Brook Lopez: Plays only 22 minutes in return

While the blowout loss contributed to Lopez’s low minutes count, first-year coach Kenny Atkinson has been adamant about taking the long view with the center’s playing time and hasn’t been willing to fully unleash him. Lopez has already sat out one half of a back-to-back set and hasn’t seen more than 26 minutes in any of his three appearances thus far. It’s still expected that Lopez will be bumped up to a 30-plus-minute workload eventually, but until that happens Justin Hamilton will occupy a large portion of the timeshare at the position.