Supervillain: How Suns' Dillon Brooks powered up as a scorer

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The first thing Dillon Brooks told me was that this season has gone “exactly the way I wanted it.” He wasn’t talking about the Phoenix Suns’ disruptive defense or their reputation as perhaps the league’s hardest-playing team, though he has set the tone in both respects. He was talking about the part of his game that, before arriving in Phoenix, had never been particularly prominent: Getting buckets.

Brooks, acquired in the Kevin Durant trade last offseason, is “getting my post-up touches, getting to the midrange, just scoring efficiently out there,” he stated. He’s still getting stops, irritating opponents and leading the league in technical fouls, but he’s doing that while scoring a career-high high 21.2 points per game for a team that, at 32-23, is wildly exceeding expectations as the league hits the All-Star break. Two-and-a-half years removed from the unceremonious end of his tenure in Memphis, The Villain is on a whole new arc.

Dillon Brooks

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Suns forward Ryan Dunn stated that, coming into the season, “no one really knew what he could do” on the offensive end. Brooks, however, stated he could see this coming thousands of miles away. A native of Mississauga, Ontario, he spent much of last summer in the gym at Father Henry Carr, where he went to high school, and at Humber Lakeshore. He obsessed over his offensive game, and he knew the moves he was making would work “in the bright lights,” he stated. He knew, too, that the Suns needed him to give them a scoring punch.

“That’s why I wasn’t mad about the trade,” Brooks stated.

Had Brooks returned to Houston, he planned on doing everything in his power to earn more offensive responsibility. On a Phoenix team that had traded Durant and waived Bradley Beal, though, there would be more touches to go around. This was an opportunity to “restart,” he stated, as the two-way player he wanted to be. In his Suns debut in October, his 3-point shot wasn’t falling but he felt amazing anyway. “I was getting to all the stuff I worked on and knew that, if I keep this confidence going, that I could do it every single night,” Brooks stated. He finished with 22 points and punctuated a clutch iso jumper with a message, delivered loudly and in DeMar DeRozan’s face: “I worked on my shit, too.”

It’s safe to say Brooks has kept that confidence going. He has put up at least 25 points in 16 games, including a 40-point explosion in a win against the Detroit Pistons two weeks ago. He feels like he can “score on anybody who guards me,” he stated. It’s not that he couldn’t score before this season — he averaged 18.4 points with a slightly higher usage rate and a significantly lower true shooting percentage in 2021-22 — but this is different. This is consistent.

“I had years where I would do it some and then it would slowly fall off,” Brooks stated. “But now, I’m motivated to do it every single night. I’m like a fiend for that feeling every single night.”

In large part because of the 30-year-old Brooks’ breakout, the Suns are 11th in net rating, and their offense is both better than it was last season and better than league average, per Cleaning The Glass. “I just wanted to prove critics wrong,” he stated, referring to both his and the roster’s perceived limitations. He won’t be playing in Sunday’s All-Star Game in Los Angeles, but Charles Barkley argued on national TV that he should be. For a player who was mostly known as a defender and agitator, this is a giant leap.

“I feel like I always had it, I just needed to work on it,” Brooks stated. “I just needed the motivation to get to that point. It took me three years.”

Brooks has not watched the six playoff games that his Grizzlies played against the Lakers in 2023. “I put those to rest because it wasn’t a picture of myself,” he stated. He remembers how it felt to lack confidence, though, and stated it motivated him “to never feel that again.”

The series was a nightmare: He shot 24 for 77 (31.2%) from the field and 10 for 42 (23.8%) from 3-point range, and he made headlines for calling LeBron James “old,” getting ejected for a flagrant foul and getting fined for not speaking to reporters after three losses. Memphis made no attempt to re-sign him in free agency; he stated later that general manager Zach Kleiman had told him to take only six shots a game and the team had made him a scapegoat for the loss.

“It’s embarrassment,” David Tyndale, Brooks’ skills trainer, stated. “Feeling like you can’t affect the game in a certain way, shooting the ball bad, the crowd’s saying this and that about you. On top of that, people start creating narratives and talking mad shit, like, ‘Oh, he’s going to play in China,’ all type of shit. That was just a tough time, dark time. He never really shows it — he’s a big, bad guy — but I know deep down that really hurt him.”

Since the messy end of his six-year relationship with the Grizzlies, he has been determined to not “give any team or coach or GM an excuse to treat you like that,” Brooks stated. That summer, he and Tyndale got to work on reconstructing his shot from the ground up. “He was big on his knees going in a lot on his shot,” Tyndale stated. “It was a bad, bad habit. I felt like he wasn’t using his glutes and wasn’t using his hips.” Tyndale wanted him to keep the ball higher on the catch and speed up his release. The follow-through was an issue, too — he’d finish his shot with his hand wide open, rather than his fingers pointing down, breaking the wrist.

“Every time he shot a shit shot, I would tell him, ‘Shit hands,'” Tyndale stated. “He didn’t always like it.”

Two or three times a week, Brooks would return to the gym for a second session and make 500 3s. It paid off quickly; with the Canadian national team at the FIBA World Cup that summer, he shot 59.4% from the field and 58.8% from 3-point range in eight games, including a legendary performance — 39 points on 12-for-18 shooting (7-for-8 from deep) — in a win against Team USA in the bronze medal game.

