Long-time Portland bench leader Terry Stotts would appear to be the only NBA head coach to apply a playoff mentality to the “Seeding Games” from the get-go – through two down-to-the-wire games (including Friday’s OT victory over Memphis), he’s limited his playing rotation to just eight players and ridden his dynamic backcourt of Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum for 176 out of a possible 202 minutes. [Rockets’ mentor Mike D’Antoni gets an old-school honorable mention for using four guys for 40+ minutes in their OT opener with the Mavs.]
The blazing comeback of Stotts’s Ironmen fell a bit short in large part due to the red-hot three-point shooting of Brad Stevens’s “Jay Team” – the youngsters converted 11 of 16 treys (compared to eight-for-21 from the Portland guards).