Suns Roll Out Chaotic Starting Five With Khaman Maluach Anchoring the Paint
Underdog NBA tweeted: 'Lineup alert: Suns will start Booker, Green, Brooks, Bridges, Maluach on Wednesday.'
The Phoenix Suns are rolling out a starting five on Wednesday that looks like it was pulled straight from a chaotic fantasy draft lobby. According to Underdog NBA, Phoenix is officially starting Devin Booker, Josh Green, Dillon Brooks, Mikal Bridges, and rookie big man Khaman Maluach.
This is the kind of lineup that forces you to refresh your timeline just to make sure you read it correctly. With their frontcourt depth completely decimated, the Suns are handing the starting center job to a 7-foot rookie and hoping for the best.
The domino effect here starts with Mark Williams. The big man is out for three to six months after undergoing surgery in September to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder.
To make matters worse, Oso Ighodaro is also absent from Wednesday's rotation. That leaves Maluach as the last man standing in the paint, tasked with anchoring a defense alongside the relentless, and sometimes unhinged, energy of Brooks.
For anyone monitoring the betting markets ahead of the matchup against the , this frontcourt shuffle completely changes the math. Prop projections for rebounds and paint points have to be entirely recalculated when a rookie is suddenly thrust into the starting five.
Offensively, this lineup screams that Booker is about to take on a massive workload. When you surround your star guard with defensive specialists and a rookie center, his shot attempts are probably going to look like a vintage 2006 Kobe Bryant box score.
We will find out quickly if this makeshift unit can actually hold the line in . If Maluach can survive the defensive rotations and Brooks manages to avoid a first-quarter technical foul, the Suns might just steal a win while their rotation is in the blender.