I expected a fun game to watch, and I was not disappointed in the slightest. Stuckey started, but had the show stolen by Dixon as far as point guards go. Dixon looked good hitting his first 6 shots, dishing 5 assists too while playing fine D. Sheed started by hitting triples, and then kept working the inside like a fiend. Tay was game MVP with a great double double, 22 points, career high 10 assists. Most of Tay's damage was taking it right to the basket. Rip hit a few shots. Dyess was scoreless, contributed some bounds.

But even with Tay and Sheed on fire tonight, our starters could have lost this game for lack of D. Fortunately though, Flip remembered to play Amir this time, and so we slaughtered the Clips. Amir finally came into the game with 8 minutes to go in the 2nd quarter, and wow, the defense all the sudden, quite mysteriously, held. (Mysterious to Flip only and his supporters. Anyone else can see that Amir is dynamite on D.) The lead began to build. Most of the 3rd quarter was just trading baskets. Then Amir came in at the end, and the lead went up some more. In the end, the team was plus 5 with Amir not in the game, and plus 25 with him in the game. Our defense is that much better when he plays. Sheed had four blocks himself in this one, and it was him and Amir manning the big spots as we started to pull away in the 2nd quarter.

Stuckey scored on a couple of cuts to the basket among his 4 makes. (I missed a portion of the 1st half where he made a couple of shots so I don't know what he did there. I had the game on pause, and then flipped channels - when you do that you come back to live action, missing part of what happened while you had it paused. Oops.)

Hayes made a few shots, one kind of meaninless in garbage time. And they burned him on D a few consecutive times in the first half. My vote for who loses minutes to Dixon is Hayes. Another guy is Hunter, who simply may not be needed down the stretch here after all.

Afflalo hit one shot mid 4th quarter. He did not play in the first half except the last few seconds. Instead, Hayes played a lot and Tay spelled Rip some. Now, I don't mind seeing us doing something different, like playing Tay at shooting guard some, especially since Afflalo did get to play the last 14 minutes of the game. A guy who plays good solid D like that should always be rewarded with more minutes.