Fess and Evans started the 4th quarter, when the Jazz were down 6. 30 seconds into the quarter, Deron turned the ball over and Sloan yanked him and put in Watson. At that point, the Jazz are down 10. So the team went an additional 4 points down in a mere 30 seconds with Fess on the floor (not that it was Fess's fault, but that's the whole problem with tryin to rely on +/- stats to prove the contribution of an individual player).
6 minutes later, Deron came back, and Watson left, with the scored tied. So they made up 10 points in 6 minutes with Watson at point. During that time, Watson had 3 assists, blocked a shot on a guy a lot taller than him, and even had a rebound. During the same time, Fess had two fouls, but made other valuable contributions (3 rebounds and a tip-in).
Does anybody claim that "Watson did it?" Shouldn't he play point full time? Or shouldn't Sloan at least "develop" him? I guess they aint no Watson fanboyz who ONLY see what their boy does right, and what others (but not their boy) does wrong, so we don't git that.
I claim that Watson, Evans, and Fesenko did it together, along with AK and Miles (a pair that supports one of my many mantras of playing a shooter (Miles) and a defender (Kirilenko) more together on the wing). The problem is that your arguments resort to ridiculousness. Is anybody claiming that Fesenko OR Watson OR Evans should play "full time"? I think not. Will I say that Watson should get the nod in the next game for the first PG subbing in for D-Will? Yessir. Your hyperbole about "developing" Watson is weak because his development would most likely span getting enough time on the court to be more comfortable in the offense, which is a valuable thing anyway. And yes, I would support rewarding Evans with a few extra minutes in the next game, with a consideration of upping his minutes on a regular basis. There you go; no focus on one player.
Without Watson and Evans (who made 2 buckets) what "comeback" would Fess have engineered? Likewise, without Fess's 3 rebounds, what would Watson's +/- be? Sorry, but it's a team game. Fess played well, overall, despite some mistakes. But to suggest that the team can "only" outscore opponents when Fess plays, as the OP basically tried to do, is a little extreme
The problem with your argument here is that if performance is repeated over time, then it stops being a single-game coincidence. So while no player is an island, the correlation between Fes being in the game and the Jazz engineering a comeback has increased with each passing game of the last 3 and 4 games, even though the lineups around him have varied somewhat.
If you're still gonna be a hater (of reasonableness, if not of singled-out players) then the tape shows--as you might have pointed out--that Fes controlled the paint far better than Big Al most of the time (more so after the first 3 to 5 minutes of play), but that it took players around him, especially given that Fes isn't a very good scorer. The prescription? Not to give Fes "full time", but rather to play him 10 to 20 MPG--definitely more than the sub-5 or sub-7 MPG through the first 6 games available and throughout the entire past season, when the same thing happened on multiple occasions: Fes came in the game, and the bleeding stopped, more often than not. The coincidence continues to dissipate, especially given that some of the faces have changed; Evans and Watson weren't even on the team last year.
What is promising is that Sloan might be recognizing the trend, and he has been playing KF more, and it seems like he's willing to bench even the starters from time to time, as he did with big Al 2 or 3 games before, and what he seemed to do with DW in Q4, allowing this serendipitous Watson-led run to unfurl. More often than not, when Price comes in at backup PG, I am disappointed, so despite Watson's defects, I'd like to see EW come in as 2nd string. Things might have run better if Watson had played during that 2nd-quarter stagnation of 5ish minutes (when Fes and a few others were in the game), for example.
One or more JazzFanz has argued in favor of starting Fes. I'm not
that ambitious, and I'm not sure that it's the right decision anyway. But there is a better way than throwing him out with the other backups, devoid of many (or any starters) to bolster their performance. And vice versa. Note that in the 4Q run, two "starters" (CJ and AK) were on the floor, and things went much better. A rule of thumb IMHO is to have at least two of the first 6 in the rotation on the court at all times. How this is accomplished is to start subbing earlier in the first quarter, usually after 6 or or maybe 8 minutes have elapsed.