OKC has been hitting a good stroke of luck of late. They’re playing well and are moving the ball, but a lot of things have bounced their way.

Milwaukee-Boston was example 10,000 of why NBA scheduling sucks. Should’ve been a marquee match up but Boston was on the second night of a back to back after beating Minnesota in OT the night before and had to travel to Milwaukee to play. It was an easy set up for Milwaukee.

Knicks played with their food vs the Luka-less Dallas Mavs and got beat. Got down by -15 in Q1 and had no answer for Kyrie. Good win for the Mavs and we might be ok with them winning to keep N.O. at bay.

LAL v PHX: Lol, Lakers. I thought Ham was safe after the win vs the Clips, but they still looked well out of sorts against Phx. They don’t know what their rotation is, and don’t know what they want to be on offense. It can affect their defense. Losing Reddish early hurt them too. They also don’t seem to know how to respond to teams that play with some pace. But mainly, it’s about the guys not named Lebron/AD not knowing what their roles are. When you have a team that comes out of the gate executing well, it can start rolling downhill on you. AD wasn’t able to bail them out b/c Phx had a true center playing as opposed to Toronto, which did not have Poeltl. We lost to them because we indulged their pace and their preferred matchups.

• Getting Harden’s minutes down to 30 for the remainder of the regular season. You get A Game James with breaks. I think giving Mann 3-5 mins at the point would help a lot.
• Russ – Need to get more consistent play from him and show a better understanding of the role he now has. He’s been feast or famine for the past month, and I don’t want that for the playoffs. Lue doesn’t either b/c he’s been pulling Russ when he messes things up. He really is a Patrick Beverley for this team and he needs to embrace that role. Pat Bev doesn’t make a lot of mistakes on the offensive end. He has his limitations, but he knows what he does well and sticks to that. Russ has to be an elite finisher and if he doesn’t have it he has to draw fouls or make the pass. He can’t be chucking up mid range shots and 3s with time on the shot clock when we have 3-4 other shooters on the floor. If Norm Powell is on the floor with him, he can’t ignore him in his shifts. Move the ball to him first, cut and play off the ball, get a pass back and make a play or hit the offensive glass. That’s it. That’s the game.

As others have noted, the defense in Q1-Q3 was terrible. Toronto had uncontested looks almost every time. That is why they shot 60% for most of the game.

I did not like Harden’s performance. Yes he had 11 assists and a +8. But he was so slow to initiate the offense. His endless crossovers went nowhere. He also tried a couple of fancy passes … looked like he was trying to put a spin on the ball. What was he trying to do; “bend it like Beckham” around the defender? In any case, he ended up telegraphing his passes as a result.

Russ: At least he didn’t take many outside shots. I know he’s been adjusting his game (to good effect) lately. It seems like he’s simply flipping every shot (jumper or lay-up) hoping it goes in. He doesn’t square up on jumpers or put any spin on lay-ups off the glass. But he used to. My brother and I joked that “Russ can get to the rim anytime he wants, and can actually make a basket on some of those instances”. He didn’t play at all in Q4

With regards to matchups, yes: we don’t have to fear Dallas or Sacramento to the same degree as NOLA or OKC (especially if OKC does up the ante and tries to win as much as possible this year, they got more than enough assets to add the veteran help, improve their rebounding, backup center or backup point guard minutes significantly).

However, depending on how the West standings change, getting home court advantage in as many rounds as possible might be just as important as strategy and matchups, especially if the question is: game 7 at Denver or in L.A.?

It’s fascinating even this early into the season so I hope we can win the games vs Minnesota and OKC as well in order to leave ourselves all options open.

Lastly, I’m praying for good health, not only for us but for opponents because at full strength there are a lot of fun teams in the West.

Lue is the type to do strategic playoff positioning, and I think that he’d rather face a Sacramento, Dallas, Minnesota than a NO, OKC, Denver. If the season ended today, we’d face Sac in Round 1, Minnesota Round 2. We’d win both series, I think. IoW, if we get to a solid top 4 playoff spot, he’ll rest guys to engineer the most favorable match ups and to prepare for the post season. It’s just that west is very tough so there isn’t a lot of room for error.

OKC could get pushed around a bit by a Lakers or even Jazz team in the 8th seed and we would just bring another round of full grown men to do the same. The landscape is brutal no matter what but I think after Joker, Kawhi is probably still the best playoff weapon in the WC.

Not concerned about Kawhi, PG, Harden or Zu. Mann is also looking great. Norm has had mixed games but provides a ton of value when he’s making shots.

Russ was bad in this one AND Ty is exacerbating it by not having figured out the second unit/the rotations.

Starters imo will turn it on defensively when challenged. Their second issue that’s gotta be addressed before playing the Wolves is turnovers. Keep them low and we got a great shot to win that critical game. Third one is Kawhi playing out of double teams. It looked better this time, especially with the shooting Mann provided. That is not the case when he’s with the bench unit, another aspect to improve.

This ain’t to be negative, it stems from the desire to win those games because it would put us in position to challenge for 3rd, 2nd or even 1st if we keep good health for our key players.