Sports Illustrated uses fictional grade to rate Suns performance so far this season

The 2018-19 Phoenix Suns are bad. Good luck finding anyone who feels differently.

Exactly how bad is a matter of debate, though. The minds at Sports Illustrated felt the need to use a mark you won’t find on a traditional grading scale. They’re giving your Suns an “F -” at the midway point of the season. Grades don’t get that bad. Take my word for it, if the educators at Ball State University or Reitz Memorial High school could have given me an F -, they would have.

Rohan Nadkarni on your Suns:

What the hell is going on here? At what point do we ask the Suns to not be so awful at basketball? Phoenix has a young team, sure, but the Suns need to see that Devin Booker and Deandre Ayton can actually start producing some wins. It’s not an apples to apples to comparison, but look at what Luka Doncic has done in Dallas. The Suns also tried to be respectable by bringing in a vet like Trevor Ariza, but he’s already been shipped away and the organization looks no closer to even being average. Ayton certainly isn’t a bust, but he’s been outshined by players taken after him. Booker has yet to prove he can be anything more than a volume scorer on a dead-end team. And is Phoenix really going to play this entire season without an NBA-caliber point guard? The young guys have flaws, but it doesn’t help that the infrastructure around them is completely nonsensical. Booker is going to start making superstar money by next season. Ideally this team would be making strides to be, you know, not a complete embarrassment by then. Instead the Suns look just as directionless as the day they drafted Booker.

I’ve been there, Suns. Don’t worry about turning things around just yet. Final quarter of the year kick it into high gear. “D” is for “Diploma.”