[grndmstr_c]

It's an unfortunately small sample, but the selection of those 5 games was far from arbitrary, the numbers were very much within the range you'd expect based on his career standard, and it's all we've got to go on. We could go back and look at how he was playing right when he came back from the injury (he was playing well, I believe), as that might have been a decent indicator of healthy playing capabilities as well given that the coaching staff was very cautious about bringing him back and he was well rested, but selecting a cutoff date for the analysis becomes arbitrary and quite likely to be determined by the preconceptions of whoever's doing the selection, so I stayed out of that.

But he wasn't just putting up good numbers at the start of the year. He looked like he was playing well and moving well in putting up those numbers. People want to say that we should trust that Quis would make up for Fin based on a handful of games he played in 03/04 (not including you in that group, dirno, but a lot of the people who seem to think losing Fin wouldn't matter are in that group), and the argument has to cut both ways.

As to your list of concerns:
1) you could just as easily count that as encouraging. Good players respond to adversity. Not saying either interpretation is right, just that neither is particularly conclusive.
2) Fin's athleticism and movement looked to me to be impaired late in the season relative to his normal level, irrespective of his very game effort against McGrady. And my own opinion is that Fin was successful against Tracy mainly because he approached playing defense the right way, like a veteran, rather than because he was physically outstanding.
3) but never when he was nursing a nagging ankle injury that was going to require offseason surgery. And he is older now. His minutes do need to be cut if he's going to continue to play at a high level.