By the time an NBA team gets to late March, the goal is to be touching up paint and tightening screws — to be putting the finishing touches on the machine its front office, coaches and players have spent the previous nine months building, in hopes of best positioning itself for postseason success.
“Every game we play is an opportunity for us to get better,” Kevin Durant told Duane Rankin of The Arizona Republic during the Suns’ Tuesday practice session. “To fine-tune what we do.”
Where you don’t want to be, though, is unclear on what “what we do” even means, because you’re still frantically trying to build the machine — searching high and low for the right tool to make the disparate parts fit, wondering why the detail-sparse instructions insist Tab Y should fit in Slot C, and blaspheming the gods who have cursed you to fail in every attempt at masonry.