The rise of Suns rookie Ryan Dunn, a supposed non-shooter who learned to let it rip: 'You can't be scared'

The word on Ryan Dunn, NBA prospect: Extraordinary defender, complete non-shooter, long-term project. Offensively, Dunn, a 6-foot-8 forward out of Virginia, was "one of the worst" potential first-round picks of the last decade, per The Athletic's draft guide, published six months ago. "Even if you buy into Dunn's shot" becoming passable in time, drafting him would mean waiting "multiple years" for that investment to pay off.

In Dunn's fourth preseason game with the Phoenix Suns, he shot 6 for 11 from 3-point range. Last season, in his sophomore year at Virginia, he made a total of seven 3-pointers. His last 11 3-point attempts in college were spread over 454 minutes in 16 games, or almost two months of real time. He only made one of them.

"Had I known that Ryan Dunn was a 45% shooter, I think our draft board would've looked a little bit different," Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick told reporters the night of Dunn's fifth preseason game.

Dunn, the No. 28 pick in the 2024 draft, might not be a 45% shooter -- he's shooting 31.6% from deep through 21 regular-season games -- but he's not a long-term project, either. He has started nine games for the Suns, averaging 17.5 minutes and is almost always guarding the opponent's best perimeter player. He's been matched up with the 6-foot-2 Jalen Brunson and the 7-foot Lauri Markkanen, and he's blocked LeBron James at the rim. This is heady stuff for any 21-year-old, never mind one who didn't make his high school team as a freshman and didn't get serious attention from colleges until after he'd graduated.

"If you would have told me this 10 years ago, I would've thought you were smoking crack, or crazy," Dunn said.

It is hard to believe that Dunn is the same guy who airballed multiple free throws at Virginia. On Oct. 26 against the Dallas Mavericks, he stepped into an above-the-break 3 in the fourth quarter of a two-possession game and cashed it. Kevin Durant said in a walk-off interview that Dunn was already "making veteran plays" three games into his career, and that particular one swung the momentum in Phoenix's favor.

Recalling the play a month later, Dunn said that he was just trying to screen Durant open for a 3. When he got the dribble-handoff from Jusuf Nurkic, he saw that he was open and let it rip. "I'm like, 'All right, well, let's just shoot this one,'" he said. It felt good to see it go in, but it was NBD. All he thought about was getting a stop on the next possession. 

The funny thing about Dunn's reputation coming into the NBA is that, until relatively recently, he wasn't much of a defender. "In his junior year, he was so small, I would be like, 'You don't box out, you don't block anybody, you don't play D,'" his father, Ed Dunn, said, laughing. Ed said that, starting at 15 years old, Dunn "would stand in the corner and shoot 3s. He would stay outside and shoot 3s. He was a little guy." Before a late growth spurt, his game did not at all resemble what scouts would see at UVA. 

"My dad's 100% right: I was the complete opposite," Dunn said. "I couldn't guard anybody. People wanted me to switch onto them so they could go score."

In a way, this makes Dunn's seemingly out-of-nowhere transformation into a 3-and-D guy at the NBA level more comprehensible. "This is who Ryan really is," said Jay David, who coached him as the executive director of the New York Jayhawks AAU team and an assistant coach at Long Island Lutheran High School (LuHi). His trajectory as a defender, though, is objectively preposterous, which makes him an even wilder development story than the shooting suggests.

If you skim Dunn's Wikipedia page and see that he attended Oak Hill Academy -- the powerhouse in rural Virginia that counts Durant and Carmelo Anthony among its former students -- you might get the wrong idea.

"I didn't play on the biggest team at Oak Hill," Dunn said. "I played on the worst team. The triple-triple-low team."

Dunn was anything but a basketball prodigy. "We were all a baseball family, so I always had that love and passion growing up, and my brother would always play, so I would usually follow him," he said. But while his brother, Justin Dunn, would become a major-league pitcher, he eventually "grew out of it." While recovering from an elbow injury, he realized he didn't want to get back on the field. All of his friends hooped, and, since watching James and Paul George go at it in the conference finals, he'd become a more avid fan. Dunn played for his middle school team in eighth grade, and as a high school freshman he told his father that he wanted to take basketball seriously. Ed said he should go to Oak Hill to see what elite players looked like.

"He was a little-ass kid," said Orlando Magic guard Cole Anthony, the consensus top-five recruit who starred at Oak Hill when Dunn was on the White Team. "He was like 5-9, maybe. Big-ass feet -- he probably wore the same size shoe as me then -- and was just this little, skinny, lanky kid. I knew he was gonna grow, and he always had a little game, but I didn't think he -- first of all, I didn't think he was gonna be 6-8."

Back then, Dunn "was a guard," Anthony said. "He was trying to handle. He was trying to shoot. He wasn't very athletic at all. He's a different person now," Anthony said. "It's really funny to see. But it's cool to see, too." Anthony remembers Dunn being a hard worker, but he did a double-take when, scrolling Instagram three years ago, he learned that the little kid he'd played with in open runs was getting Division I offers.

