Per The Ringer:
Eleven months after he became eligible for his rookie extension, and nearly two weeks after the start of free agency, Deandre Ayton—the no. 1 pick in the 2018 NBA draft, and the league’s top restricted free agent—is still waiting for that bag that Chris Paul was so certain Deandre would be getting.
After Phoenix’s disastrous exit from the playoffs at the hands of Luka Doncic’s Mavericks, Suns general manager James Jones expressed interest in hanging on to his starting center. “I know it’s a big question, a topic everybody wants to talk about, but I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: DA is a tremendous part of what we do,” Jones told reporters last month. “We want to keep this team together.”
That desire comes with some cost constraints attached, though. The Suns balked last fall at offering Ayton the five-year maximum-salaried extension of his rookie-scale contract, preferring instead to let him join the injury-plagued Greg Oden as just the second former no. 1 pick in the lottery era to enter restricted free agency. Since then, the Suns have declined to offer him a deal of their own, letting him seek his fortune elsewhere—perhaps because, as NBA.com’s John Schuhmann notes, they went 18-6 without Ayton last season, and outscored opponents by nearly 17 points per 100 possessions in the minutes Paul and Devin Booker played without Ayton. And so, while the Suns built up the depth behind Ayton—re-signing Bismack Biyombo, trading for ex-Spurs backup Jock Landale—Ayton, again, played the waiting game.