Just like his shooting guard counterpart on the opposing team, Courtney Lee is having a career year this season, scoring 13 points per game at the ripe old age of 32. He’s seeing his highest usage since his second year in the league, when he played for that Nets team which went 12-70 and disgraced the entire state of New Jersey in the process (not like New Jersey needed any help being a disgrace). Playing for that team might have forever cursed Lee to be a low-usage role-player who gets shuffled around to any team who needed a plug-and-play shooting guard, but Lee has had a respectable career despite that. He’s always been the guy that teams look at and say, “he could be a short-term answer for us with his shooting and defense,” even if he never developed into the kind of long-term answer that those teams probably hoped for.
Unfortunately for Lee, Tim Hardaway Jr. is also on this team and he’s definitely the more assertive scorer out of the two. I would have loved to see Lee become the undisputed third-best scorer on the team behind Porzingis and Kanter, but it can never happen while he shares a position with THJ. There’s only one choice for Lee: snip THJ’s Achilles tendon with a pair of kitchen shears while he’s asleep on the team plane.