Devin Booker’s shot selection became an easy target the moment Oklahoma City ended Phoenix’s season in late April.
People hate the long two until they are down three with forty seconds left and Devin Booker has their best defender sliding backward on tired legs. Then the old math starts to feel different. The arena hears it first. Sneakers squeal. A big drops half a step. A wing pinches from the corner, then regrets it. Booker has not released the ball yet, but the possession has already changed shape.
Reuters reported on April 28, 2026, that the top-seeded Thunder finished a four-game first-round sweep with a 131-122 win in Phoenix. Booker led the Suns with 24 points, while Phoenix absorbed its second straight first-round sweep and its 10th consecutive playoff loss dating back to 2023. That pain matters. It gave every old criticism new lungs.
Yet still, blaming Booker’s shot-taking for the sweep misses the bigger story. Oklahoma City did not beat Phoenix because Booker loves the elbow jumper. The Thunder beat Phoenix because they squeezed the weak points around him, turned every catch into a crowd, and trusted their length to survive shots most teams fear.
Booker averaged 26.1 points, 6.0 assists, and 3.9 rebounds this past regular season, per NBA.com. Those numbers impress on paper. They still barely describe the burden.
The real question is not whether Booker takes perfect shots.
It is whether his shot selection forces defenses into imperfect choices.
The sweep that changed the temperature
In that moment, Oklahoma City gave the league a clean reference point.
The Thunder pushed Booker higher. They crowded his first dribble. They loaded help before he reached his comfort spots. When he curled toward the nail, a second body waited. When he tried to turn the corner, another defender showed hands without fully abandoning the shooter.
Across the court, Phoenix often looked one pass late. That matters. Booker’s best shots come when the floor breathes around him. His hardest nights come when the spacing gets sticky and the release valve disappears.
The sweep fed a familiar argument. Booker took too many hard shots. Booker leaned too much on the midrange, Booker did not bend the series enough. Some of that criticism deserves oxygen. A franchise player cannot escape playoff failure by pointing to context alone.
However, context decides whether a shot looks clean or desperate. A Booker pull-up with movement, spacing, and a tilted defense can function as elite offense. A Booker pull-up after a dead first action, a stalled second action, and a late-clock panic pass becomes something else entirely.
We lose the plot when we only look at the release point. The real story lives in the chaos Booker creates before the ball even leaves his hand.
The Physics of Panic
Defenders guard the threat before they guard the shot
Just beyond the arc, Booker starts many possessions like he has nowhere special to go.
That calm tricks people. He dribbles with a measured rhythm, not the frantic bounce of a guard hunting a viral clip. Then he nudges the defender into the screen, reads the big’s feet, and turns one step inside the line into a negotiation.
The loudest critics obsess over the midrange jumper while ignoring the five seconds of psychological warfare that forced the defender into the wrong zip code.
At the time, the league’s shot-selection revolution helped remove bad habits from bad players. Fewer long twos from role players. More rim pressure. More corner threes. Smarter spacing. Better math.
Booker does not reject that progress. He complicates it.
His midrange attempt does not carry the same meaning as a stalled possession from a limited scorer. He takes that shot because he can punish the coverage modern defenses prefer. Drop the big, and he rises. Bring the big higher, and he snakes the dribble. Send help from the wing, and Phoenix gets a corner chance. Stay attached, and Booker walks into balance.
That balance creates panic.
Booker’s shot selection should not be judged only by zones. It should be judged by reactions. How many defenders moved? Who helped first? Which shooter became available because one body leaned toward Booker too early?
The 70-point night created the wrong stereotype
Before long, the 70-point game became both evidence and trap.
Booker’s night in Boston in 2017 still lives in NBA memory as a wild scoring artifact. NBA.com described him then as the youngest player to reach that mark and the sixth player in league history to score 70 in a game.
The problem came after the applause. Critics filed him away as a young scorer on a bad team, a player who could pile up points without controlling winning. That label stuck longer than it should have.
Yet the 70-point night also revealed something that still defines him. Booker can keep finding usable space after the defense knows the ball is coming back to him. He can score through attention without turning every touch into a collision. Even then, he understood balance better than the caricature suggested.
Years passed, and the roster around him changed again and again. Chris Paul arrived. The Finals arrived. Kevin Durant arrived. Durant left. Still, the argument around Booker kept returning to the same lazy place: pretty scorer, tough shots, not enough proof.
