How the Suns can rise to NBA glory

It’s really too bad that NBA free agency begins in July. That’s a major disadvantage to franchises based in the desert, by which I mean the Phoenix Suns. The average July high in Phoenix is 106 and the forecast for Tuesday is 111. The city’s closest weather comp is Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. So when NBA free agents come visiting to hear the Suns’ pitch, it is likely to feel like a Mercurian hellscape in Phoenix.

But the city is totally lovely during actual basketball season, with average temperatures in the 60s and 70s and one whole frost day per year. And while Phoenix doesn’t have the nightlife of, say, Miami, it is a thriving metropolis and has an improving downtown core.

More importantly for basketball purposes, it has Goran Dragic, the right of first refusal on Eric Bledsoe and loads of cap space.

That’s why few are straight-up laughing at the rumor that the Suns intend to pitch The Desert to LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony as free agency opens, as first reported by Yahoo!‘s Adrian Wojnarowski. Even more, Phoenix owner Robert Sarver -- who doesn’t have the best reputation after selling a bunch of draft picks to save dough in the Aughts -- is committing to spend now. This is big, given how good the Suns were last season when literally no one expected them to be remotely competitive. (In fact, there’s still reason to believe the Suns intended to tank the 2013-14 season before coming out with 48 wins.)

Thanks to the vagaries of restricted free agency, the Suns can sign a maximum-contract free agent and keep Bledsoe (expected to draw a max offer sheet if Phoenix doesn’t give him one first) without making any additional roster moves. To land two will be trickier: the Suns would need to trade some movable contracts to open up another $10 million in salary cap space. The Morris twins and Alex Len would get them there. One imagines that packaging Len with Gerald Green -- who was pretty darn good himself last season -- would allow Phoenix to keep a Morris. The Suns don’t really have any bad contracts on the books at this point, just the stretched-out Michael Beasley deal.

So it’s feasible that the Suns could unload those three contracts, sign two max free agents and then sign Bledsoe, going way over the cap and likely into the luxury tax in the process. And that team would be a favorite for a top-4 seed in the West, depending on the free agents. If it’s LeBron and Melo, there’s your title favorite. If it’s LeBron and anyone, there’s a new title contender.

But in all likelihood, LeBron will stay in Miami with his buddies and Melo will land in a more expected market, like Chicago or Houston. And as we slip down our NBA free agent rankings, we see others Phoenix could use that cap space on, though not necessarily for max contracts. Guys like Greg Monroe, Chandler Parsons, Luol Deng and Gordon Hayward.

If Phoenix strikes out on LeBron and Melo and signs one or two of those second-tier free agents while retaining Bledsoe, the Suns could then afford to keep Channing Frye and not have to lose Green or a Morris. The Suns drafted more assets -- Tyler Ennis, T.J. Warren and Bogdan Bogdanovic -- on Thursday and are on deck to have three more firsts in 2015. Assets galore. The Suns could destroy any other Kevin Love trade offer. They could preserve some cap space to be the big man on the block in 2015 free agency. They could trade for a star we don’t even know is available yet.

There’s no lottery team in better position than the Suns, which is to be expected given that the Suns won 48 games. But this could be the summer that the Suns start to rival bigger fish -- the Spurs, the Thunder, the Clippers, the Rockets, the Heat -- for NBA supremacy. No team has a more intriguing position heading into July.

And if Ryan McDonough put together the 48-win Suns on accident, imagine what he’ll do when he’s trying to build a winner. Big things are ahead for Phoenix, weather be damned.