Mike Budenholzer is now out of a job, and it appears a failure to connect with his team’s stars helped do him in.
On Monday, the Phoenix Suns made the unsurprising decision to fire their first-year head coach Budenholzer. The move came after a substandard 36-46 finish this season by the Suns despite having an exorbitant NBA-high payroll.
Later in the day on Monday, NBA reporter Chris Haynes shared an interesting anecdote about what went wrong for Budenholzer in Phoenix. Haynes reports that Budenholzer met with Suns star Bradley Beal earlier in the season and told Beal that he wanted Beal to be “the Jrue Holiday of this team.” The remark by Budenholzer “was not well received” by Beal, Haynes adds.
While Budenholzer won an NBA championship with Holiday on the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021, Holiday has a very different style of play than Beal does. Holiday is a defense-first, lower-usage player while Beal is a score-first player who has produced multiple 30-ppg seasons in his career.
In Budenholzer’s defense though, Beal looked like a total shell of himself all year (culminating in a career-worst game earlier this month), so getting Beal to take a step back offensively might have been the right move overall. Beal is also gaining a reputation as being difficult to coach and even seemingly had issues with Budenholzer’s predecessor in Phoenix too.
Nevertheless, there was no saving Budenholzer’s job with the Suns, especially there were signs that he had poor relationships with both Kevin Durant and with Devin Booker as well. Phoenix has now taken the first step to improvement by making a head coaching change, but they still have a lot more work left to do from here.
