If you’re a Suns fan who isn’t living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that newly re-signed center Mark Williams will be out until at least the All-Star Break with a torn labrum, if not longer. This leaves Oso Ighodaro and Khaman Maluach as the only centers left on the team, and Ighodaro is more of a PF/C size-wise.
Williams had been the presumptive starter for the team, and Oso the back-up, with Maluach getting spot minutes here and there. This was despite Maluach’s dominant summer league performances where he resembled nothing so much as Will Ferrell in Elf. There was significant debate as to where Maluach would find playing time, but Williams’ injury just opened things up.
The presumptive starter on opening day is Ighodaro, but I believe that would be a mistake. Ighodaro has absolutely no shooting range, no three-point shot to speak of; he’s undersized and doesn’t rebound. His strengths are based around his mobility, high basketball IQ, and willingness to play the team game. The problem is that his weaknesses exacerbate the problems with the (presumptive) rest of the starting unit of Green, Booker, Brooks, and Bridges.
As many others have written about these four, they’re not great three-point shooters, undersized, not good rebounders, and lack the size to protect the rim. Ighodaro takes all of those issues and either makes them worse or does nothing to address them. Maluach, on the other hand, seems like a better fit.
First and foremost, he looked like a legitimate three-point threat in summer league (8 of 20 for 40%), and given his work ethic, age, and rapid development so far, I suspect that won’t be a mirage. Adding a legit 40%, three-point shooting center to the starting lineup will help create space for the supposed offensive goal of getting more penetration drives for shots at the rim. Playing Oso allows the opposing center to camp in the paint, mooting the entire point of trading for guys who are supposedly better at getting shots at the rim.
It’s hard to overstate the value of centers who provide space: back in the day when Steve Nash and Channing Frye were on the team, they were always neck-and-neck for who would lead the team in box plus/minus and net plus-minus per 48. Which is a fancy way of saying that statistically, Channing Frye was as important to the team’s winning as Nash was, and all he really brought to the table was being a switchable 4/5 that could hit threes and provide spacing.
Conversely, Oso seems like a better fit with the second unit of Gillespie, Goodwin, Kennard, and Fleming. All four of them are somewhere between good at three-point shooting (Fleming), to God-tier (Kennard, Gillespie). Fleming is long, tall, and heavy enough to play a little small-ball center, meaning that this unit doesn’t suffer some of the size issues as the starters. Oso’s lack of shooting range doesn’t matter nearly as much, but his ability to facilitate offensive flow will work well with a bunch of players who aren’t stars who can create their own shot but can absolutely hit open threes at a deadly rate.
Maluach doesn’t have to close out games either: he’s very young and still going to be pretty raw. That’s a problem for a competitive team going into crunch time in the fourth quarter. I suspect as the season wears on, and some of the issues with the Suns rotation become more apparent (I wrote about issues with how Green and Bridges fit here), we could see Gillespie, Kennard, Goodwin, and Fleming getting minutes late in the fourth quarter when the team needs stops on defense and spacing for Booker to operate on offense.
Oso makes more sense in these sorts of situations where they need a more polished, reliable, high basketball IQ player to close out games if there are better three-point shooters on the floor with him. It wouldn’t be the first time the Suns have started games with one center and finished with another: Jarron Collins and Robin Lopez usually got the starting nod over Channing Frye from 2009-2011, but it was almost always Frye on the court to finish the game.
Of course, the Suns are going to experiment with lineups a little in pre-season, and we will see how the dynamics of the starting unit will play out in the first month of the season. But if things aren’t gelling (and I’m skeptical that they will), Jordan Ott might be wise to shake things up and see if Maluach is indeed a better fit with the rest of the starting unit.
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