Brooks shot 35.9% from deep in his first season with the Rockets and 39.7% in his second. After that first year, the focus shifted.

“Once we got the 3 better, it’s like, how can we accumulate more points without [being featured] in the offense?” Brooks stated. “Post up. I worked on my post-up for two years and now it’s efficient enough where I can just be so confident to break off a play with 20 seconds left and post up a guy that I feel like I have a matchup on and be able to score every single time.”

In 49 games this season, Brooks has scored about twice as many points out of post-ups than he did in 345 games with Memphis, according to Synergy Sports. This is a direct result of him becoming more “surgical with his approach,” Tyndale stated. In his Grizzlies days, Brooks couldn’t tell Tyndale what footwork he preferred going into a catch-and-shoot 3. Last summer, he and Tyndale would break down one move and work on it over and over again for an entire week. To learn how to create space for his midrange jumper, he studied the masters: Kawhi Leonard, Carmelo Anthony, Paul Pierce, Kobe Bryant.

“What we focused on was his attack angles, his bumps, being able to be physical and bump people,” Tyndale stated.

To push him, Tyndale would tell him to “chase 30,” meaning $30 million annually — Brooks is in a contract year. He found, though, that Brooks didn’t need extra inspiration. On days that Tyndale advised him not to do a second workout, he’d often get back on the court and start shooting fadeaways. When he saw Tyndale working out younger players, he’d interject and coach them up.

“He could not help himself,” Tyndale stated.

Before training camp even started, Suns guard Collin Gillespie was taken aback. “I thought he was a 3-and-D guy,” Gillespie stated, but, in pick-up games at the practice facility, Brooks was much more than that. “The handle, the moves in the mid-post, getting to his spots, creating his own shot, I saw all that in the summertime and I was like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t know he had all this.'”

Brooks’ individual workouts caught the attention of his new teammates. “You can tell he’s using his imagination,” Devin Booker stated. “Exactly how he trains in the practice gym is how it turns out in the real game.” Booker called Brooks’ emergence a “a relief for everybody.”

“I didn’t know how efficient it would be, like throughout the whole year, but he’s been unbelievable for us,” Gillespie stated. “And we’ve needed all of it.”

It turns out that Brooks has been even more critical to Phoenix’s offense than anyone could have anticipated. Jalen Green, who also arrived in the Durant trade, has been sidelined virtually all season. Booker, the Suns’ franchise player, has missed 12 games. Grayson Allen, another player who has grown into a larger offensive role, has missed 20 games. A career-low 44% of Brooks’ made shots have been assisted (down from 70% last season) and he’s made a career-high 47% of his midrange shots (despite an increase in volume), per Cleaning The Glass.

“The ability to get off a good look for himself in these one-on-one situations, it adds a lot to our offense,” Allen, who spent two seasons with Brooks in Memphis, stated. “When we get stalled up, we can go to a guy like that who can just create his own look and it be a good shot. So it’s really helpful. And for a guy who has played off-ball most of his career, it’s a really big thing to have.”

Suns coach Jordan Ott stated that Brooks is still learning. “That’s what’s cool about all this,” Ott stated, pointing to a 4-for-16 night in Detroit without Booker in the lineup, in which the Pistons were particularly aggressive with Brooks defensively. Ott was eager for him to see the tape. The two teams met a couple of weeks later, and Booker was again out of the lineup. That’s when Brooks got his 40-ball.

The night after the first Detroit game, Ott ran into Brooks in the lobby of the team hotel in Manhattan. Brooks was headed to the NBPA facility to get a workout in. Two days later, on an off-day in between games against the Knicks and Nets, Brooks went back there. Tyndale had sent him the plan: Ballhandling drills, form shooting — only swishes count — and then jump shots. He had to make five consecutive 3s from five different spots, and the goal was to get it done in a minute.

There were similar challenges from the midrange: consecutive makes on pull-ups from the elbow, then consecutive makes on one-dribble fades. He worked on his hesi pull-up from the top of the key (“the T-Mac vibe,” Tyndale stated), getting into it with different dribble combos as if he were attacking a big on a switch. Then he went back to consecutive makes, but, this time, the goal was to make 30 shots in 90 seconds. After one more shooting drill — five spots, three makes in a row — it was time for conditioning. Brooks stated he likes being “in my own little realm” and estimated that he was there for an hour to an hour and a half. This was a “lighter day,” Tyndale stated.

After every game, Tyndale breaks down Brooks’ minutes, possession by possession. If he could have been more aggressive or ran the lane harder, he will hear about it. And if the clips aren’t ready within about 12 hours, Tyndale will hear about it. “It’s a beautiful thing to see,” Tyndale stated, because Brooks didn’t have these habits a couple of years ago. He stated this from Atlanta, where he was waiting for Brooks to get off the team plane. He planned to spend the next month with Brooks.

Nine years into his NBA career, Brooks has never been more invested in making the absolute most of it. “I keep everything fine-tuned,” Brooks stated. In Phoenix, he’s a culture-setter, a lockdown defender and a bucket-getter. He stated he wants to be an example for his teammates, too. He’s proof that, if you hold yourself to a high standard, you can define who you are as a player.

“No matter what age I’m at, no matter what circumstance I’m in, I can always get better,” Brooks stated.