Oh? Is that a soapbox over there? Well, it would be rude of me not to step upon it for a few moments, so step I shall…
I have some news that I’m not sure everybody knows to be true. This may come as a shock. This may come as a surprise. Or you may have already navigated to this level of philosophical understanding as it pertains to NBA roster construction. We’ll see shortly. That news? The perfect roster in the NBA sounds great in theory, but it does not actually exist.
Did you drop your tea? Is that blood boiling, making your face red, or were you out in the sun too long at the Goldfield Mine Ghost Town this past Saturday? Sunblock. You should use it.
It’s true. The perfect roster? Not a thing. One team wins the championship every year, and even that fan base can rattle off a list of things they wish were better. A little more shooting here, a little more size there, another defender they trust when things get tight. That is the reality of the league, and quite honestly, sport in general. There is always room to improve. Perfection is the pursuit, but it is not attainable. The goal is to be as perfect as possible, knowing perfection cannot be reached.
Even if you somehow checked every box on paper, size, speed, rim pressure, shooting, defense, and versatility, there is still a hard truth waiting for you. A basketball game only has 48 minutes. There are only so many possessions, only so many lineups, only so many moments where the right five can be on the floor together. You can build the cleanest roster imaginable, but if the wrong guys are playing at the wrong time against the wrong opponent, you can still walk off the floor with a loss.
That is the part that never shows up in roster diagrams or trade deadline grades. Talent matters, construction matters, but timing, trust, and deployment matter just as much. The league is littered with great rosters that never quite figured that part out.
This is the time of year when a few predictable things happen, and for whatever reason, a lot of people still struggle to grasp how the machinery actually works. One of them is the tension between chasing short term improvement and protecting long term viability as a franchise. Every team has needs. That part is obvious. And every time a player hits the buyout market after the trade deadline, the cycle begins all over again.
Fans rush to their phones, hit the message boards, and start building the case. This is the guy! This is the piece! This is the move that fixes everything that has been bothering us since November! Positional need solved! Fate altered! Season saved!
Rotations, chemistry, and fit are treated like minor details that will sort themselves out later, because the idea of the player is doing a lot more work than the reality ever could.
I never knew so many people thought, nay, BELIEVED that Jeremy Sochan was the answer to every Suns question. Ultimately, he signed with the Knicks. And just you wait for the monstrous impact he’ll have with New York this season. And wait. And wait…
What gets lost in all of the noise is the basic math of where this Suns’ season actually is. This team is already two-thirds of the way through the year. Roles have been defined. Minutes have been carved out. Trust has been built, or not built, over months of reps. There are only so many minutes to go around, and dropping a new player into the middle of that ecosystem, even one who checks a positional or archetypal box, does not automatically translate to success.
Basketball is not a plug-and-play sport at this stage of the calendar. Fit matters. Timing matters. Chemistry matters. And the idea that a buyout addition is going to swoop in and change the trajectory of a team without disrupting the balance that already exists is more wishcasting than strategy. It feels productive, it feels proactive, but more often than not, it ignores the reality of how late in the process we actually are.
The other piece that tends to get forgotten during buyout season is the simplest one, and it gets ignored every single year. The player who is available is available for a reason. He was bought out. Teams do not walk away from impact players for fun.
There are plenty of reasons why a buyout happens. Maybe the player does not match the team’s timeline. Maybe there was a quiet agreement to let him go so the organization could prioritize youth or pivot in a different direction. Maybe the situation simply ran its course. All of that can be true at the same time.
But the reality still holds. If that player was truly moving the needle, he would still be on a roster. What you are most often talking about with buyout additions is the fourteenth or fifteenth man, someone filling depth, insurance, or situational minutes. Year after year, we go through this cycle, and year after year, the results look the same. Buyout players rarely decide a game. They rarely swing a playoff series. They almost never change a championship path.
It is not impossible, but it is incredibly uncommon. The buyout market is not where seasons are saved or transformed. It is where margins are adjusted, bodies are added, and options are created. Expecting anything more than that is setting yourself up to be disappointed by something that was never designed to carry that kind of weight in the first place.
I do get a kick out of it, honestly. The Suns move some size in Nick Richards, even if it is at a different position, and suddenly everyone is begging for size like there is a mythical power forward wandering the buyout market who can step in, play 25 minutes a night, and magically solve every structural issue on the roster.
It shows up in the reaction to the Haywood Highsmith signing. Why not a power forward? It is a fair question on the surface. But in the same breath, who exactly are we talking about? There is no player sitting out there waiting to be signed who checks every box and slides cleanly into a real rotation role this late in the season. That is not how the NBA works.
Whoever you bring in right now, Highsmith included, is living at the end of the bench. He is not walking in and claiming steady minutes. The Suns took a swing on Highsmith because they want to see what he can be as a wing option looking ahead, not because he is some immediate fix. That is long-term thinking. That is roster management with the offseason in mind, where other decisions can open pathways for a player like him to matter more.
But so much of the conversation is trapped in short-term panic. We need a power forward. We need size. And in that urgency, people miss the bigger picture. This is not an argument that the Suns do not need one. It is an argument that the player people are dreaming about does not exist. Size, speed, rim pressure, shooting, lockdown defense. If you find someone with two of those traits, that is a win. And even then, he is still competing for minutes in a rotation that already has priorities baked in.
Development is still a priority for this organization. Chemistry is still the oil to their engine. The Suns did not get to this point by accident, and the idea that the fifteenth man on the bench is going to swing the season continues to amaze me every year. I guess that is sports. Everyone chasing the idea of a perfect roster with no flaws, even though it has never existed.
And for a Suns team that is exceeding expectations, it is still surprising how quickly that context gets lost in the noise.
That is fandom, though. It lives in conversation, in debate, in the constant search for how things could be better, because there is always room to get better. That part is healthy. That part is fun. Where it goes sideways is when those conversations turn into calling each other idiots instead of actually engaging with the ideas.
The truth is, armchair GMs — myself very much included — would benefit from stepping back and seeing the whole picture more often, rather than locking onto one perceived flaw and treating it like the root of all evil. Every roster has holes. Every night presents a different problem. Every matchup exposes something. That is the NBA. That is the season. That is the sport.
Focusing on a single deficiency without context ignores how teams actually function, how minutes are distributed, how chemistry develops, and how progress is rarely linear. Improvement is usually incremental, sometimes invisible, and almost never solved by one name scribbled onto the end of the bench.
So argue. Debate. Dream about upgrades. That is part of the joy. But maybe do it with a little more curiosity and a little less certainty, because the picture is always bigger than the one weakness staring us in the face.