By Ed's estimation, Dunn sprouted to "about 6-2, 6-3, maybe 6-4" heading into his senior year at LuHi. He grew three or four more inches as a senior, but "wasn't able to really show what was going on," Dunn said. LuHi's season, if you can even call it that, consisted of only three games because of the COVID pandemic.

Everything changed, though, in the summer of 2021, when he enrolled at Perkiomen School in Pennsylvania for a postgraduate year and played on the Adidas circuit with the Jayhawks.

"He went to a Perkiomen showcase event," Ed said. "First day he came in, he dunked on somebody. And that's like Ryan's new toy, right? Because he could never dunk before and now he's just dunking all over everybody. Then the offers started coming in. And he received 24 high-major offers."

Thanks to the growth spurt, though, Dunn's defensive upside was starting to become obvious. Part of Virginia's recruiting pitch was that it would help him develop into a high-level defender.

"That's what Coach [Tony] Bennett saw when he recruited me," Dunn said. "And when I got to Virginia, he kind of told me. He said, 'You're long, you're athletic, you have a chance disrupting offenses.'"

Dunn, who has a 7-foot-1½ wingspan, was so sold on UVA that he would've gone there as a walk-on. After it gave what it thought was its last scholarship to forward Isaac Traudt, he almost did. (Another scholarship opened up for Dunn afterward.) When he arrived in Charlottesville in 2022, the coaching staff hadn't decided whether or not to redshirt him. With each workout and each practice, it became clearer that he could play right away.

"In these practice settings, you could see it," Virginia assistant coach Orlando Vandross said. "He covers a lot of ground. He can switch. He can rebound. He'll block a shot. The thing that was impressive to us was, sometimes, when you're guarding the ball and somebody gets by you, you think you're beaten, but he can shut down space and actually block a shot at the rim. Those gifts were evident every day."

As a freshman on a famously slow-paced, defense-first team, Dunn averaged only 2.6 points in 12.9 minutes per game. Virginia's defense was incredible when he was on the court, though, and his defensive numbers -- 2.1% steal rate, 10.6% block rate, 22.6% defensive rebounding rate -- attracted attention from analytically inclined NBA teams. Dunn didn't always execute UVA's pack-line defense perfectly, but "what he didn't know, he made up for with effort," Vandross said.

UVA empowered Dunn to make reads like a free safety and guard every position. His steal rate rose to an OG Anunoby/Herb Jonesesque 3.1% as a starter in his sophomore season. He was a demon, a menace, maybe even a generational defensive talent. ESPN and The Ringer called him the best defender in the draft; Swish Theory called him "the best defensive prospect that I can remember." 

After Dunn's freshman year finished, he and his parents visited Arizona, where Justin's team at the time, the Cincinnati Reds, were for spring training. This is when he first got in the gym with Phil Beckner to work on his shot.

Beckner, best known as Damian Lillard's longtime skills coach, did not want to overhaul Dunn's shooting form. He wanted to simplify it.

"Ryan comes and works out with us, and -- great kid, but his shot is all over the f---ing place," Beckner said. "He's throwing the ball instead of shooting the ball. He's had all this different stuff in his head, whether it's technical adjustments, confidence adjustments, blah, blah, blah, all this different stuff."

The goal was to give Dunn clarity on what was working and what wasn't. That meant starting with his footwork, base and balance. From there, Beckner wanted Dunn to have a smoother, more consistent motion as he brought the ball up, and to release it at the same spot every time.

Dunn worked with Beckner twice a day. He did the routine that Beckner calls "foundation shooting," which Lillard both swears by and claims to be able to do with his eyes closed.

"I obviously wanted to be a better shooter than what I was, so I went to him," Dunn said. "I think it was a lot of reps and a lot of confidence. Starting from 15 feet from the rim to backing up, and enjoying those moments."

Those reps did not translate to immediate improvement. When Dunn returned to Virginia, he mostly functioned as a cutter, a crasher, a screener and a finisher. The spacing in Bennett's blocker-mover and inside triangle offenses looked nothing like, say, Mike Budenholzer's system in Phoenix.

"I think it was about the makeup of our team and the way our offense was designed," Vandross said. "It wasn't like, 'Oh, don't shoot.' Basically it came down to us putting Ryan in the best position to be successful, and I thought we did that, pretty much."

"Whatever my role is to help the team, I want to do that to win," Dunn said. "I don't care about points or scoring 40 or 'I gotta do this' -- no, if this is going to help us win the game, I'll be down for it. So I think people just didn't see that in me. They just saw the not-shooting part. But I understand it."

Dunn reconvened with Beckner after his sophomore season. One night, at Camelback High School, less than three miles from the Suns' practice facility, with his parents and brother watching, he had what Beckner described as an aha moment.

"He started making every shot," Beckner said. "His movements were precise. His movements were confident. I'm hooting and hollering. I was just like, 'This guy! It has clicked.'"

The first summer that they worked together, misses frustrated Dunn. "Every time he missed, that's confirming what? That 'I'm not a good shooter,'" Beckner said. But there is a difference between back-rimming a shot and clanking one off the side of the backboard. When Dunn missed a shot but had the right mechanics, Beckner gave him positive reinforcement: Good miss.

