Phoenix Suns: 5 Steps To Reaching The Playoffs

3. Fielding A Top-10 Defense

The Suns had a couple of major weaknesses in 2014-15, but we’ll get to the rest of those in a minute. With Phoenix ranking in the middle of the pack defensively, McDonough went out and added a veteran player who would not only be a locker room leader, but someone who would also serve as a defensive anchor.

Alex Len was an excellent shot-blocker, but at only 21 years old, he wasn’t ready to anchor a top-10 defense. The addition of Tyson Chandler could help get the Suns there, especially with his emphasis on getting his new, younger teammates to talk on defense.

"“With us having such a young team here, what Tyson’s already doing is adding that talking factor, making guys communicate with each other because you’re gonna have some breakdowns,” Brandon Knight said. “When you have some breakdowns, you can either talk about it or you can not talk about it, but when you don’t talk about it, you’re probably giving yourself a zero percent chance of fixing it. But when you talk about it, you at least give yourself a chance to fix the problem.”"

Not only will Chandler improve the Suns’ communication on defense, but he’ll also be able to mentor Len, who will benefit from his tutelage and wreak havoc on opposing team’s backups.

With Chandler holding down the starting five and Len coming in off the bench, the Suns will always have a stout rim protector in the game. Eric Bledsoe is a bulldog on defense when he’s fully engaged, and after a season of getting acclimated to an increased workload on both ends of the floor in starter’s minutes, he should have more energy in 2015-16.

Knight has the length to defend either guard position and P.J. Tucker is a very good wing defender as well. With Bledsoe, Tucker and Chandler in the starting five, it’s not unreasonable to think the Suns should be a vastly improved defensive team this season.

At Media Day, head coach Jeff Hornacek noted that the Suns — a team that has historically thrived on up-tempo, high scoring offenses and sort of skimped on the defense end — needed to focus on improving defensively if the playoffs are the ultimate goal.

"“We want to be more aggressive defensively,” he said. “We already told the guys that the offense has kind of driven the defense the last couple of years, we want to try to reverse that. We feel we’re longer, we have more active guys defensively, more trapping. “We don’t want to gamble for steals, but we’re going to give the guys some freedom defensively to do some things and that hopefully will help us to get out and run even more, get some more steals. When you have guys like Tyson and Alex in the back, we’ve got some very solid defenders at our other positions, we could be a pretty good defensive team.”"

In order to be a playoff team in the West without a bonafide superstar, the Suns might need to put their players’ skill sets to good use and find a way to field a top-10 defense.

Next: No. 2