For the second straight game — and the fourth time in just nine contests this young season — D’Angelo Russell was benched in crunch time, planted on the bench by Nets coach Kenny Atkinson.
Is the elephant in the room a message or just matchup management?
“It’s game-to-game,” Atkinson said. “We’re going to see it with Spencer [Dinwiddie] and Caris [LeVert] and Joe [Harris], and they were playing well. And then we [started] switching everything, so didn’t want to get any mismatches.”
Russell is a porous defender, part of why both Byron Scott and Luke Walton benched him at times in fourth quarters with the Lakers.