Before his pre-draft workouts with NBA teams, Dunn spent three weeks with Beckner, then went to Los Angeles to train alongside other CAA prospects at Proactive Sports Performance with former NBA player Don MacLean. "He was another one that was just breathing belief into Ryan," Ed said. In interviews with executives, Dunn projected confidence.

"I knew the shooting was going to be the biggest thing everyone was going to ask me when I got into this whole pre-draft process," Dunn said. "[My response] was just, 'Hey, I've been working on it. I know I didn't shoot a lot, I didn't get a high volume in college, that's probably a big minus factor for you guys, but I've been working on it throughout this whole offseason.' I just told 'em, 'Hey, look, I'm excited to come down and let you guys see how I've been working on my shot.'"

Vandross told NBA execs asking for intel that he thought Dunn was a capable shooter and would do everything he could to make his shot more reliable. David told them that Dunn was not a "force-it guy," so he did the job that was asked of him at Virginia, but, dating back to high school, he could always shoot.

Dunn shot poorly at the combine, but impressed in private workouts. He shot 1 for 13 from 3-point range in four games for Phoenix's summer league team, which sounds rough, but the number of attempts was a positive indicator. "That's when I said I knew he had gotten better," Beckner said. His mechanics were more consistent, and there was no hesitation.

On Halloween in Los Angeles, Dunn played 34 minutes against the Clippers and scored 16 points, making 4 of his 9 3-point attempts. His marksmanship -- 44% from deep in five regular-season games, 43.4% in five preseason games -- was one of the NBA's happiest and most surprising storylines. Already, though, he'd told reporters multiple times that he knew he would go through ups and downs over the course of an 82-game season. Even if the noise around him was positive, he wanted to block it out. 

Sure enough, Dunn missed all six 3s he took in his next two games. Then he went 2 for 2 before spraining his ankle in a game against the Miami Heat. His accuracy has wobbled since then, but Dunn himself has been even-keeled. He wishes he would have shot better than 1 for 9 against the Oklahoma City Thunder, naturally, but he didn't beat himself up about it.

"I shot nine 3s," Dunn said. "I got 'em up. It's progress. A lot of those shots felt good coming out of my hand."

Dunn works closely with Suns assistant coaches Chad Forcier and Brent Barry, who have put him through the same shooting drills that Kawhi Leonard and Patty Mills did in San Antonio 13 years ago. He knows that he's in good hands.

"[I'm] just enjoying the process of everything," Dunn said. "Not being goal-oriented and, 'Oh, I need to shoot 3 for 3 in this game' or 'I need to shoot this much.' No, like, if I shoot 1 for 9, cool; if I shoot 0 for 10, cool; if I shoot 3 for 3, cool."

Two years ago at Virginia, Dunn understood that he had to play tough defense to be on the floor. Now, with Budenholzer emphasizing 3-point volume from Day 1, Dunn understood that "these 3s have to go up, so no matter what you think, you can't be scared to take 'em at all," he said. Everybody around him has encouraged him to fire away.

"When you have someone like Kevin Durant and Devin Booker telling you to shoot the ball every time, you're going to get it up," Dunn said.

When Beckner watches Dunn now, he sees not just a tighter, more consistent shooting form, but a "more mentally resilient" shooter. When Ed watches, he sees a player who is "in the right place at the right time, with the right people, with the right coach and the right staff." In a far less structured offensive environment than the one he was in at UVA, "what you're seeing is a kid that's hooping," Ed said.

Shortly after his sophomore season at Virginia ended, Dunn and his father had a conversation about the NBA. "He asked me, straight-up, what do I see in him, what type of player?" Ed said. "Is he a 3-and-D player or could he be more than that? Could he be a two-way guy? And I said, 'That's up to you, to be honest with you. I see both, you can do both. It's just how hard that you want to work.'"

Dunn agreed, and still does. "Obviously I can start being 3-and-D, but I'm not going to limit myself," he said. He wants to have a long career, which will afford him time to expand his game. For now, though, he's focused primarily on the defensive end of the floor, where he sometimes looks like he's in two places at once. In a game against the Golden State Warriors, Dunn chased his man around a screen, deterred him in the paint and then cruelly robbed him of an assist to a cutter, instinctively pogo-sticking to the rim for an impossible block.

Looking back, Dunn said he has overcome "a lot of doubt, a lot of fear." Before he burst onto the recruiting radar, "there was a time where everyone was getting their offers and I wasn't," he said, "so it was kind of like, 'Dang, do I really belong here?'" After that, "there were some bad games I had at Virginia where I kind of got in my head." He questioned himself, and he questioned whether or not he'd make it.

As a late bloomer, though, Dunn knows that "it's not how you start," he said. "Everyone has their own race, and everyone has their own journey." Dunn is exactly where he wants to be because he learned to trust that he was on the right path, let it fly and live with the results. One perk of his particular journey: It bred in him a competitive edge that continues to drive him, even though he knows he belongs.

"I want people to know who I am," Dunn said.