“But this isn’t his fault. It’s on our starters. They’ve got to get us off to better starts in games, and right now we’ve been very sluggish at the start — and it’s been happening all year. We dig ourselves a hole that’s hard to get out of, and we just can’t afford that. We spend so much of our energy battling and fighting to get back into the games that by the time the fourth quarter comes, we’re burnt out because we’ve used all our gas getting back into the game.

“So our starters have to do a better job controlling the momentum and the tempo of the game from the start.”

“It’s like they’re walking into a situation where you feel like you can flip the switch on at any time, and you can’t do that in this league,” he said. “Teams come out hard on you. The first one that hits the hardest is usually the one that sets the tone for the game and gets the calls and everything.

“And we can’t have that be the other team, especially at home. We’ve got to be able to come out and be the most aggressive ones, you know, hit first and take it to those teams and have them play on their heels instead of us being on our heels.”

“Eventually you’d want to see that,” Wallace said. “At the end of the day, something has to click. We have to take pride. We have to do something about that. Right now, I think it starts with us setting the tone and setting the momentum of the game from the start. When we come out as the aggressors, we play very well. But when we don’t, we always find ourselves back on our heels, and it’s hard to get going.”