All-NBA nod.
Collins may not be as talented as the Suns’ power forwards of old, but right now, he is undoubtedly an upgrade from Jae “you tried trading me and benched me, so I refuse to play,” Crowder said. The current deal seems to be Crowder for Collins, sending some conglomerate of picks to the other side of the country. I prefer if the Suns could get Bogdan Bogdanovic in the deal.
Bogdanovic is currently recovering from knee surgery with no coherent timetable for his return. Bogdanovic had surgery done on his right knee in the offseason, and the news did not even break until June when a doctor for the Serbian National team said he would not be able to participate this past year’s EuroBasket tournament. Many fans may be sketched out about dealing with an injured player from the Hawks, as just last year, they hid a John Collins injury from the media. However, I am not one of those fans. I do not see an injured shooting guard; I see dead salary on the Hawks and an injured player whose price has gone down because of this injury. The Hawks have had a dismal start to their season, so it is logical to conclude that the 2-month recovery time is because of some form of setback. Bogdanovic was videoed working out in mid-October in the Hawks practice facility, so something is going on there.
Based on talent, the Suns would win this trade in a rather lopsided fashion. I propose Crowder, Suns backup guard Landry Shamet, a first-round pick, and a second for Bogdanovic and Collins. The equalizer for this trade will be that the Suns would be taking on 41 million dollars, with the Hawks only taking on 19 million.
This is where it gets complex. Initially, the Suns wanted Collins for Crowder and a few picks straight up, but they wanted to avoid paying Collins’ full salary for the next four years. Adding Bogdanovic into the mix will make that even more complicated, but regardless of how much the Hawks pay, it will be much less than what they would be paying.
I do not think there is a single person that would consider the Hawks are making it out of the east this year, so that extra equity may prove to be more valuable than the gamble on Bogdanovic’s health and Collins, who the Hawks have been trying to ditch for years since giving him a very player friendly extension ($23,500,000 annually for the next four seasons). Speaking of salaries, Bogdanovic isn’t cheap either. The Serbian star shooting guard is making $18,000,000 annually for the next two seasons, with health being a constant issue for the 30-year-old. The Suns need this money situation figured out because Cam Johnson will be a free agent at the end of the year and will not play for free. I am of the ilk that if you genuinely want to win a championship, you look at the back of the trading card, not the checkbook.
All sources point to a Crowder/Collins deal being finalized sooner rather than later. By the time you read this, this piece will already be obsolete, but if the Suns genuinely want to win their first championship in franchise history, they will stop at nothing to achieve that. Bogdanovic off the bench and Collins at the power forward spot doesn’t just make the Suns a juggernaut in the West; it would make them a colossus in the league.
