Bradley Beal Gets Honest on Playing With Suns Stars

Phoenix Suns guard Bradley Beal says sacrificing is something he embraces.

PHOENIX -- Phoenix Suns guard Bradley Beal recently dove into the challenges of adjusting to life with stars such as Kevin Durant and Devin Booker around him in his latest diary entry for Andscape.

More from the former 30-point-per-game scorer and what life has been like in the desert:

"Sacrificing has been something I’ve embraced. It’s not easy, 100%. It takes a lot of work. It takes kind of training your mind to do something that you have been used to doing for so long. But I enjoy it. I feel like, especially with the dynamic that we have here, we have so much versatility, we have so much firepower, I take a lot of joy in that because I’ve never had this type of ammunition before. I’ve never been surrounded with this caliber of talent. For me it’s a joy to be able to share the floor with guys like that," said Beal.

"Grayson [Allen] is one of the best shooters in the NBA. Get him the ball. D-Book is a killer mentality. Give him the ball. KD is a killer mentality. Give him the ball. Eric Gordon was one of my favorite players growing up. And now I get to share the floor with him and watch him still make over 2,000 threes in his career and continue that number. It is awesome to be a part of this group. I play with another dominant big that I can add to my list of bigs that I’ve played with in Nurk [Jusuf Nurkić].

"It has been a joy. It has truly been a joy. I’ve been known as a scorer all my career, but to be able to embrace more of a point guard role and being kind of our defender at times, I can get a joy in that. It’s like a new challenge for me.

"Everybody wants us [Booker, Durant, Beal] to all go score 30 a night in a perfect world. But we realize that won’t happen. I think it was a game the other night, three points the other night. We won a game and I played some pretty good defense that night. It happens. I think KD shot the ball nine times the other night — which should never happen, by the way — but it happened and I think we won the game. So, it is a very fine line. We can look at it through that lens and kind of go with the opinion of the whole world and the expectation of what everybody has for the situation, or we can embrace who we are as a team and embrace our versatility and embrace the need of everybody and not just Beal, Booker and Durant."

The Suns recently snagged a clutch win over the Denver Nuggets on Wednesday and currently hold the No. 7 seed in the West. They'll next play against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Friday.