The Phoenix Suns are heading into Saturday night’s matchup with the Golden State Warriors with their cleanest injury report of the season.
For Phoenix, only Mark Williams is listed out. He remains sidelined after left shoulder surgery and is expected to miss multiple months following a torn labrum suffered in the offseason.
There is better news for the Suns on the interior: Oso Ighodaro has been cleared after missing two games with an oblique strain. He returned in Friday’s 127-120 loss to the Denver Nuggets, and Phoenix clearly felt the difference after struggling inside without him and Williams.
Collin Gillespie praised what Ighodaro brings to the floor, pointing to how smoothly he fits into the offense.
"He makes the flow really easy because you could kind of just give him the ball and he's like a point forward, and he's a really good connector. It's definitely really nice having him out there," Suns guard Collin Gillespie said of Ighodaro.
"The pace that he plays at, the speed, the decision-making, the IQ. He's a really smart basketball player.
Plays extremely hard, and whenever you can add a guy like that to the lineup, it makes your team better. So obviously, we love having him out there.
Love playing with him. It makes the game a lot easier for everybody else around him."
Phoenix enters at 1-3 and has had a rocky start, but Friday’s effort against Denver gave the team something to build on. The Suns said they took a step forward in terms of their energy and compete level, even if the result didn’t go their way.
That makes Saturday’s game a useful measuring stick, especially with the Warriors likely closer to full strength. Golden State is on the second night of a back-to-back and will be playing after facing the Los Angeles Clippers on Friday without Stephen Curry and Draymond Green. Both are expected back against Phoenix.
Curry has topped 30 points in each of his last two games, and he and Green also sat out the first meeting between the teams on Oct. 24, which was Phoenix’s only win of the season so far.
Gillespie said the Suns can’t lose sight of the standard they want to play with, even while working through an uneven start.
"We're going to continue to grow and learn from this stuff. I said it in the locker room, the world's not ending. We were 1-4 to start the year last year, and we just continually got better," Gillespie said after Friday's loss.
"Now the non-negotiable stuff, if we lose games that way, like playing hard and competing, and that's what we pride ourselves on. We can't have that, but if we're trying to do the right things we're going to continue to get better. We're going to continue to grow and then our competitive advantage is playing hard every night, every possession, and we can't lose sight of that."
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