That misses the career arc.
Booker did not simply become a better scorer. He became a better mapmaker.
The Geometry of the Trap
Oklahoma City showed the problem and the solution
The cleanest Booker argument from the Thunder series did not come from a made shot in a comfortable game.
It came late in Game 4, after the series had already started to feel like a closing door. ESPN’s play-by-play logged the sequence: Jalen Green stole the ball from Ajay Mitchell with 2:54 left, and 11 seconds later Booker hit a 26-foot pull-up three off a Dillon Brooks assist to cut Oklahoma City’s lead to eight.
That play did not save Phoenix. It did not change the series. Oklahoma City still closed the night, and the season, with the calm of a team that knew it had more answers.
Still, the possession mattered because it showed what Booker needs. The steal created pace. The pass arrived before the Thunder fully set its shell. Booker caught the ball with just enough runway to turn space into punishment. No wrestling match. No dead clock, No double team waiting at the nail.
Across the court, that sequence exposed the difference between a hard shot and a dead shot. Booker’s pull-up three looked difficult. It was not desperate. The defense had to retreat first. The geometry bent before the release.
That is the version Phoenix must chase.
The Finals showed why hard shots can still be correct shots
In that moment against Milwaukee, the court looked smaller than it had all season.
Jrue Holiday pressed into Booker’s body. P.J. Tucker leaned on him with heavy playoff forearms. Giannis Antetokounmpo lurked behind the action, waiting to turn a drive into a mistake. The Bucks did not build a wall for Booker the same way opponents built one for Giannis, but they crowded his corridors. They made every step toward the paint feel expensive.
NBA.com’s Game 4 tracking from the 2021 Finals recorded Booker with 42 points, including 14 from midrange and 20 in the paint. The same report showed he scored efficiently against both Holiday and Tucker in direct matchups, putting up 10 points on 5-of-6 shooting against Holiday and 14 points on 5-of-9 shooting against Tucker.
That matters because it cuts against the lazy version of the story. Booker was not just bailing out Phoenix. He was solving elite defenders in real time.
Across the court, Milwaukee forced him to make decisions under contact. Booker answered with shoulder bumps, sudden stops, and high-release fadeaways. One Game 4 possession against Holiday captured the point: Holiday crowded him, Booker held his ground, spun into space, and released before the contest could fully swallow the shot.
The jumper looked difficult because the defender was elite.
It also looked correct because Booker created the only clean window available.
The pull-up bends the screen before the pass appears
At the time, Chris Paul gave Phoenix structure. Booker gave that structure danger.
A normal ball screen asks the defense to choose between the ball and the roller. A Booker ball screen adds another problem. He does not need to reach the rim to win the possession. He can stop at 17 feet, square his shoulders, and punish the big for protecting the paint.
That threat changes the screen before contact even arrives.
A center who drops too far concedes rhythm. A guard who trails too loosely gives up separation. A wing who digs from the strong side risks the next pass. The defense starts making small compromises. Booker collects them.
Booker’s shot selection lives in those compromises. It does not always look dramatic. Often, the best part happens two seconds before the highlight. A defender opens his hips. A big points with one hand while retreating. The corner defender takes a step toward the lane, then tries to recover too late.
When people call the final jumper “settling,” they often ignore the work that made the shot available.
The Weight of the Bailout
Late-clock offense is not a style choice
Before long, every top-heavy team runs into the same ugly possession.
The first action dies. Dillon Brooks catches and has to reset. Jalen Green attacks a seam that closes before his second step. Khaman Maluach, still young enough to look rushed in traffic, turns toward the rim and finds two bodies waiting. The clock reaches seven. Then five. Then Booker gets the ball with no clean advantage left.
Those shots make critics loud.
They also keep a team alive.
Late-clock jumpers rarely look like model offense. They look rushed because the possession already failed. They look selfish because the pass that should have created the advantage never arrived. Yet every serious team needs one player who can turn a broken trip into something better than a turnover or a desperate heave.
Booker has carried that job for years.
That responsibility explains why some of his misses look worse than they are. He does not only take the shots a coach draws up. He takes the shots left behind after the drawing gets erased.
The best Booker possessions do not always end with Booker
Despite the pressure, Booker’s biggest evolution came as a passer.
