Booker devin5/7/2023 He also had 8 assists and 7 rebounds, stamping the playoffs with his presence. He finished with a game-high 34 points while shooting 13 of 26 from the field. He spun through small crowds of defenders. Instead, he was going to trust his teammates and bank on the slow, methodical process that had put the Suns in this position in the first place, as the No. It was a small but significant moment: Booker seemed determined not to force much of anything. In the game’s early stages, he quickly passed out of a double-team, a decision that led to an open shot for a teammate. It was only one game, of course, and it is worth remembering that the Lakers lost a pair of playoff series openers - to the Trail Blazers in the first round and to the Rockets in the conference semifinals - before crushing both Portland and Houston on their march to last season’s finals victory.īut the big stage did not seem to affect the 24-year-old Booker. “Honestly,” he said, “it’s a little different. Booker has been on the cusp of emerging as one of the league’s brightest young stars for several years, but perhaps he needed to lead the Suns to a playoff win - against the Lakers, no less - to solidify his arrival. He was dominant in an almost effortless way, outshining the title-tested luminaries with whom he shared the court. If everything about the experience was new to Booker, he did a good job of hiding it in the Suns’ 99-90 win. “I had to get myself under control emotionally because I hadn’t been in that environment in a long time.” “When I came out and saw that many people and heard the noise, I was like, ‘Holy smokes, this is pretty cool,’ ” he said. The Suns were among the teams that were able to increase their arena capacity for the start of the playoffs, and Coach Monty Williams said he found it jarring in the best way possible. On Sunday afternoon, the Suns opened the doors of their arena to nearly 12,000 fans for Game 1 of their first-round series against the Los Angeles Lakers. He made his first All-Star team, then helped the Suns close out their season a few months later with eight straight wins in the bubble environment at Walt Disney World - a run that cemented their identity as a young, tough-minded team but was not enough to make the playoffs.īooker had to wait a little longer for his first trip to the postseason. By the start of last season, none of the teammates he had as a rookie remained on the roster. The franchise kept tinkering and building. Still, he kept refining his craft as change swirled around him. The closest Booker got to the playoffs was watching other players celebrate big wins on television. For his first couple of seasons in Phoenix, he played in relative anonymity. The roots of everything that the Suns are now - a winning team, a franchise with championship hopes - date to 2015, when Phoenix made Devin Booker the 13th overall pick of the N.B.A.
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