I think it's easy as fans to overreact based on the most recent performance. I really believe you have to take a wide angle view. Just given the nature of your two best players, and having a veteran roster - there are going to be nights where they just collectively stink and won't make the effort required to compete. They are hardly alone in that department. On the road vs a lousy west team without its best player- that's recipe ripe for sleepwalking.
But I think we have to keep an eye on the team defense as that's what ultimately makes them either a championship contender or a team that won't make the conference finals. The ability to stop good teams from scoring when it matters.
They, themselves, can score. Can they defend and rebound well enough vs the top teams?
Most fans live in the moment...we don't think about the team until the 2 hours that they are on TV then we watch and for those 2 hours we live in the moment. That's why there's always overreaction to both good streaks and bad ones. But if you look at things over a longer lens, this team has proven it's capable of beating all our main competitors, and probably in a 7 game series against anyone you would put money on them.
But against some of the riffraff teams, or when they are not on national TV, they tend to take nights off, are not focused, don't take the game serious, which is where we get these bad losses where we get blown out, or we get blown out, then make a comeback but fall short. Then it starts a round of wrist slitting where we overanalyze why - is it the coach? Do we need better defensive coverages? Do we need another big? Another point guard? Another wing? When really the issue is just the effort and the attitude, particularly on the defensive end.
Which is a hard thing to try to analyze and get a fix for - because are we confident that they will be able to turn it on when the time is right?
I will say one thing. I'm sure the team has advanced metrics that it is privy to, from Cleaning the Glass and other sources that require thousand dollar subscriptions, that the analysts are looking at on a regular basis, to work out which variables correlate most with winning and losing, and are tracking those regularly, so they can figure out numerically whether the team is genuinely dipping or if it is just the RNG of being in a make/miss league. As a person who loves stats I wish I had access to those as well but it's just too expensive
