Phoenix Suns: About Brandon Knight’s Big Night

With the Phoenix Suns currently on a three-game winning streak, things are looking good in the Valley of the Sun. Eric Bledsoe is becoming elite, T.J. Warren is quietly becoming one of the best bench scorers in the league and the Suns are finally starting to find their consistency by doing something good teams do: beating opponents they’re supposed to beat.

But in Phoenix’s win over the Kobe Bryant-less Los Angeles Lakers Monday night, another encouraging theme moved back to the forefront: Brandon Knight finally finding his groove in his long-term NBA home.

On Knight’s good night, he put up 30 points, a career-high 15 assists, 10 rebounds and four steals for his first career triple-double — putting himself in some pretty elite company with Pete Maravich, Magic Johnson and Russell Westbrook in the process:

Knight also went 11-for-18 from the floor, made three of his eight three-point attempts and was simply unstoppable, both as a scorer and facilitator.

To be fair, the Lakers boast the fourth worst defense in the entire league, but Knight’s dominance on both ends of the floor helped the Suns pull away in the fourth quarter in a game where they’d been having trouble creating some separation on the scoreboard.

When a long rebound rolled out to Brandon Knight at half court for his 10th rebound, the Suns’ bench erupted into cheers, knowing he had secured his first career triple-double.

It’s not just that Knight played well and that he’s fitting in; it’s that ALL of these new Suns players are coming together and being so supportive for when their fellow teammates succeed.

Eric Bledsoe didn’t have to be overly excited while being relegated to bench duty in the fourth quarter, watching as the reserves built the lead up, but he was the loudest and most animated one on the bench celebrating Knight’s drives to the baskets and T.J. Warren’s buckets in transition.

When asked if Knight knew that final rebound was good for the triple-double, he responded, “I’m not gonna lie to you, I knew. Like I said, my teammates were telling me. These guys, they root for you, they root for each other. We’re really brothers, we really want everybody to be successful.”

That kind of team-first mentality is infectious, and huge for a team that’s been missing Markieff Morris lately. But even more encouraging is the way that Bledsoe and Knight are tearing apart opposing backcourts on both ends of the floor — a lot like head coach Jeff Hornacek and general manager Ryan McDonough envisioned when the Suns re-signed Knight this summer.

"”Well yeah, if we can get him and Bled to combine for 18 assists every night — it doesn’t matter what the combination is — we’ll take it,” Hornacek said after the game. “They have the ball in their hands — we put it in their hands quite a bit — we feel that they can make plays. Brandon made some great decisions tonight on where to throw it and set up a lot of guys. Obviously when you have 15 assists you’re spreading that ball all over.”"

The 15 assists make it pretty obvious Knight was setting up teammates to succeed all night, but the manner in which he found cutters like Warren and Archie Goodwin — both in the half court and in transition — was a sight to behold.

Lost in those career-high 15 assists might be the fact that Knight reached the 30-point plateau for the second time in his last three games.

Against the shorthanded Los Angeles Clippers, Knight dropped 37 points (tying a career-high) in a game in which Bledsoe finished one assist shy of his own triple-double. The next game, he was hardly needed as Bledsoe became the dominant force, finishing with 30 points in only three quarters of action.

But then the next game, it was Knight who was shredding the Lakers’ defense with penetration and impossibly hard-to-block scoop shots that extended just beyond the reach of the help defense.

Knight doesn’t always take the greatest shots, but it was safe to say he earned a couple of freebies with the way he was shooting the ball early…and yes, the devastating manner in which he spun poor Marcelo Huertas into a complete circle with a move that looked more suited for Rucker Park than Talking Stick Resort Arena.

For a guy who, according to both Knight and Hornacek, isn’t quite 100 percent yet after having arthroscopic ankle surgery this past summer, watching Knight pull off a move like this is terrifying when you consider he might have even more bounce in his step in the future:

In 11 games with the Suns last year, Knight saw his numbers plummet from 17.8 points, 5.4 assists and 4.3 rebounds per game on .435/.409/.881 shooting splits to 13.4 points, 4.5 assists and 2.1 rebounds per game on .357/.313/.828 shooting splits. He failed to adjust to playing off the ball and his ankle injury took him out of the lineup right when he was showing signs of fitting in.

But after an offseason of getting more accustomed to his teammates both on and off the floor, Knight is starting to look more comfortable than ever. Through the first 10 games of the season, the 23-year-old point guard is averaging 20.2 points, 5.0 assists and 4.3 rebounds per game while shooting 44.8 percent from the floor and 38.2 percent from three-point territory.

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Ten games is a small sample size, but after a couple of rough outings that featured questionable shot selection and too many turnovers to open the season, the Knight-Bledsoe pairing is thriving as one of the league’s most underrated backcourts.

“We feel that one of those two guys is going to have an advantage,” Hornacek said. “Maybe one night it’ll be Eric, one night it’ll be Brandon. We’ll try to take advantage of maybe the matchups and who’s rolling, just kind of let them go. That opens it up.

“I always said it when I was playing with Kevin Johnson that, ‘Hey, you do your thing and everyone else is gonna get shots. Because now all of a sudden the defense has to collapse and help out and try to keep you out of the lane, now the rest of us are gonna get easy shots.’ So the aggressiveness in Eric and Brandon will open things up for other guys.”

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Eric Bledsoe is still the Suns’ alpha dog, but if Phoenix can enjoy this kind of well-balanced production in the backcourt, it’s going to be very hard for opposing teams to pick their poison on any given night.