The Phoenix Suns hit rock bottom last night. Beal or no Beal, what we're seeing from this team is inexcusable, and they need to fix it soon if they want to keep their season from going off the rails.

-Gerald Bourguet

The Suns have a myriad of problems, and Bradley Beal alone won't fix them

Coming off a seven-game win streak, the Phoenix Suns have now lost seven of their last 10 games. They're only one game above .500, sitting 10th in the Western Conference and coming off their worst three-game stretch of the season. Body language looks bad, their Big 3 has only played 24 minutes together through 27 games, and their problems seem to extend to both sides of the ball.

None of it can be sugarcoated. This is a bad basketball team right now, and Bradley Beal coming back in a few weeks from a right ankle sprain isn't going to magically fix everything.

The Suns' 109-104 loss to a six-win Portland Trail Blazers team marked a new rock bottom Tuesday night. After watching Jalen Brunson drop a 50-ball on their heads, followed by a narrow win over the tanking Washington Wizards that was too close for comfort, Phoenix needed a "get right" game against a younger, vastly inferior opponent.

Through the first quarter, it looked like the Suns would capitalize on it. They led 36-20 after the first frame, shooting 14-of-20 from the field while forcing the Blazers into 10 turnovers. The ball was humming on offense, the tempo was up, the defense was locked in, and it was the perfect opportunity to right the ship with a blowout win ahead of Friday's road game against the Sacramento Kings.

Instead, the Suns looked completely lost on both ends in an atrocious third quarter that Portland won 38-20. Overall, the Blazers outscored Phoenix 60-43 in the second half, and the Suns trailed by double figures until a last-ditch effort made it more interesting. And when a loss like that happens, the blame game begins.

There is no one specific reason for the Suns' recent struggles; it's a myriad of problems, all compounding at the same time to rob this team and its fanbase of the joy that used to be on display on a nightly basis here in the Valley.

On offense, Devin Booker running point guard has hit a snag. While he's still averaging 27.9 points and 8.2 assists per game on 38.3 percent shooting from 3 (all career highs), he's struggled with navigating that dual role as scorer and facilitator over the last handful of games. The flow hasn't been there like it was earlier in the season, and at times, Book has resorted to his comfort zone in the midrange, forcing contested shots rather than keeping the ball moving.

However, Booker is easily the Suns' best ball-handler, so the "Point Book" approach isn't going anywhere, barring a significant trade. Between Beal's lack of availability and Jordan Goodwin's disappointing showing as a playmaker, Phoenix hasn't afforded Booker -- a guy who led the league in points per touch for three straight seasons -- to play off the ball very much.

Book and the Suns' offense are currently maximized with him handling the rock and setting up teammates, and he's done well in that regard before this nightmarish three-game stretch. According to NBA.com, Booker still ranks seventh in the league in potential assists and sixth in assist points created, and before these last three games, Phoenix was a top-10 offense despite their smorgasbord of injuries.

But over the last week, this team's dependence on Booker operating at career-high, possibly unsustainable levels has come into full focus. And when Point Book isn't perfectly threading the needle on that balance between scoring and playmaking, the Suns' offense stops dead in its own tracks.

The problems extend much further than Booker, of course. The Blazers game was a perfect example of the Suns' aggravating tendency to move the ball, trust the offense and get easy buckets out of their actions for stretches...and then abandoning it completely. When opponents start making shots, or their own wide-open looks stop falling, Booker and Kevin Durant veer away from it. The trust and the ball movement stops, and the offense devolves into iso-ball.

In the playoffs, having two guys who can do that -- and possibly three, if Beal can just stay healthy -- will be a luxury. But for the regular season, that approach has made it difficult for the role players to build anything resembling a game-to-game rhythm. Grayson Allen and Eric Gordon have been asked to do a lot more than expected, but then they'll also go long stretches where they're simply spacing in the corners without touching the ball.

That awkward pairing has led to stagnant offense down the stretch in close games, where a fatigued Booker and Durant have to go to work against double-teams. Only then are role players suddenly expected to cash in on the 1-2 shot attempts they actually get.

It's no wonder Phoenix is 29th in fourth-quarter Net Rating, losing the final frame by an average of 14.0 points per 100 possessions. Their Net Rating in the other three quarters? A much more tenable +4.1, +10.0 and +3.2.

To be fair, role players have to prove themselves capable of making those shots when Booker or Durant get blitzed and trust their teammates to cash in. Outside of the Big 3, Allen and Gordon, the other guys have failed to impress with their 3-point accuracy:

Nassir Little: 36.4%
Yuta Watanabe: 34.8%
Chimezie Metu: 33.3%
Jordan Goodwin: 30.7%
Josh Okogie: 27.5%
Jusuf Nurkic: 26.6%
Keita Bates-Diop: 25%

Coming off career years from 3-point range, both Watanabe and KBD have been massive disappointments. Neither Okogie nor Goodwin have shown they can be respectable from beyond the arc, and playoff defenses will continue to leave them wide open whenever they're on the court.

