How The Suns Nailed Their Offseason By Signing Yuta Watanabe

The Phoenix Suns made huge changes to their roster this summer, not only trading for Bradley Beal – mere months after trading for Kevin Durant – but also signing a handful of quality players to minimum contracts to round out their depth.

More importantly, the players they signed weren’t seldom used pieces last season. They were contributors for their respective teams.

Let’s take Drew Eubanks as an example, who Phoenix signed as their backup center. Eubanks spent over 1,500 minutes on the floor with the Blazers last season, shooting over 64% from the floor, and presenting himself as a solid-to-good rebounder.

They also got in veteran Eric Gordon, a player who provided almost 2,000 minutes last season between the Houston Rockets and Los Angeles Clippers.

The 7’2 Bol Bol, who broke out a bit last year averaging 9.1 points, and 5.8 rebounds, gave the Orlando Magic a little over 1,500 minutes.

Keita Bates-Diop, who last year played with the San Antonio Spurs, averaged just under 10 points per game in the 1,452 minutes played over the course of 67 games.

Point guard Jordan Goodwin – included in the Beal trade – gave the Washington Wizards a little over 1,100 minutes last season, and was one of the league’s better point guard rebounders at 3.3 per game in just under 18 minutes per night.

Finally, the Suns also signed both Yuta Watanabe, and Chimezie Metu, both of whom received over 500 minutes last season.

Those players will join a rotation that already includes Josh Okogie and Damion Lee, two players who received 1,350 and 1,506 minutes last season respectively.

Why is the minutes totals important, you might wonder?

For most teams this top-heavy, it’s a slug identifying role players who can contribute, as oftentimes teams will need to sign somewhat untested talent, and roll the dice on their upside.

The Suns are entering this season with an enormous amount of data on the players they just signed. Instead of having to make a call on a player with just a couple of hundred minutes to his name, the Suns have large sample sizes to use as baselines.

Even Metu, who played just 689 minutes last year, received over 1,200 minutes the year before. That unquestionably allowed the Suns to form an educated opinion on him, before they signed him.

With all of that said, it’s ironic that one of their likely best signings this summer is Watanabe, a player with no more than 179 career games on his résumé.

The 6’9 forward, out of Japan, might not wow you with his 5.6 points in 16.0 minutes from last year in Brooklyn, but don’t mistake his lack of numbers for a lack in production. Watanabe is a tremendous shooter, having sported two seasons already at over 40% from long range. He’s a quality rebounder, knows his own limitations, and stays within his own areas of expertise.

Watanabe will function primarily as a floor-spacer, one who is able to play in a wide variety of lineups, and play off of stars such as Durant, Beal, and Devin Booker. Whether or not he produces a lot of points is immaterial, as his job will be to create driving lanes. Sure, he’ll need to occasionally make his presence felt to keep those lanes open, but as someone who canned 44.4% of his triples last season, that doesn’t seem like much of a burden.

Presumably, Watanabe will find himself more open than ever before. This should allow him a chance to not only increase his volume slightly, but to even better last season’s efficiency of a TS of 63.7%. The more he plays with the three aforementioned stars, the more chances he’ll have at becoming a crucial element to finishing games with them.

With Watanabe being able to play both forward spots, it would even make sense for Frank Vogel to use him in the starting lineup. Optimizing spacing and opening up for driving lanes early could allow Phoenix to get off to strong starts, and letting a more defensive-oriented bench unit come on to help keep a lead safe.

However Vogel decides to build his rotation, Watanabe should end up playing a crucial role.

Unless noted otherwise, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball-Reference. All salary information via Spotrac. All odds courtesy of FanDuel Sportsbook.