Looking back over the season so far, you can almost group the games together and see the patterns and trends come into focus. The first few games were high emotion, low preparation, and they just came up short. The next few games were against cupcake opponents so they were easy wins. The bottom line is that they were either too out of shape or too unprepared mentally to get wins during that 5 game losing streak - which may yet come back to haunt them.
From that point on, however, the team has won 8 out of 10 games and seems to be hitting their stride. They haven't looked perfect throughout. The Jekyll and Hyde routine played itself out even during individual games often enough. But that's kind of been this team's M.O. for a while now, so no big surprise there.
The overall sentiment I'm trying to get across here is that we're headed in the right direction. Are we "there" yet (where ever there is)? Not by a long shot. We've got miles and miles to go before we hit the playoffs and we've got some epic road trips happening in the 2nd half of the season. But we can be reasonably sure that Danny has seen enough from this team to not hit the detonate button (unless he gets wowed with offers he can't refuse).
I don't know if we're title contenders yet, but if the playoffs started tomorrow, there wouldn't be a team in the league that would look forward to playing this group. And that's a good start.