Suns General Manager Ryan McDonough was on Arizona Sports Radio, 98.7 FM on Friday and let it be known that the Suns had discussions and were presented with an offer from an unnamed eastern conference team that involved each team swapping three of their best assets.
Here is McDonough’s quote from the Doug and Wolf Show:
“It didn’t really get serious, but one team mentioned three very good players — probably their three best players — for three of our top players, and it would have been a blockbuster deal,” he said. “We thought about it briefly, and at the end of the day decided not to pull the trigger.
“This would have been kind of a franchise-altering thing for us, in terms of a direction shift, so any time those discussions come up we obviously wanted more time to analyze it. Maybe there’s some other version of it we can reconstruct in the summer.”
According to local Phoenix reporter John Gambodoro when the Suns inquired about the Bulls star wing player Jimmy Butler, the Bulls were open to discussing a deal centered around Suns 20-year-old shooting guard and budding star Devin Booker, which the Suns weren’t interested pursuing any further.
The Suns also reportedly had discussions with the Pistons, and if you read between the lines and the rumors that the Pistons were fielding offers and were open to dealing Andre Drummond, Reggie Jackson and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, it becomes pretty apparent the Pistons approached the Suns with some variation of a Drummond-Jackson-KCP swap for Bledsoe-Booker-Chandler or Len.
From the Suns perspective, while acquiring Drummond would have been huge, Jackson and Caldwell-Pope are each downgrades from Bledsoe and Booker and there is a reason they were on the block in the first place.
I’m sure there were many other blockbuster deals that were at least discussed that we may never know about, or won’t for a few years at least.
