When your team's top beat writer surmises that the team's starting power forward "had perhaps the worst performance of his career" after said power forward looked awful on offense and gave up 32/14/7 to a guy who usually comes off the bench, and you actually have to search your short-term memory to consider whether any of your starting power forward's recent games were actually worse … that's when you know have a problem. A Big(s) problem.

The line-up +/- data really mimics what I saw (or vice versa). There were 5 min, 15 seconds in the first half in which both Evans and Martin sat. The Kings were -3. There were two minutes without Evans and Martin in the second half (the aforediscussed end-of-the-third): the Kings were -3. So that's -6 over 7 min, 15 seconds.

The Kings were +4 in the roughly 34 minutes in which both guards played together. Martin was +1 in his non-Evans minutes, and Evans was -6 in his non-Martin minutes (which all came in that third quarter). The team was far more effective when they played together. Unfortunately, since each played upward of 37 minutes, I'm not sure you can play them together any more than Westphal did and still survive the minutes without them, especially on nights when Beno shoots 0-for-5.

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I'm not going to talk too much about Martin's reversal of fortune, because … well, this is the norm. This is what the world expects now. It didn't take a genius to believe a brilliant shooter/scorer would eventually end a slump. It's like predicting a new Kevin Smith film will be unwatchable, or that Mehmet Okur will wince when he's about to take a charge. It's just common sense, based on years of observation.