Suns know there will be expectations next year

Goran Dragic calls this past year the best of his life for the smiles that came from his nation hosting European Championship, a new marriage, his first child, a massive Suns turnaround and his newfound stardom for a career season.

It started with a good joke. In October, the Las Vegas oddsmakers pinned the Suns as a 19-win team for the season.

"That was the funniest thing in my life," Dragic said after a 48-34 Suns record tied for the winningest non-playoff season in three decades of the 16-team postseason format. "It was a pleasure to show the people that they were wrong."

Now that there will be expectations for the Suns, their tougher task will be to show they are right. The Suns had a mix of players who were young and hungry to prove themselves and found chemistry as a result. When playoffs become the acceptable goal and the roster and roles change, will their edge remain?

Only Detroit (2009), Sacramento (2006) and Minnesota (2004) have longer active playoff droughts than the Suns, whose last postseason play in came in 2010.

"We had nothing to lose so we went out and just played," Suns forward P.J. Tucker said. "We didn't make the playoffs so it (the hunger) is even more. Now we've seen what we can do, so now we know those games that we lost, when we get back into those situations, what we need to do to win. We didn't have a lot of people that had so much experience and had played so many minutes. So, in some of those situations, we lost and we fell a little bit but it's a growing experience."

The roster surely will be altered with three first-round draft picks. The Suns have cap space to address — by free agency or trade — frontcourt needs and a dearth of passing. But most of the roster is under team control. The questions come with Eric Bledsoe and Tucker heading into restricted free agency, and team options for Ish Smith, Dionte Christmas and Shavlik Randolph. Channing Frye has a $6.8 million player option for next season. Markieff and Marcus Morris are eligible for extensions in October.

Nothing is as heavy as Bledsoe's restricted free agency. The Suns have control to match any offer sheet on Bledsoe and Tucker and have expressed an intention to do so or execute a pre-emptive strike with a longer, richer contract.

The only murky part is Bledsoe has not committed himself publicly to the idea of wanting to come back to Phoenix. He deflects repeated questions on the matter, providing answers about spending time with his family and working on his game in the summer in Birmingham, Ala.

He makes slight occasional references to a Phoenix future, as he did when talking about missing the playoffs: "It was a failure that we didn't make it. We've got a little bit of experience going into next year to know what it takes."

His teammates seem to have a better feel, especially his neighbor this season on team flights.

"He wants to be back," Smith said. "He likes it here."

The Suns barely got a glimpse of their master-plan backcourt of Dragic and Bledsoe. When the two started, the Suns were 23-11. The rest of the season, they were 25-23.

"Every day, every month, every year, we can get better and better," Dragic said. "It was our first season and we already played so good together. Next season, hopefully he's going to stay here — yes, Eric — and try to raise that bar even higher. We're always joking around. We're always talking that, 'Hey, you're going to stay here. You better stay here. Otherwise, we're going to hunt you down and try to bring you back.' "

Dragic and Bledsoe might be the only sure things to continue in a similar capacity. Other starters could change. Teammates could be traded. The front office will pursue exterior improvement while the coaching staff will aim for interior improvement to change how a team went a league-worst 2-9 in games decided by three points or fewer, blew huge leads in three losses during the season's final week and posted losses to Sacramento (twice), Cleveland, Utah and Los Angeles Lakers.

"The way we lost the last couple games to the Spurs and Dallas, it definitely put a taste in my mouth," Bledsoe said.

A stunning turnaround has given them an ideal base to launch their next steps in a loaded Western Conference that could have injury-riddled New Orleans and Denver and Kevin Love-led Minnesota trying to join the playoff hunt too.

"Nobody is going to pick us last but they're definitely not going to pick us first," Frye said.