What this means is Frank Vogel has had to constantly tweak his rotation, whether due to injuries, inconsistent play, or both. He's stuck between one-sided players who mainly contribute on offense (Allen, Gordon, Nurkic, Watanabe) or solely contribute on defense (Goodwin, Okogie, Bates-Diop). Metu and Little are getting more run because they might be the closest things to two way players that the Suns bench has right now.

The problems extend much further than the offensive end, of course. Defensively, the Suns rank 17th in defensive rating -- not nearly good enough for an aspiring title contender. They're ranked 20th in opponent points in the paint (52.0 per game), and according to Cleaning the Glass, they're 19th in opponent field goal percentage at the rim (66.4 percent).

It's natural to look at Jusuf Nurkic as the culprit there. He's not the most mobile big, and we've already seen teams attack Nurk by spamming pick-and-rolls against him down the stretch of tight games -- just like opponents will in the playoffs.

The numbers suggest Nurk has been better than expected, holding opponents to 7.4 percent worse shooting at the rim than they'd normally shoot. Nurkic is actually leading the Suns in deflections, as well as stocks (steals plus blocks). But that opponent field goal percentage at the rim doesn't take into account blow-bys; it only takes into account shots where Nurkic actually contested. Opponents are routinely putting him to the test, as Nurk ranks eighth in the entire league in contested shots at the rim.

In other words, as much as Nurkic has done about as well as could be expected under Vogel, there will still be plays where his deficiencies in foot speed, gap navigation and perimeter mobility are exploited in the pick-and-roll.

The problem is those flaws are exacerbated by perimeter defenders that can't keep anyone in front of them. Booker made strides as a defender over the last few years, but he's reverted back to some troubling habits on that end with all the load he's carrying on offense. Durant can be a secondary rim protector when he's fully engaged, but like Booker, the offensive burden he's carrying at age 35 leads to far too many "my bads" on defense.

Okogie and Goodwin are tenacious, gritty defenders for ball-handlers to deal with, but their offensive flaws make them difficult to play for longer stints, and Okogie's missed the last four games due to a hip injury. Bates-Diop is a plus on the defensive end, but he's basically become the wing version of those two, with a noticeable lack of confidence and pronounced hitch in his 3-point shot.

Allen is pesky defensively and Gordon has a knack for stripping opponents as aggressively as possible when he gets beat, but even with those two being committed defensively, but still have their own flaws -- most notably, size. That problem extends throughout the roster, because for all their length, the Suns are a smaller team that lacks height, strength and physical toughness.

Which brings us to the biggest problem, aside from injury woes depriving this top-heavy team of its Big 3 and the chance to build continuity: The Phoenix Suns currently don't have an identity.

Vogel came into the season talking about wanting the Suns to be scrappy defensively; they're 17th in D-rating, 14th in deflections and 20th in steals. The Suns wanted to play faster and attack mismatches in transition; even after trading Chris Paul, they're still 26th in pace and 27th in fast break points. They were supposed to get up more 3s than the midrange-dominant teams of the last few seasons; instead, they're 24th in 3-point attempts despite ranking 13th in 3-point percentage.

And none of this speaks to the apparent lack of joy out on the court. Losing is never fun, obviously, but the lack of identity and on-court chemistry is seeping into the Suns' play and dejected body language. It's clear this group is frustrated, but for all the talk about "needing to figure it out," there's been very little in the way of actually doing so.

That first quarter in Portland provided a glimpse, but they they followed it up with one of their worst second halves of the season. The Suns are so frustrating because everyone knows what they're capable of, and it's been on display even without Beal in the lineup. But their inability to sustain that high-level play has been maddening, with the Suns vacillating between quarters where they look like world-beaters one minute and a group that's completely lost its way the next.

Some of that has to trace back to coaching. Any team with Devin Booker and Kevin Durant should be better than what the Suns have showed over the last two weeks. Losing to playoff-caliber opponents was understandable, but getting pummeled at home by the Knicks, squeaking by the Wizards and falling apart against the Blazers isn't. It's one thing to acknowledge the team's injury woes and how they've prevented Phoenix from establishing rotations to build chemistry; it's another to blame those problems for the Suns' recent lack of heart and execution.

We knew the Suns' Big 3 was injury-prone. We knew the defense would need some work, the offense would take time to jell, some of the veteran minimum guys might not pan out, and the roster's lack of a backup point guard could be a problem. But all of those things have transpired at once, leaving Phoenix staring down the barrel of its worst-case outcome. It's only December, but how they handle this stretch of adversity could decide the trajectory of the rest of their season.

It's too early and purely speculative to say Vogel has already lost his locker room, but with everything going wrong, this team has some demons to exorcise. Whether that's in the form or a players only meeting, blocking out the noise or simply refusing to continue like this, the Suns need to get their act together...and they need to do it far sooner than Beal's eventual return in January.