elindholm
edited for content
I agree about Beasley being a big mistake. Almost everyone has come around to this position.
I haven't. Beasley was signed as a project. So far, he has been with the Suns for about 1/3 of a season. Whatever improvement he needs to make to become an NBA player, he hasn't made it. But he's not pouting to the media, I've read reports that he's still working hard in practice, and his body language on the floor hasn't gotten any worse now that his minutes have been slashed. Consider that his salary is about what the Suns were paying Childress, only for half as long, and he's far from a disaster.
Beasley may never get it, but that doesn't mean that the signing was a mistake. Teams that are as far behind the talent race as the Suns are need to take risks. Pursuing Eric Gordon was a huge risk, but the Suns got away with it. Whether taking a gamble is a good idea doesn't depend on whether the gamble pays off -- that's not a fair way to judge. You need to assess the magnitude and likelihood of the reward versus the cost.
I don't understand people who say, "Put Morris, Marshall, and Johnson on the floor to see what they can do, sink or swim, but for god's sake banish Beasley to the inactive list." Beasley is younger than Johnson and only a few months older than Morris, and is far more likely to develop into a quality NBA player than either Johnson or Marshall is. It's not even close. Beasley is probably the best player on the team at creating his own offense -- inefficient though it may be -- and he's a surprisingly good passer, trailing only Dragic and Telfair in assists per minute.
I'm not disagreeing that Beasley has been lousy so far, but to call his signing a mistake shows a misunderstanding of why he was signed in the first place. Expecting him to come in and look like a star right away, when two teams had already given up on him, was unrealistic. There are reasons that he was available to a team like Phoenix for a relatively cheap contract, and we're seeing them. There's a good chance that the risk won't pay off, but compared to ideas like re-acquiring Stoudemire or going after Greg Oden, it was a pretty sane proposition.