Bright Side of the Sun: How good is the Suns bench?

There was a time when the Phoenix Suns bench featured Barbosa plus Diaw and, if it was really needed, a random towel-waver who could check in and play a few minutes replacing someone in foul trouble. Mike D'Antoni has always been a believer of the short rotation, something he's been criticized for (and probably rightly so) over the years. His Phoenix Suns never had more than an eight man rotation by design, not because of the actual quality of the roster. D'Antoni just didn't want to play more than eight guys. Alvin Gentry, his top assistant back then, has a completely different approach. He likes going ten or even eleven deep, he likes to give bench warmers a chance and he's not shy to keep a guy like Jarron Collins on the court during crunch time if he's playing well.

This new philosophy has given the Suns a reliable bench that can spell the starters and often outplay the opponent's bench players with energy and hustle. Players like Jared Dudley and Lou Amundson have become fan favorites and their solid performance has translated to the win column. Around the league, everybody admits the Suns bench has really improved and become a real asset. But, how good are they really playing? How do the Suns reserves rank among the other 29 teams in the league?

If you are obsessed by these questions just as much as we are here at "Bright Side of the Sun" (there are two ways of seeing it: our lives are that boring or we care too much about the Suns. Where's the truth? Where it always lies: in the middle), this is you lucky day. We have the answers!

Before we start I want to personally thank George Vardopoulos, from HoopsStats.com, for his inestimable job of keeping track of the stats we'll use in this article.

We'll adopt a very straight forward approach to compare our Suns bench performance to the other NBA teams. We'll simply dissect the numbers. There's no way of measuring energy, hustle, and stuff like that, which makes it really impossible to compare teams based on those "abstract" concepts. Obviously, stats don't always tell the truth, but they are still a great and valuable indicator.

We are going to take into account the classic stats: points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks per game but, to have a better idea of how the bench actually contributes we'll also calculate, on a percentage basis, how much the subs produce compared with the team's total.

Points

The Suns are the number one team in the league in points per game with 110.4. The reserves rack up 31.2, making them 10th best overall. If we consider the production on a percentage basis, 28.3% of the Suns points come from their subs, led by Barbosa and Dudley who score 10.9 and 9.6 respectively. The Suns rank 17th in the NBA on "percentage points from the bench", far from San Antonio's leading 41,6%. This comes as no surprise though; Gentry's bench is not known for its scoring prowess. Besides, Barbosa, consistently one of the top three or four Suns scorers over the last few seasons, is off to a slow start due to a wrist injury that's been nagging him since day one.

Rebounds

Even though it was supposed to be its Achilles' heel, Phoenix is unexpectedly doing a good job rebounding the ball, due in large to the excellent contribution of Grant Hill and Jason Richardson. In fact the team ranks 14th in the league and the bench ranks 9th. The subs grab 14.9 out of the 42.6 total team rebounds (35%), good for the 10th place in the NBA. San Antonio, again, is the best team in this department: 45% of the team's rebounds are corralled by their bench players. Still, the Suns are much better than Boston's bench (31.8%), Orlando's (30.2%) or even the Lakers' (25.9%).

Assists

Led by Steve Nash's NBA-best 11.6 assist per game the Suns rank second overall with 24.1 per game. Even though most of the team's assist come from the same player, the bench production is still pretty good, ranking 13th overall. Percentage-wise, though, Phoenix reserves are 23rd on the list with 27%. And guess who's leading the NBA in "percentage assists from the bench"? Again, the Spurs, with 43,8%. The Suns rather modest ranking shows how much the team depends on Steve Nash, but one can argue that it's normal to suffer a drop-off when you take the league's best passer out of the court.

Blocks

Blocks are not something the Suns are known for, thus, it's no surprise that the team ranks a humble 18th overall. On the other hand, though, most of the teams blocks, almost 44%, are actually coming from the bench. Amundson leads the team and the reserves with 1.14 rejections. Lou alone blocks 23,8% of the Suns total, the rest of the bench tallies 20%, which makes the Suns the 4th best team in the league with 43.8% of the team's blocked shots coming from the subs.

Steals

If the Suns are not exactly renowned for their blocks, we can safely say nobody knows them for stealing balls. In fact, Gentry's team ranks third-to-last in this department, with only 5.4 per game. We should blame the starter's though, because Dudley (1.29 steals per game) and his fellow bench players amass almost half of the team's total strips (48,1%), 3rd best in the league behind only Portland (53.3%) and San Antonio (49%).

Conclusion

Overall, we can say that the Suns bench is in the top 5 for blocks, a remarkable feat considering the team's lack of size, and top 10 for steals and rebounds. Even when we account for the modest assists and points rankings, the Suns reserves are, on average, still top 10 in the league. It's been a while since we could boast a top 10 bench. Probably we should all thank Alvin Gentry for believing in some unproven youngsters like Dragic and Dudley or almost unknown NBA-vagabonds like Lou Amundson.