The Phoenix Suns aren’t getting much attention for whatever reason. I’m going to assume that everyone is waiting for Bradley Beal to get well in order to truly assess this team’s makeup. But in the interim, Devin Booker and Kevin Durant are destroying the league.

With over 31 points per game on over 52% 3-point shooting, Durant is the second-leading scorer in the NBA. However, he missed his first game of the season on Friday. Not that huge. With their sixth straight victory, the Suns dominated the Grizzlies, improving their in-season tournament record to 3-1 and taking the lead in the wild card race. Booker scored 40 points in the victory.

A recurring trend this season has been Booker’s presence: If he’s on the court, the Suns win. They would have the best offensive rating in the NBA even without Durant, outscoring opponents by more than 112 points per 100 possessions, according to Cleaning the Glass.

Booker, who is averaging just under 30 points on explosive 52/45/93 shooting splits, has just had no answer. When he is active, the Suns are 7-1. He is one of just two players in the top seven in terms of assists and scoring. Luka Doncic of the Mavericks is the other.

It’s hardly surprising how they scored. Before he simply opted to become more of a 3-point shooter, Booker was among the league’s best pure scorers, much to what fellow great mid-ranger CJ McCollum accomplished later in his career. The stroke was there from the beginning. There is no issue with the range. For Booker, who made 15 of his final 18 shots on Friday, this was a very logical and expected progression.

The playmaking is the development; again, I hesitate to use the term “development” because it suggests a significant improvement in skill. With the ball, Booker has always been an expert. It wasn’t so much that the invention was lacking as it wasn’t a constant requirement earlier. This “development” is really about opportunity now that Chris Paul is no longer around, and Booker is definitely taking advantage of it.

Nor is this some novel advancement affecting the entire league. The floor generals in the Paul mould are all but extinct. These days, the pass-first strategy has changed to score first, and the pass becomes more available once a defence has overplayed its hand in response to the threat posed by the scorer.

One of three methods usually occurs: either by drawing multiple defenders away from the rim before swinging to an open shooter or starting a ball reversal, or by going downhill with a pick-and-roll partner. Getting into the paint and collapsing the defence results in kick-out threes. Booker has all three covered because he makes opponents move towards him since he is a proven bucket.

Where I saw the most improvement is in the final two passes to Jusuf Nurkic. Not to belittle drive and kicks or reversals out of double teams, but once the defence has given up on a player like Booker, those passes kind of sell themselves.

Using this template, Jayson Tatum has become an influential playmaker without the need to be a passer on par with Doncic or Trae Young. Anthony Edwards is acting in a similar manner.

Conversely, the interior passes demonstrate the composure and patience that Booker has shown to allow plays to develop until the very last second, maximising separation with a subtle stall step or an extra dribble as his recipient fully opens up. However, they also tend to reflect a higher degree of difficulty due to increased traffic. He occasionally adopts a Steve Nash persona, maintaining his dribble well past the typical time frame.

This is not a hurried guy at all:

These are the subtleties that truly begin to set a top-tier playmaker apart, and Booker has demonstrated a great deal of these in recent years. It just occurs constantly these days. From an offensive standpoint, there’s basically not much that Booker hasn’t mastered—or at least gotten very, very close to perfecting.

He dribbles and catches the ball well to score effectively at all three levels. In a game, he reaches the free throw line eight times. According to Synergy, when scoring and assists are taken into account, he scores above the 90th percentile in both pick-and-roll and post-up point generation. You really can’t defend him with one man, which is an issue with Durant standing next to him and Beal coming later.

According to Cleaning the Glass, Booker’s 127.9 points per 100 shot attempts, along with his 36.5 usage rate and 62.5% true shooting, are career highs. Of all combo guards, Booker has the highest assist percentage (43.3%), meaning that when he’s on the court, he assists on 43.3% of his teammates’ baskets. He’s already tallied assist totals of 15, 13, and 10 in only seven games this November, and his plus-10.4 point differential per game leads all players who take at least five shots in the contest.

Even if he might not be his own team’s top player, the dude is a beast. Quite perhaps, he isn’t. Although the Suns aren’t flawless, they don’t have to be because of how deadly the Booker-Durant combo is.