Devin Booker reportedly agrees to 2-year, $145 million max extension with the Suns

Sports

add

Devin Booker has agreed to a two-year, $145 million contract extension with the Phoenix Suns, according to ESPN’s Shams Charania, keeping Phoenix’s face of the franchise under contract through 2030 as a hoped-for stabilizing agent amid a period of uncertainty in Arizona.

The collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players stipulates that a contract covering a term of five or six seasons (including option years) can’t be extended until the third anniversary of the signing of the contract, and that it can only be extended up to five years out from the date of the new deal’s signing.

Advertisement

Booker has three seasons left on the four-year, $224 supermax extension he agreed to in 2022, putting pen to paper on July 6. In total, Booker will be paid $316 million over the next five years.

Which is to say: The Suns are giving Booker as much money as they are legally allowed to give him, as soon as they are legally allowed to give it to him. They will also pay him an average annual salary higher than any player in the NFL.

That should come as no surprise, given how emphatic Suns owner Mat Ishbia was earlier this season about viewing Booker as the cornerstone of whatever came next in the Valley — even as rumblings about the Rockets’ interest in trading for him grew louder and louder as Phoenix dropped further and further in the Western Conference standings.

“Never happen,” Ishbia said, according to ESPN’s Tim MacMahon. “It’s silly. So here’s what I’ll tell you: I have Devin Booker in the prime. In order to win an NBA championship, you got to have a superstar. You got to have a great player.”

Advertisement

It’s also very much in keeping with Booker’s own public statements about wanting to be one of the “rare breed” of players who spends his entire career with one franchise — even if that franchise has rarely tasted success during his tenure with it.

“I take pride in the community in Phoenix, the people that have supported me since I was 18 when things were ugly,” Booker told MacMahon. “And the people that are with us, we just fell short of accomplishing what we want. So I want to do it, and I want to do it here. That’s the responsibility of being a franchise player, and I wear that with honor. So it might not look the most pretty right now, but we got to get it done and I’m going to do it.”

The Suns enter the 2025-26 NBA season feeling pretty far away from getting it done, after failing to qualify for the playoffs for the first time since 2020, trading away one-time-all-in-bet Kevin Durant and rolling the dice on yet another new head coach … which, in its own way, brings us back to giving Booker as much money as possible, for as long as possible, as soon as possible.

Advertisement

As he neared the end of a profoundly disappointing Suns season, Booker sounded … well, profoundly disappointed.

“It’s been a slow bleed-out,” Booker told reporters. “I’ve been feeling this way for the majority of the season. I think the small glimpses of good stretches that we’ve played gave me hope, and probably gave everybody else hope. You never want it to be squeezing into the last spot of the play-in in the first place. … I think that’s one of the steps that we skipped: Learning through the wins and the losses. Just continue to get better every day, no matter what the circumstances are. We had spots where we did it, but it has to be something that’s turned on at all times.”

Attitude reflects leadership, and extending Booker firmly cements him as the central figure in establishing that culture of learning, improvement and constant engagement. Hitting him with the largest possible extension at the earliest opportunity is about as good a way as any to say, “Hey, sorry about the whole ‘dismantling a team that went to the NBA Finals and going from 64 wins to under .500 in three years’ thing” — and a pretty strong indicator of Phoenix’s commitment in rebuilding around someone who, 10 years into his career, has established himself as one of the greatest and most beloved Suns ever.

Booker, 28, is Phoenix’s all-time leader in points scored and 3-point field goals, and ranks in or near the top five in franchise history in a slew of other categories, including games, minutes and points per game. He’s a four-time All-Star, two-time All-NBA selection and two-time Olympic gold medalist. He’s one of the league’s premier three-level scorers: a high-efficiency finisher in the paint, an elite midrange marksman, and a five-alarm threat beyond the arc, whether he’s firing off the catch or pulling up behind a ball screen.

Advertisement

The Kentucky product has also developed into a high-end, low-mistake primary playmaker, joining Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Damian Lillard and Donovan Mitchell as one of just four NBA players over the last five seasons to use at least 30% of his team’s offensive possessions, dish assists on more than a quarter of his teammates’ baskets, and turn it over less than 12% of the time. Even in a down-by-his-standards 2024-25 campaign, Booker averaged 25.6 points and a career-high 7.1 assists per game on .589 true shooting — marks that put him in the company of Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić and Jalen Brunson.

The Suns will need Booker to be every ounce that good, productive and efficient as a No. 1 option next season to have any hope of returning to the playoffs after yet another tumultuous offseason. Phoenix has fired its head coach for the third straight spring, sent Durant to the Rockets for Jalen Green, Dillon Brooks, No. 10 overall draft pick Khaman Maluach, and five second-round picks, dealt its last two tradable first-round picks to Charlotte for enticing but oft-injured center Mark Williams, added a couple of promising second-round prospects in St. Joe’s wing Rasheer Fleming and Kentucky shooter Koby Brea, and reportedly remains at an impasse on The Bradley Beal Situation.

Advertisement

Booker will have to get on the same page with new head coach Jordan Ott — whom Ishbia and new general manager Brian Gregory hired after a process in which Booker reportedly “had a level of involvement.” He’ll have to get reacclimated to life alongside Beal in a now-Durant-less context, find synergy with another similarly styled combo guard in Green, and develop chemistry with a new battery of pick-and-roll partners in Williams and Maluach. He’ll have to rediscover his 3-point stroke while facilitating at a higher level as, in all likelihood, Phoenix’s primary ball-handler and playmaker.

If he can do all that, and produce at the All-NBA individual level that he played at over the previous three seasons … then maybe the Suns will have a chance at climbing back into the West’s middle class, vying for the chance to escape the play-in tournament in the next couple of seasons. That’s the task facing Booker; it is not an easy one. If nothing else, he’ll be awfully well compensated to do it.

This news was originally published on this post .

Share on

email

Previous

trending_flat

Bryce Harper is having fun again as 4-extra-base-hit day shows Phillies star feels just fine

Sports

Next

trending_flat

MLB’s Rob Manfred is pushing for salary cap, and players are skeptical, union official says

Sports