Phoenix needed that shift after Paul left. The roster still had famous scorers, but it lacked a natural organizer. Booker had to become the player who felt the second defender before the trap arrived. He had to score while also teaching the possession where to go next.
His 6.0 assists per game this season help explain why the shot-selection debate feels too narrow. His value does not stop at his attempts.
The pass to the corner can start with a midrange threat. The pocket pass can open because the big steps up one beat too high. The slot three can appear because Booker stared down the elbow and pulled the low man out of position.
Just beyond the arc, he can make a defense reveal its priority. Does it protect against the pull-up? Does it stay home on shooters?, Does it trust the center in space? Every answer opens a different door.
That is offensive architecture, not indulgence.
The scoring record measures difficulty, not just volume
Years passed, and Booker’s scoring total became a franchise monument.
The Suns announced in February 2025 that Booker passed Walter Davis as Phoenix’s all-time scoring leader, reaching 15,668 career points. That record can sound like a career-retrospective note if it sits by itself. It should not.
Booker did not score those points as a passenger in a finished system. He scored them while carrying scouting-report attention for almost a decade. He scored them during rebuild years, contender years, injured years, superstar-partnership years, and now this new Suns reset.
Defenses have known his spots for years.
He still gets there.
There is a stubborn, almost defiant quality to the way Booker plays a style the rest of the league tried to abandon. Not because he hates modern math. Because he understands that modern defenses also study modern math.
The Franchise Bet
In that moment last summer, Phoenix admitted the old plan had run its course.
NBA.com reported that the Suns traded Kevin Durant to Houston in July 2025 as part of a seven-team deal, receiving Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, Khaman Maluach, draft rights, and other assets. Days later, AP reported that Phoenix committed to Booker with a two-year, $145 million maximum extension through the 2029-30 season.
The message could not be cleaner. Durant became the detour. Booker remains the road.
That does not excuse everything. A franchise player must own the noise after a sweep. Booker will hear it all summer. He should. Phoenix lost badly, and the Thunder made him work for every clean breath.
Yet still, the franchise’s next step cannot begin with asking Booker to become someone else. It must begin with building around what he already bends.
Give him pace. Give him corners that punish the low man, Give him screeners who hit, flip, and roll with force, Give him a second handler who can attack the advantage after Booker draws two. Most of all, give him possessions that start before the defense has already loaded the paint.
Across the court, the Thunder series showed the danger of asking one star to solve a defense that already knows the answers around him. Oklahoma City did not merely guard Booker. It tested Phoenix’s entire ecosystem. Every unsure pass helped the Thunder. Every cramped possession turned Booker’s best zones into contested real estate.
On the other hand, the answer is not to shame him out of the midrange. That would remove one of the pressure points that still makes him special. The answer is to make those shots come after the defense has already bent, not after the offense has already stalled.
Devin Booker’s shot selection remains misunderstood because it lives between eras. It carries old-school touch and modern gravity. It looks like a throwback until the help defender moves. Then it looks like geometry.
Finally, the question for Phoenix feels simple and uncomfortable.
Can the Suns build an offense that turns Booker’s difficult shots into chosen weapons instead of last resorts?
If they can, the same jumper that critics mocked after the Thunder sweep will start looking different again. The defender’s feet will tell the story first. One slide too deep. One reach too late. One helpless glance toward the bench.
Then Booker will rise, and the math will have to make room.
Also Read: Devin Booker Commits to Phoenix Suns with $145M Deal for 2 Years
FAQ
1. Why is Devin Booker’s shot selection criticized?
Fans often see the midrange jumper first. They miss the defensive panic Booker creates before he shoots.
2. Did Devin Booker’s shot selection cause the Thunder sweep?
No. Oklahoma City beat Phoenix by crowding Booker and exposing the Suns’ spacing issues around him.
3. Why does Devin Booker take so many midrange shots?
Booker takes them because defenses give up that space to protect the rim and three-point line. He punishes that tradeoff.
4. How does Booker help teammates without shooting?
His scoring threat pulls defenders out of position. That opens corner threes, pocket passes, and cleaner late-clock chances.
5. What should the Suns build around Booker next?
Phoenix needs pace, spacing, strong screeners, and another handler who can attack after Booker bends the defense.
