They did find Covington and Derrick Jones, Jr., both of whom (as one might expect) did credible jobs on Steph. They can be your 3-4 or even your 4-5 when you need to lock down a guard or wing who's going off. And yet ... somehow the Blazers saw fit to put Melo and Kanter on the floor together for most of the 4th quarter. STOTTSSSS!!!!! / Captain Kirk shaking fist
When they signed Melo last year, it was because guys were injured (I think Dame missed some games) and they were desperate to get anybody that could create their own shot. Once people got healthy, there is almost no reason to play him significant minutes, since they don't need him to score and he can't really do anything else except rebound a little. Last season, no matter how good Dame was, they were never going to go anywhere in the playoffs with such shitty play from their wings; they had nobody to even attempt to guard LeBron or Davis.
Covington was very good signing for them because he can at least credibly due that. DJJ is an interesting player, he would occasionally play significant minutes for Miami but was inconsistent; he is an absolutely incredible athlete, if you told me he had like, a 62" vertical I would believe it, but is he a good defender? Not sure about that one. Gary Trent Jr. is really streaky, if he can be consistent from three they might have an answer there. Still waiting on Anfernee Simons to do something tangible in a real NBA game.
The problem with the GS game was that the best way to slow Curry down is to have a really athletic five that can move well laterally; any traditional five, even a good defensive one like Nurkic, is going to get torched by Curry if he has to switch on to him. If I was Stotts, I would have benched Nurkic/Kanter and just played Covington at the five, and gone ultra-switchable. To this day, the best team at slowing down Curry imo was ironically the Rockets, because they went really small with Harden/Gordon/Luc Ricard Mbah Moute/Ariza/Tucker and were able to just switch everything and still have a quick, strong defensive player (when Harden was engaged) and avoided the DeAndre Jordan scenario, where Curry puts some lug on skates and cashes threes over them.