Re: KAT – Vecenie said it and it’s 100% true — we’ll see what happens the rest of this series, but that was a legacy 4th quarter for him. 20 points in the 4th quarter in what was basically a season-saving performance. He is so maddening.

I think the key to this team, and perhaps the reason why the starting lineup struggles, is that Brunson and KAT together on defense is not tenable when the opponent is trying to explore your weakness every time. Mitch + starters or Deuce + starters ends up working perhaps for this reason.

That’s more or less what I’ve been saying for a long time.

You can get away with one non shooter or one negative defender, but when you have two or more of either it compounds into a more difficult situation than you’d think intuitively.

We have ways of trying to mitigate the problem, but none are perfect and our coach has practically been oblivious or too stubborn to try them until tonight. This should have be experimented with in the regular season so they’d all be more familiar with each other and we could see what works best.

It will be interesting to see what Leon does in the off season. I trust that our management understands the issue even though our coach often seems clueless. But it’s not easy to fix, especially because we don’t have assets to add quality. We have assets to swap quality.