The Phoenix Suns on Wednesday waived and stretched the two years and $110 million remaining on three-time All-Star guard Bradley Beal’s contract, punctuating the end of a failed “Big Three” experiment.
The question, then: Is this also the end of the era in which teams try to collect three max-salaried stars?
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The Suns swung for the fences in 2023, acquiring future Hall of Famer Kevin Durant from the Brooklyn Nets at the trade deadline, and then dealing for Beal from the Washington Wizards over that summer. It cost them just about all of the depth from their roster and the rights to every one of their draft picks.
Durant, Beal and Devin Booker combined to make $150 million last season, when the NBA’s salary cap was set at $140 million. That pushed the Suns up against the cap’s second apron, which restricts a team’s ability to do almost everything, impacting its flexibility on the draft, free-agency and trade markets.
In other words: It was awfully hard for Phoenix to construct a capable roster around its three stars, something to which the Nets could relate when they boasted Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving. Beal’s Suns did not win a single playoff game, getting swept in the first round of their only appearance.
The Suns’ Big Three of Devin Booker, Bradley Beal and Kevin Durant had zero playoff wins in two seasons together. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
(Christian Petersen via Getty Images)
That was not the case for the Miami Heat in the early 2010s, when they collected LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh and required little additional help to contend for championships. Yes, they needed help to actually win championships, but this was also 15 years ago, when the second apron did not exist, and James, Wade and Bosh were making $45 million combined. It was easier to build a capable rotation.
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The league was not as deep as it is now, either. Look at the teams that are winning titles now. The Oklahoma City Thunder were easily the deepest team in the NBA this past season, as were the Boston Celtics in 2024. Neither team had any holes in its eight-man rotation, let alone in the starting lineup.
That proved too costly for the Celtics. They are built around two stars, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, who over the previous two years each signed a maximum contract north of $300 million. Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis were also making more than $30 million annually, and that took them above the second apron — to a projected $500 million payroll — so they parted with both Holiday and Porziņģis.
As Celtics executive Brad Stevens said this summer, “I think the second apron basketball penalties are real, and I’m not sure I understood how real until they were staring me in the face in the last month.”
The Celtics retained Derrick White, who is on one of the best value contracts in the NBA, and he will form their Big Three, along with Tatum and Brown. This is probably closer to what we will see in terms of team-building practices in the future: Two highly paid superstars, surrounded by value everywhere else.
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In Oklahoma City, the Thunder have developed three max-salaried stars. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s reigning regular-season and Finals MVP, just signed a four-year, $285 million supermax extension. Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren, both drafted in 2022, also signed rookie-scale max extensions in July.
The Thunder are about as good of a Big Three scenario as anyone could imagine. They have the literal MVP on the roster, plus a pair of players who developed into All-Star-caliber talents on their rookie contracts.
(Important to note here: Not all max contracts are created equal. Gilgeous-Alexander will make 35% of the salary cap, which is the highest possible allocation. The younger Williams and Holmgren are each slotted to make 25%, though that could increase to 30% for Williams if he meets certain qualifications next season.)
Still, the Thunder will feel the crunch of the second apron as soon as the 2026-27 season, when Gilgeous-Alexander, Williams and Holmgren are scheduled to make a combined $123.5 million. This will likely cost them some of their existing depth, possibly including Lu Dort and Isaiah Hartenstein, among others who are owed raises. OKC will attempt to replace them with an influx of draft picks over the next few years.
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If even the best-laid plans require a team to nail each one of its draft picks in order to keep open a championship window around three stars, then what hope did the Suns have? Remember: They had to dispatch of depth and draft picks just to acquire three stars, some of whose skill sets overlapped. They had no path to add additional talent, other than minimum contracts, and that was an exercise in futility.
Gone, then, we have to imagine, are the hastily assembled Big Threes. Even if you already have one max-salaried superstar on the roster, the cost to trade for two more is too prohibitive to building a contender.
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Maybe some team will figure out a way to sign three max-salaried players into salary cap space (though that is impossible if all three are making 35% of the salary cap), as the Heat did in the summer of 2010, maintaining some flexibility to construct a championship-caliber roster around them.
After all, the Suns were not an ideally built superteam. There was too much overlap in what Booker, Durant and Beal brought to the table. A chance will come for another team to form a better-constructed trio, and a general manager will leap at it. The opportunity is too enticing.
But the needle a team must thread in order to build around three high-priced stars — nailing every pick and signing possible — is so narrow, and the window so short, that a two-superstar model is the safer bet in the second apron era.
