Devin Booker stood in front of reporters at shootaround on Wednesday morning and said of the season opener in Portland, “I think we’re ready for it.” Twelve minutes of basketball later, the Suns trailed 43-12. They opened the game down 21-0, did not make a field goal until 4:27 remained in the first quarter, never led for a single second, fell behind by 52, and lost 124-83. Ready for it.

You cannot blame Valley fans for believing something better was coming. The local preseason chorus was nearly unanimous. This was the team that shocked everyone with 45 wins last season, kept its core together, added Miles Bridges, and finally had continuity. ESPN projected 42 wins and Suns writers called even that way too low. The fan site roundtables praised the depth, the good vibes, and a bench trio of Collin Gillespie, Luke Kennard, and Jordan Goodwin as a luxury. One Booker preview predicted a late-career breakout season and a return to the league’s top 15. Vegas was more cautious at 40.5 wins, and after one quarter in Portland, Vegas looks like the optimist in the room.

The warning labels existed. They were just printed in smaller type. The previews that worried did so about two specific things: this roster still has no true point guard next to Booker, and it traded its shooting away. Both warnings cashed in on opening night, in full, at the same time.

Start with the point guard problem, because everything else flows from it. Phoenix lists Booker at the position, which means its best scorer is also its only organizer, guarded by the opponent’s best perimeter defender, with no one else on the floor who can run an offense. The Suns finished with 14 assists as a team. Portland, which employs actual point guards, had 32. Ja Morant, playing his first game as a Blazer, put up 14 points and 8 assists and was plus-33, carving up a defense that had no organizer of its own to answer back. Booker scored his 23 points and finished minus-43, a number that tells you what happens when one man has to be the scorer, the creator, and the system. Jalen Green, the alleged second creator after a summer working with Steve Nash, scored 10.

Then the shooting. Phoenix was one of the better three-point teams in the league last season, then traded Grayson Allen and Royce O’Neale, two of its prominent shooters, to Charlotte in the Bridges deal. The replacement plan leaned heavily on Kennard, who sat out opening night with a knee problem. What remained shot 6 for 31 from three, 19 percent. Portland shot 19 for 47, 40 percent. That is a 39-point gap from the arc alone in a 41-point loss, which is another way of saying the game was the gap.

The cruellest detail is where the shooting went. Allen, in his first game for Charlotte, scored 21 points and hit 5 of 8 from three. Ty Jerome, another former Sun, hung a career-high 45 on Utah for Memphis with 5 threes. And Toumani Camara, drafted by Phoenix and traded before he ever played a game here, scored 18 against the Suns with 4 threes of his own. Three players Phoenix discarded combined for 14 made threes last night. The entire Suns roster made 6.

None of this required a crystal ball. A team with no point guard and no shooters will struggle to score, struggle to organize, and have no way back once it falls behind, because comebacks are built from the two things this roster does not have: easy shots created by a floor general and threes in bunches. The Suns were down 31 after one quarter and the remaining three were a formality, 27 points at a time, never threatening, never even interesting.

It is one game of 82, and the honest caveats apply. Mark Williams is out for months, Kennard was hurt, Oso Ighodaro left with a hip injury, and Portland shot the ball out of its mind in Damian Lillard’s return. All true. But injuries do not explain 14 assists, and Lillard’s homecoming does not explain starting a season 0 for the field for seven and a half minutes. The flaws that showed up in Portland are not bad luck. They are roster construction, chosen in July, visible in the fine print of every preview that bothered to look.

The home opener is Saturday against Golden State. The hype will say it is a chance to respond. The roster says the response has the same two problems as the question.